Quite often I suffer from insomnia, well I think insomnia is actually exaggerating it. What actually happens is I find it very difficult to go to sleep and also I wake during the night for inexplicable reasons but also at exactly the same time. Generally there appears to be no rhyme or reason to these occurrences, sometimes I get the feeling they last longer (or not, as may be the case) due to stress, but what initially causes them remains a mystery.

It’s probably obvious that now is such a time; as you can imagine its usually unwelcome. But at the moment I feel like rest is the one thing I really need, this is week 8 of term, which means I’m currently trying to finish marking the first set of marking I have this term and do my last 3 weeks of teaching before Christmas. It has been a very busy term, I have done exactly no PhD work, my supervisor has suggested I apply for retrospective intermission, which will basically mean I won’t have been registered for my PhD this term and thus I will have an extra term to do it (and perhaps mean I get another term without having to pay, although that’s not clear). I’m going to do it, although you always hope you won’t need that extra term at the end.

They put the Christmas tree up on campus today, guess that means that time of year is here again right? Great… 

In many ways its been a great week. As I mentioned in the last post my first book review got published this week and then yesterday I heard that my second book review has been accepted for publication. Thus tonight I having fish and chips to celebrate, don’t tell me I don’t know how to do fun!

I hold in my hand a copy of the first journal to contain one of my publications, namely a book review on Zygmunt Bauman’s most recent book. It’s an amazing feeling.

For the last week or so almost everyday I’ve thought about writing a very specific update on here, as will be clear, I’m yet to do that. Part of the reason for the lack of such an activity is uncertainty on my part about what I choose to write, I’m hoping that will be resolved soon. Then, who knows, maybe you’ll get that post.

In terms of other news. I’ve taken up knitting with a vengeance, one of my new-ish housemates has been knitting since the age of 5, so she has been kind enough to teach me, I even learned how to purl at the weekend (this basically means knitting one row backwards. It’s really enjoyable and something that’s wonderful to relax to. I’m on my way to my first scarf (yes I know, so predictable) which a friend of mine has already (very subtle) claimed for himself.

Also, I have not done more than 2 hours work on my PhD this term, finding time has been very difficult. In some ways I think this break (although it’s not a ‘break’, but instead is too much teaching) may well be good in the grand scheme of things, but still, would be nice to get back to it

I was 26 on Monday. I did a kind of mini-celebration on the Sunday before, my parents came down for lunch and then in the evening I went to an impossibly good vegetarian restaurant in town called ‘Food for Friends’. Despite the fact that bad-timing (i.e. Fresher’s flu) meant some people couldn’t make it, it was a lovely evening full of good food and good company. My housemates had also been impossibly sweet with presents and a cake (chocolate AND pineapple, what more could a man want?). It was all very civilised, which would hopefully be the MO of birthdays at this point.

In terms of what else is going on, after a lag to start term I’m finally recovering some level of productivity (although I haven’t spent more than an afternoon on my PhD in the last 3 weeks) which is useful since next week is the return of the ‘3 courses per week’ trend. Also I have yet to hear back from my latest re-submission after almost a month and the nerves continue to grow

I’ve been a bit of a state this week, there are two reasons for this. Firstly I’ve developed a cold, which in and of itself is not really a problem, but it does mean I generally sleep about 3 hours a night at the same time I offered to take a lecture with a day’s notice and to cover another 3rd year seminar. At this point (with 4 hours of teaching left tomorrow) I am very close to exhaustion.

This brings me onto me second concern, this week I’ve been having a bit of a crisis of confidence regarding my teaching. By this I mean that I feel like recently I haven’t been doing it as well as I can. My students, as always, are good and committed (the 1st years notably so this year), nevertheless I feel like the classes aren’t going as well as I would hope them to. As a result I’m worrying to what extent this is about me and whether (for want of a better term) I’ve lost my teaching mojo. Now obviously this is a bit silly, I can’t have lost the ability to teach in the 4 months which made up the summer holiday. Instead perhaps I just need to refocus and think about how to do these classes a bit differently (especially the two courses I’m taking this term I haven’t taken before). Until then however it is awful to feel like you’re not doing your best at a job you’ve committed to, something you love and something you know you’ll do for the rest of your life, I look forward to this feeling going.

