Victorianitas

Now that Article One - my baby, my firstborn - has gone back out into the world to try its fortunes once again, and I can step back and think about it without a miasma of nail-biting guilt settling over me, I've realised something strange. The part of the article I liked best, the one part I was happiest with when I finished it the first time round, was grumbled at in both readers' reports. This in itself isn't surprising, but the part of the article I hated, the part I knew was weak at the time, didn't know how to fix without a major overhaul, and cringed at on re-reading, was received well. I know I'm not the most objective judge of my own work, but still, I can't help thinking that this is the academic equivalent of reviewing Return of the Jedi and telling everyone that the Boba Fett character was an unnecessary and irritating bit-part novelty, but the Ewoks were just great.

My patchwork blanket of summer jobs is still holding together well enough to keep me warm. At the moment, two of us are moving a large quantity of withdrawn library material into boxes and sending it off to loving homes in various departments, which involves a whole lot of stamping things with a 'Withdrawn From [Such-And-Such] University Library' and a small amount of making boxes. (Me and Dr K have agreed to ceremonially stamp each other's foreheads with that very same stamp when we leave here for full-time academic positions.) Because it's noisy and we need space, we get to do this in a gloomy area at the back of an old bindery.

Dr K got there before I did. When I met him there the next day, the gloomy area at the back of the old bindery featured:
- a desk,
- a decent swivel chair, on which Dr K was sitting,
- a computer, connected somehow to a network socket I didn't even know existed,
- a desk-tidy, filled with stationary that looks suspiciously purloined,
- and a phone. ("I feel like we're more important if we have our own extension," as he explained it.)

We might still be minions, but now we're minions with our very own in-tray.