Good lord. D’you know what, folks? I’ve finished my PhD. As in submitted, viva’d, resubmitted and passed. Passed. Ended. Submitted. Finished the whole thing, and nothing left to do on it.

It’s very strange.

I feel sort of… odd, really. I’ve been working on that thing for five years, three years nominally full-time (let’s not mention the fact that I was working twenty-two hours a week during that period) and two years part-time once I started working full-time. When I started it, I was in such a different place in my life – I finished my MA in 2003, and much to my delight (and surprise) I found myself with a distinction, which rather made up for the fact that my first degree ended in a 2:1; after my mother died, my grade average, unsurprisingly, plummeted from a comfortable first to a low second, and I only managed to turn it around in the last few months of my third year. I knew it was all quite acceptable, and all quite happy-making and so on, but it always irked me to think that if my mother could see me, she’d see a 2:1 and feel it had been her fault somehow, which was ludicrous (of both me and her. Er…), but I couldn’t stop thinking it. So then I rolled into the PhD programme, largely because I was offered funding by my department and I realised that, actually, a PhD might be within reach, in terms of my ability. Very strange to find myself here, three houses on, married, with a daughter who I love to distraction, two cats who drive me insane but are very lovely, a flock of hens and more mud than you can shake a large stick at. Oh, and a doctorate.

I should probably do something with that, shouldn’t I? Could I possibly be one of the world’s better-qualified slackers, I wonder?