Victorianitas

My dad and my brother might lose their jobs. They might not have jobs now, by this morning; my brother might have decided to jump overboard and swim for something more stable, my dad might have decided to walk out rather than fire a whole workforce and tell half of them to reapply for their own jobs. But they probably won't. It's only a little company that they work for, and my dad's been there for thirty years; even if they could afford to leave and not look back, there's more there than money.

But the company might not still exist in a couple of weeks, so all that might be irrelevant.

I've never felt further away from home than I do right now.

I ask because I don't.

Once, back when I was twelve or so, I built a little cave behind some cupboards and some junk in the spare room, lined it with some cushions and a motheaten quilt and hid away in there every afternoon after school, reading myself into oblivion for hours at a time. I went through books like air back then. I could read a whole book in one sitting, ignoring any kind of siblings-and-pets chaos that was erupting around me; my parents used to take me shopping, leave me in the library, and find me at the end of the day, usually carrying a pile of books I could just about see over the top of. I read a lot now, but nothing approaches the kind of total, overwhelming, put-that-book-down-and-look-at-the-scenery! immersion I could manage back then.

Other things haven't changed. I still read four or five books at once, and I still have a pathological aversion to stopping at the end of a chapter. Books I like get re-read over and over again (although not quite in the way I used to when I was younger - read the last page, turn straight back to the first page, and carry on without a break). It's not quite the same, though.

This is what I'm reading at the moment:

Ruth Brandon, Other People's Daughters. The lives of governesses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like Brandon's other books (at least, the ones I've read), it's very good and very detailed at the same time as letting you know exactly who she disapproves of.

Danny Wallace, Yes Man. It's very good. I've liked Danny Wallace since Are You Dave Gorman?. This one, though, I'm reading a couple of pages of before I'm going to sleep, sometimes, which is why I've been reading it since January and am only 2/3 of the way through.

Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out. The lives of single women after the First World War, and fascinating. I can't say enough good things about this book; in fact, I'm deliberately reading it more slowly now so that I don't have to finish it.

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief. Lent by someone who thought I'd like it. I've only read the first two dozen pages or so, of about four hundred, but, yes, it seems good so far.

China Mieville, The Scar. I bought this in October and only started reading it this week, tsch. As with his Perdido Street Station, which is set in the same world, I'm very impressed at the same time as being vaguely annoyed by how the biology works - how is it a human with the head of an insect, or the body of a crayfish? How? I know, I know, it's fantasy, and he doesn't care about that sort of realism, but dammit, I care! Which is why I'm reading this one slowly, too.

Hmmm. Needs more short stories.

Work remains good. But so busy. And yet, I go home before six every day, I sleep properly every night.

I've discovered that under normal circumstances, like when I'm not juggling four jobs and pulling thirteen-hour shifts, I don't sleep that much. Maybe six or seven hours a night, before I wake up, all refreshed and happy. Compared to the PhD years - staring blearily at the TV over my breakfast, watching Everybody Loves Raymond every morning for ten months before working out that there were two of the little blond kid - it's a new life.

I wish my dad would stop posting photos of the landscape back home on Flickr. I am so homesick right now.

By about 2pm today, I'd decided that the afternoon would be better spent under my desk. (Thinking: it's quiet there, no-one can see me, and perhaps two inches of old, nondescript desk would give some protection from the meteor storm of trouble that hit my office today.) But the keyboard would not reach, and so the plan was sadly abandoned.

For a day in which very little got done, a lot seems to have happened, and most of it made me want to gnaw off my hand. I believe that the traditional metaphor for trying to organise large groups of academics is herding cats, but I'd like to contest this on the grounds that cats are smart, independent creatures who are easily capable of looking after themselves if the herding enterprise goes awry. Organising academics is not like herding cats. Organising academics is more like playing Lemmings. That, plus issues with scheduling student workers, plus working with some troublesome documents that by five o'clock I was close to convinced had achieved sentience just to plague me, plus an ongoing battle with my ex-ISP who refuse to accept we broke up, is all why I came home to an evening of pampering myself (viz. a blanket, a mug of coffee, a stack of good books and a Walking With Dinosaurs DVD).