But perhaps the best thing for me is to take a weekend off, and, perhaps luckily, this weekend will coincide with my birthday celebrations! My birthday is actually on Monday, when I will reach the age of 26, before that however I will be going to an impossibly good restaurant in town on Sunday before a few drinks to celebrate what is effectively the last year I can pass for ‘mid-20s’. Add in the fact I’m going to see Camera Obscura on Friday night, and you have a good time for all

Week 1 of term is over. Every term I always think this is the strange one, once you get to week 2 it feels like term has actually started and at that point it becomes a, surprisingly quick, journey to the end of term. The first classes went well, my groups seem good, and that is pretty much all the battle at this point.

All of this also brings with it October. It’s been a bit sad to see the entry of autumn (especially the rain!), although today has been an exception to this.

This is indeed the last of the quiet periods for quite a while. The week after next brings with it the return of teaching. This means that this up-coming week (itself Fresher’s week) will partly be about tidying up loose ends before term starts, chief amongst these being the (re-)re-submitting of my article once my supervisor has taken another look.

In all honesty I’m quite looking forward to the return of teaching; 2 new courses to teach this term (although one of them only for the last 4 weeks) and 3rd years for the first time. I think also the change of responsibilities and focus will be nice, it’s way too easy to become a bit cut off from society and develop a tunnel focus with regard to the PhD, so it will be good to have other things to focus upon.

Apart from this I’ve been enjoying the Indian Summer we’ve been lucky enough to have in Brighton this past couple of weeks. But I also had a really strange experience really, I have no idea if it was just me who found it strange. I went to dinner at a friend’s flat, we’ve known each other for over a year now. It was really nice, we had good food and chatted quite a bit, it was quite open in that we both ended up sharing stuff we hadn’t with each other before etc and thus was a lovely evening. However the next day I got a message from her saying that although she really valued our friendship she wanted to make clear it was ‘just’ friends. Since I never had any romantic/sexual desires or expectations about the relationship this was, in and of itself, exactly what I wanted.

Nevertheless I was a bit confused, what bought it on? In my reply I said I was sorry if I’d given a different impression to what I actually felt. In reply she said this was not the case, but she just wanted to make it clear. I think such a reaction hurt somewhat because it was just going against my basic assumptions about such relationships. Call me naive but I’ve always thought these kind of friendships could occur without the question of ‘sex/romance’ being raised, after-all I’ve had plenty of such relationships without this. Of course I’ve also had the opposite, I’m not saying it never happens, just that it is not inevitable. In this case I guess her suggestion made me think the friendship had been ‘polluted’ a little, that it suggested ulterior motives which didn’t exist. I realise this is entirely my perspective and my friend was trying to be kind and make sure neither of us got hurt. Still, I could have done about it, such friendships have always been important to what I consider makes up my life and I guess (perhaps naively, unfairly or selfishly) I’ve thought they could exist in such a way. Don’t get me wrong, I hold no malice towards my friend, and I still consider her as close as I did before this, it’s just left me a bit confused.

Of course this could all be because I bought her flowers, can’t a man buy flowers for a woman without it being romantic?

I went to see this movie on Wednesday with a couple of current and one ex housemate(s).  I really enjoyed it, I very rarely go see love stories since so many of them get aimed at the ‘rom com’ genre which I can’t handle. However this movie appealed to me from the very start

I guess the thing is with these kind of movies is that there’s always a tendency on your part, as the viewer, to kind of ‘read yourself into it’. Even though this is not exactly an area where I have a large amount of experience (to say the least), I did find myself doing that and I did (correctly or not) find some things I could relate to. In this way it was an interesting experience.

When I left the movie though I found I was alone in feeling more attached and interested in the female character. It is true that generally she’s not painted very well and since you spend so long viewing the pain of the guy it’s clearly intended for you to side with him (plus the statement at the start to add to this).  But I think what I found so interesting was the attitude of the woman. It was throughout one of ‘going with the flow’ (spoiler alert) her marriage is kind of shown in the movie as something manipulative, but you know that ultimately it is a continuation of her attitude throughout, she did it because it felt right, in the same way that not having a boyfriend earlier felt right. In some ways this is the ‘lesson’ the guy is supposed to have learnt by the end, but I think that whilst the movie tried to present itself as a swap in attitudes, in actuality they both ended up where they started.

