Gawd. How many just-this-last-hurdle encounters is it possible to have with one PhD? I appear to be on yet another will-I-won’t-I mission re submission – if I manage to get my revisions approved by next Friday, I might make the winter graduations; if not, it’ll be next summer. To be honest, at this stage, I don’t really care about graduations; clearly, graduation ceremonies themselves were invented as the academic staff’s revenge on all those gruesome bloody students they had to endure through the teaching year – it is safe to say that I’m not in a hurry to attend, particularly given the really rather ridiculous hats that they get you to wear for PhD graduations. Anyway. Naturally, Nearly Always Absent Supervisor is, er, absent, although he has promised to read my revisions while on the train to wherever it is he’s going next, and hopefully this might mean comments back from him tomorrow. (At which point I will probably wish I’d never asked, and just burn the bastard thing.)

In other news, I am making the witchling a stocking. It is brown velvet, quilted with cream thread, and has a rather natty Kaffe Fassett fabric turnover at the top, for added, er, snazziness. Or something. Of course, at present, it is also a figment of my imagination, but just as soon as the sodding, arseing, fecking thesis fucks well and truly off (do such things ever come to pass? Even the thought seems too good to be true), there’ll be no stopping me. No. Oh, except for the fact that my sewing machine seems to be suffering from delusions of grandeur, and constantly seems about to start a new life as an armoured vehicle – this can make things like threading the needle a bit tricky, to say nothing of its newly-developed tendency to eject, quite forcibly, its bobbin. I seem to have this effect on mechanical things; I recently managed to break a washing machine, sixty miles away, just by thinking about it.

Right. Dinner calls.