1. We're going to London tomorrow to see this, which is both a cool-sounding film (by the man who made Helvetica) and features a panel discussion afterwards with Jonathan Ive. Jonathan Ive, people. I plan to smuggle in my ailing CRT iMac in the hopes that being in the same room as its father will restore it to health, and possibly a processor upgrade. The train tomorrow is at the kind of time which wouldn't really count as early if I'd managed to get any sleep at all last night, but alas, no, so I plan to spend the journey alternating between sleep and work. Because I'm that pathetic.

2. Well, busy, maybe. This morning was taken up with unexpected conference-organising related crises and a computer that wouldn't start up because of a problem with deciding my documents folder was actually the administrator's documents folder on the C drive and screwing up the path to that accordingly, meaning that the computer took nearly an hour to start up and then wouldn't explain what was wrong some stupid Windows thing, none of which had really featured in my Getting Stuff Done plans. Now I'm exhausted and still behind on all the multitude of things that should be done, and updating my blog while the computer takes a very... long... time to download a work-related program I wanted to spend some time messing around with when I'm not in the office. No, on second thoughts, this is pathetic.

3. I know, the template's all messed up. I'm working on it, in a sort of passive way.

4. Any suggestions for the story behind this? Because there must be one, and it must be good.

I cannot swim. Really, I cannot swim. I don't mean that I don't know how, which is an unfortunate but fixable situation; I mean that I do know how, and I've had lessons up to the point of jumping into the pool in your pyjamas to pick a brick up from the bottom of the deep end (a skill which I'm sure I'll need one day), and there is no longer any excuse for my inability to manage more than a handful of lengths in one session apart from being fundamentally, irrevocably, and possibly genetically bad at swimming.

My mum and my brothers are great swimmers. Me and my dad sink. We're both fine underwater, but lacking gills, this doesn't really help much.

It's good to have a swimming pool a short distance from my office again anyway, though I miss the huge, fancy swimming pool at my very-sports-conscious last university. Swimming is good exercise, I can take a short detour to the pool on my way home, etc etc etc. Still, I wish I could actually swim like an adult.

Dinner the other night:

"You're my friend! How could you not tell me that Tom Paris once regressed into being a newt?"
"I'm sorry! I didn't realise! I thought you knew! ...Seriously, how did you not know that?"

Take away my geek cred now.

I'm not interested in changes quite that drastic in my own life, but doing a postdoc in a different field is making me wonder about how much my career path could - or should - diverge from the subject of my PhD. Obviously, I don't want to work on that particular specialised area forever, but my postdoc is several steps further removed than would typically be expected, to the point where people in my new department who've asked me what my background is have typically responded with "...Oh. So, how did you end up working on this?"

(That makes them sound mean, which is not right. They're not mean. They're just genuinely surprised - it really is quite a jump.)

This post doesn't last forever, and I'm keenly interested in getting some kind of scripted career trajectory together in which my PhD work and my postdoc work both play a part. There isn't a huge amount of overlap there. So, I could stick in the PhD field in spirit if not in office and use the postdoc work to vaguely back it up; I could jump ship to the postdoc field and brush off the PhD work; or I could carve out a niche for myself that includes both, at least to some degree.

The first option is the one I'm least interested in right now, because my postdoc isn't directly applicable to the sort of posts and funding I'd be applying for after it's over. And, plus, I really like this field, which makes option B seem a little brighter. Still, I don't think that even with a postdoc I have enough of a background to make a career in the new field, and trying to do so anyway would disregard the work I have done - a PhD, a pretty nifty publication, a lot of conference papers and contacts that I'm not inclined to cast off.

That leaves option C, heading in a direction which combines material from both of them. This is both possible, and appealing, in a way which is difficult to explain without getting too identifiable, but try it this way: my PhD was on, let's say, owl-spotting in the English countryside. My postdoc is in the field of putting radio collars on saltwater crocodiles in the Australian outback. And the people who've been dealing with saltwater crocodiles for a while have started to look into possible ideas they could borrow from other disciplines, like looking at how paleontologists are using a particular kind of modelling to track the maximu speed of an infurated Tyrannousaurus. Well, birds are descended from dinosaurs anyway, right? So could some of those ideas be applied to owl-spotting? Eh, possibly - and this is, without me even having to bullshit about it, legitimately A Growing Field.