Anyway, that’s my interpretation, other people may have a different one. However at its base it’s a greatly enjoyable movie, funny with parts and with references to The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Belle & Sebastian, it is preaching to the converted me

As it says in the title, today was the last day of my holiday and tomorrow I return back to campus and work. It was a nice week, I had some nice trips around town, had some good breakfasts, lunch and dinners out and did more ‘sitting around’ than I’ve generally been accustomed to. I managed to read Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection’ (always with the religious redemption…), played lots of Tetris and my parents were kind enough to buy me The Beatles re-masters, which took up some joyful hours (you may see a post about the Beatles soon, partly to raise the anger of Marc).

There was also a bit of drama (of which I will not divulge) and in a week’s holiday I ended up going onto campus 3 separate times (only 2 less than a normal week!). But it was a week off I needed to do and in many ways I’m glad to be getting back to work, this week involves a lecture and a couple of interesting meetings. Then, before long, term will have started again, the campus will have come back to life and teaching will be here again. These are all things I welcome

I’m reading a book about blogging at the moment. It’s always been something that interested me, i even did my MA thesis on the topic (it was shit). I’m about 2/3 of the way through the book and thus far it’s been okay, not the book I hoped it would be, but still interesting.

But I guess the thing I’ve noted about it is that despite having this blog and ones before it for something like 7 years now I don’t think I’d fit the profiler of a ‘blogger’. Part of this is that (try as I might) the frequency of updates has lessened greatly over the last 4 years or so to the extent that I now consider once a week to be pretty good. Another part is that this blog is never really had a ‘theme’. But also I don’t really link to other blogs or even other sites that much. These are the kind of things that blogging has evolved into including and I don’t do them and have no inclination to do so. Despite all this I know for the rest of my live I’ll have one of these, it’s hard to give up once you start (especially since I just can’t imagine getting into Twitter).

Thus far it’s been a busy summer, I’m working on making changes to the article I mentioned on here, had to do some re-drafting of my first two chapters, reading for the third and reading for next year’s teaching.

But this summer has also been really nice in many ways. I’ve kind of fallen back in love with Brighton as city, in many ways it’s a bit of a special place to live. Tomorrow is Pride which I think I’m going to go check out. Also I managed to form a new friendship which I always appreciate and am really happy about, finding these kind of things are much more difficult than people make out.

So as some of you will know, I own a guitar. I bought it back in the late summer of 2006 (which, for so many reasons, seems like another life ago). When I was really young (maybe 8 or so?) I had some guitar lessons, got okay and then, like you do with many things at that age, gave it up. Luckily however this previous experience meant when I bought it again I wasn’t starting totally from scratch I wasn’t at a passable level but at least I knew what the chords were. The benefit was some of it came back after a while (although I did have a couple of very informal ‘lessons’ from someone I worked with at HMV).

When I first bought my guitar I spent quite a bit of time with it, going through the original ‘Jesus, how much does this hurt your fingers!’ stage (it has metal strings…) and the ‘I swear the shift from A to C is much easier than I’m making it’ stage. A few months after this I moved into my own flat in Colchester. Because I’d moved into my own place and found myself with a lot of time on my hands I played an awful lot, sometimes for hours a day. In all honesty I never got that good. I never really took it that seriously, something I did to pass the time, had I been more disciplined and organised in it, maybe I could have got somewhere, but we will never know. Saying that however I did manage to learn a few songs. Beck’s ‘Lost Cause’ was my favourite, it look a long time to learn but also Elliott Smith’s ‘Twilight’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘If’ were ones I was really glad to have ‘cracked’. It was great to be able to play these songs from start to end. Thinking back on it I had a few I’d play at home often: Belle & Sebastian’s ‘She’s Losing It’ (although, to be fair I ‘re-learnt’ to that one) the Manics ‘Ballad of Bangkok Novatel’ and ‘Imperial Bodybags’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’, ‘Pigs on the Wing’ and Dylan’s 'Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ (with an occasional 'Desolation Row’).

But of course my stay in my flat in Colchester was short (6 months in the end) I then went back to Wickford and then to my current home in Brighton. In both of these places my playing time went straight downhill. In Wickford I had other things on my mind, and apart from a brief period when there was a left-handed guitar in the house which fascinated me (I got Lennon’s ‘Watching the Wheels’ down on that!) I didn’t play much, but hell I didn’t do much of anything for my first month or so back there. Then when I came to Brighton, well quite honesty I haven’t played it in the year and half my guitar has been here. Why? Well I was nervous and shy, living in a shared house they can hear me playing and I didn’t feel comfortable with that. There was one day where my housemates asked me to bring it down, I managed a bit of Dylan, I wasn’t as proficient as previously, but it was okay. That night had involved alcohol so maybe why I was less nervous, but once it was over I didn’t touch it again.

Well last weekend I was talking to a friend and I mentioned the guitar, she asked about it and whilst talking to her about it I found that for the first time since being in Brighton my desire to play began to overpower my shyness at others hearing me. However this was Sunday and it was only yesterday (Friday) that I managed to pick it up. In some ways it was a bit depressing, it was dusty, in that way dust seems to stand for neglect rather than dirt and when I started to play…well it was hard, I knew what I wanted to do but my mind was working faster than my fingers, in short it reminded me of that winter of 2006.

I wished now I hadn’t had what was effectively 2 years away from this, I’m determined to get back to that passable level I was at in Colchester, I have no pretence to be a good player, I just want it to be something relaxing, like it was circa April 2007, it will take time, but in some ways it feels like getting reacquainted with an old friend…

So I went for it (see previous post) – turns out it didn’t work how I wanted it to, but I’m still pleased with how it’s turn out and that I did go for it (sorry about the cryptic nature, I prefer it this way).

Also, Prince’s ‘Sometimes it Snows in April’ has hooked me in and will probably keep me fascinated a few days.

I got my first review back yesterday. For those who don’t know about academic publishing (and hell I had no idea like a year half ago), when you submit an article it gets reviewed by two anonymous people, they can either reject it outright, suggest it should be re-drafted or accepted for publication as it is (with the third highly unlikely). Then of course the editor decides whether to accept their views or not.

Well yesterday I heard from the article I submitted recently, it was the middle of those options, revise and re-submit, which in and of itself is good, it’s not rejection which of course you want to avoid and as long as I do respond to the reviewer’s comments it should be okay for publication.

But, it’s the review comments themselves, one of them was very negative and it was really frustrating. I know I shouldn’t really get frustrated by it, after all this is what the field of academia brings but it is hard dealing with it after you spent so long on this piece of work this anonymous person is now criticising. In reality this reviewer had some decent things to say, but some that seem a bit harsh or vague.

As today has gone past however I’ve become less frustrated and realised that both a, I was very fortunate to make it the stage of revise and re-submit and b, I can answer most of the reviewer’s criticisms and then, hopefully, get it published.

This is really hard and challenging work, but then it should be this hard to get published and I know when it does get out there eventually it will make it feel better

I’ve certainly been enjoying the weather we’ve been lucky to have visit us this week. In fact in a fitting manner for the start of summer it’s felt like the last week or so has seen the start of some possibly very exciting things. My PhD has definitely taken a wonderful turn where I now turn to the second ‘section’ of it, so the weeks in front of me means lots of reading on wonderful new texts, it’s quite exciting.

Also there maybe an opportunity for moving in with someone from my department later this year, which would be nice a smaller place (in this case only sharing with one person) and living in town or Hove would be a nice change, at this point it’s a matter of sitting down and seeing if I can afford it.

Also, God Help The Girl, she needs all the help she can get. Yes this is a truly wonderful album. With the big gap between Belle & Sebastian albums I forgot how good a songwriter Stuart Murdoch is and he’s really outdone himself this time.

Finally - I’ve decided to go for it

Before I moved to Brighton the fact it was by the sea wasn’t really a big thing to me, I thought occasionally I might wander down to the beach or that there might be the odd barbecue on there come summer.

Nevertheless really this year I’ve developed the habit of going down to the beach quite a bit and just walking along. I’ve discovered the incredibly calming nature of the sea and the beach itself. It’s strange that in between the two piers you’ll see Brighton beach is just packed but once you get beyond that, especially to Hove greens it gets strangely peaceful (well except at the weekend of course) and incredibly calm. I’d spent this week finishing the draft of my second chapter and I’d got a bit stir crazy towards the end of it, so come Friday once it was safely with my supervisors I did one of my beach visits.

I’m a year and a half through my PhD now and considering how quick this time period has gone I’m beginning to realise the two years or so until I leave this city for the next stop will soon be over and I want to enjoy it while I can. Surprisingly, judging by what’s happened thus far far it may be the beach I miss as much as anything.