It's kind of specific. But it's more about a methodology and a field of general interest than it is about a specific topic. And, well, I still know a lot about owls.

So that's something I'm thinking of, with a view to being employable in the future, hopefully - maybe - possibly - one day - in that all-hallowed Permanent Post. Partly because I want that kind of life and financial security; partly because I want my career to follow some kind of path I have some vague control over; and partly because I have moved thirteen times in the last eleven years and I have had it with moving house.

My flat isn't big, but it's long and narrow and spans two floors, and there's a front door into the hallway on both of them. A bit odd, this, as far as design goes. Maybe it's converted from two bedsits? I don't suppose I'll ever know, and all the information I have on Mysterious Upstairs Door is that it's listed on the inventory from my letting agents as an 'emergency door'.

It's right behind a tall bookcase, stacked as full of books as it was for the tenant before me. Using this as an exit would require a very specific emergency, I'm thinking. Maybe a really slow-rising flood.

But the other door does have a doorbell. And several times this week, that doorbell has rung. Twice, today. Twice in the last half hour. Both times I ignored it, on the grounds that the time it would take me to go down the stairs, out of my actual front door, through the hall, up another set of communal stairs, and then back over to the Mysterious Upstairs Door, is longer than it would take for the person doing the ringing to decide I wasn't in and leave. (And anyway, maybe it was Jehovah's Witnesses.) But then it rung again - and then someone knocked on the door ten minutes after that, fairly hard, which unless the JWs have got a little more determined since the last time I spoke to some, is generally not the way they go about things.

And yet! I still haven't gone out to see who it is, because each time, surely they'll have gone away by the time I get there, right? I'm sure they can hear my TV. Probably they think I'm ignoring them. And this is true, I am ignoring them, but I wonder if they have any idea that I'm ignoring them because I'm trapped by a logistical problem, that I'm wondering what they think of me, and that I'm spending far more thought on trying to work out what's behind their determination to speak to me than I ever would be if I'd really answered the door.

I managed to last until half-past one before getting bored and doing some research. Although 'research' in this case involves watching flash demos of other people's software, so it's not exactly taxing on my cold-addled brain.

Off work with an unpleasant cold, and counting down the hours until I get bored enough to start reading work-related papers anyway. That's what you get for spending a weekend in the bracing sea air, you see? Ill.

My parents have been on holiday here, or at least not too far away from here, for the past week or so. Their hyperactive collie puppy is five months old now. She loved the empty beach, the fact that she could dig big holes in the empty beach, and most especially the fact that she could sometimes find dead hares this way, which is absolutely the best thing a puppy could ever find, and how cruel were we for not letting her keep any of them?

She's not too keen on water that got deeper than she was expecting, though:





The puppy is absolutely their favourite child at the moment. (Second is my boyfriend for fixing their DVD player. Joint third, me and my brothers, who have indeed lost all patience for fixing technological things without a litany of 'DAD, stop MESSING with this! What did you DO?' a long long time ago, but have never to my knowledge dug up a dead hare from a beach and then rolled in it.) Previous dogs have not been allowed on the settee; this dog is not only allowed to sleep there whenever she wishes, but actually has cushions rearranged under her head to keep her comfortable and make sure she doesn't fall off.

Anyway, now I'm home and ill, and catching up on all the unread blog posts that have been stacking up in my reader for the past couple of months, which was what I wanted to talk about in the first place. Most especially, this latest from Rate Your Students about how humanities PhDs should just stop complaining so much, are you people in this for the money or something? I have about five thousand things to say about this insidious annoyance, but for the sake of brevity will cut them down a little.

The argument goes like this:
1. Academic jobs should only go to people who are both very clever and very devoted to their subject.
2. People who are very clever would already know that the academic job market in the humanities is bad.
3. People who are devoted to their subject would enjoy the work in and of itself without needing a payoff in the form of financial security or a guaranteed academic job.
4. Therefore, people who complain about the trials of PhD and post-PhD life as if a) the job market came as a surprise to them and b) 'the hours [they] spend discussing ideas with [their] students, peers, and mentors' weren't rewarding enough to make the whole thing worthwhile shouldn't even be here in the first place.

Okay. No.

1. Academic jobs 'should' go to the people who can do the job. While being relatively bright and interested in the work you're doing are obviously going to be a bit part of that, 'I love my subject!' is never going to outweigh, say, publications on the job market. ("So you've never taught any classes at all?" "No, but I really love talking about literature to everyone else in my office!" Yeah, good luck with that.) Loving your subject - really, truly loving your subject - only seems to be the most important thing in the discussion when the discussion is about telling new academics to just put up with whatever it is they're complaining about. Funny, that.

2. People don't know the job market is this bad. Partly because it's not obvious unless you're looking: senior professors don't know the job market is this bad, for crying out loud. (Before I got the job I'm doing now, I had more than one very smart, very well-established scholar tell me that yes, it was a real shame about the job market, and maybe I should try applying for 1-year posts, as if when I said 'There are no jobs' I didn't actually mean 'There are no jobs.') PhD students? The same PhD students whose only job advice from the people who should know - the academics who are convincing them to stay on for PhDs in the first place - has been 'It's difficult, but if you really love your subject it's worth doing anyway, and the only people complaining are the ones who shouldn't be here in the first place'? Oh, come on. When they find out, it'll be by accident.

3. Hell, yes! Who needs food when you can read Derrida? You philistine mercenaries, with all this talk about 'job security' and 'I can't pay my rent' and 'something is seriously wrong when I'm working 80-hour weeks for below minimum wage and being told that objecting to another pay cut makes me ungrateful'. Tsch. You're in this for love, not money!

4. Therefore, shut up.

1. Google Street View UK going up.
2. Sunshine.

We managed to stay indoors and in front of computers for most of the day - unlike most of the undergraduates in the university, who from half-past eleven were sprawled out on every square foot of grass the campus and surrounding areas had to offer, soaking up sunshine like there wouldn't be any more until August. Which there probably won't, so good for them. And given that half of our morning was spent inching our way around the city as it appears on Street View, there will be no preaching about the virtues of work here. (Best Street View sighting of the day: the arm of our Masters student, playing Guitar Hero in his new flat.)

Some amount of work did get done, most of it involving dealing with the hundred headaches of a badly-OCRed 18th-century religious text. On the one hand, a painfully slow and fiddly proofreading process and transcription, taking hours per document. On the other hand, 'Christ has power to execute the lame.'

Today, me and my office-mate became The People Who Send The Masters Student To Do The Dishes.

He was bored! He doesn't mind! He offered! (Yes, I'm a little disappointed in me as well.)

Ikea sells stuff which is reasonably cheap when you buy one of it. Not so much when you get a carful. Especially since you have to walk through the whole shop before getting to the checkout (well, you don't have to, but: it's Ikea! it's funky minimalist laminate chic! You have to), so you go in for pillowcases and a draining rack and come out with five hundred plastic things called Skorkopp, which is not so cheap at all.

Still. It's Ikea. It's worth it.

I've also helped to cut down a tree today, to a given value of 'helped' (carrying a saw and then leaning on a dead branch). This took about a minute and a half, to what I'm hoping is the pleased surprise of my boyfriend's grandpa, who gave us a pretty dubious look when we were heading to the tree with the saw. My boyfriend's grandpa - 97, with strong opinions on brandy in coffee and the superiority of the Muppets over this Wallace-and-Gromit nonsense - is brilliant, and not least because he does a fantastic line in well-timed theatrical eye-rolling, something which fortunately appears to be genetic judging by my boyfriend's baby photos. It's kind of wonderful to see a smirk-and-perfectly-raised-eyebrow combination perfected as early as 18 months.

Also, it's strange how simultaneously fascinating and weird it is to see photos of people you love from before you knew them. I've seen old film of my boyfriend as a toddler, trying to drive a bus, which was sweet until the toddler I didn't know looked at me with the same half-sheepish, half-amused expression that I know belongs to someone I've only ever known as an adult. Carol Ann Duffy said it best, to an old photograph of her mother as a teenager; these are other people, almost, not quite.

When you first get contact lenses, everyone is very keen to reassure you that you can't actually lose them in the back of your eye.

This is true. But it turns out that you can certainly misplace them for a little while.

Ick. And ouch. And ick.