After Viva

Let me get the big news over with first (partly for those for whom this is repetition) and say that I had a Viva for my thesis on Tuesday, the outcome was not good in that I was asked to resubmit. If you want more info on this I blogged about it on my thesis blog on Wednesday . What it means practically I still have to work out but it was clear that my examiners thought I needed to get more space from my fieldwork. The immediate result is that I have decided to have a break from thesis until after my parents Golden Wedding and then start looking through the interviews and the reports that I should get from Birmingham.

Other than that I have been working and trying to get myself more healthy. Actually the health thing started in the run up to submission when I realised that my anxiety levels were going through the roof. I did not want to ask the doctor for medication for this and therefore I had to do something. I already used mindfulness and such approaches and the only other thing I  knew that reduces levels was physical activity. That started with walks in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire and then one Sunday I took myself off to Hillsborough Leisure Centre for a swim.

I was surprised how it works out. There are two pools under one roof at Hillsborough. The beach pool with pirate ship wreck a couple of water shutes and a wave machine. They also have the rock pool which is a small old fashioned swimming pool for swimming up and down. There are five narrow lanes usually (today only four) and the water is fairly warm. Also on a Sunday Afternoon it is relatively quiet.

Well I enjoyed that, that I decided to try Ponds Forge during the week. Then signed up for Fitness Unlimited which costs about £20 per month and if I swim once a week that is cheaper than buying individual sessions. However, it does not give me just swimming but gym, various fitness classes and things like saunas and steam baths. Also if you use the gym there is a small amount of personal training available. As thesis has taken its toll physically with the concentrated nature of finishing I am at present making use of this quite a lot.

Work is busy as always. A paper is in for final review, and also when we started looking at a big data set we found something pretty straightforward that would upset a number of stereotypes. There are some interesting student projects and a couple of PhD students who are getting close to finished.

Today as it was Pentecost Sunday which was the annual CTBB big service and held at St Andrews this time.  I went as they said they wanted someone to help Derek on the sound desk. In the end I did the whole sound but we had two microphones fail during the service and I do not know why.

Chattering again post first submission.

The new front of Birmigham New Street Station

This is me starting up after submitting my thesis.

In many ways the weeks have not had very much going on in them. I worked Monday to Thursday, shopped Friday morning and normally slept some of Friday afternoon, then sat down on the evening and the rest of the weekend to get on with thesis. the only real diversion has been writers group on a Monday evening and towards the end I was not even finding the energy to write a piece for that, the last piece I took was a haiku and yes it did only have seventeen syllables. If you want to know more how how my thesis progressed it is on the blog http://jengiethesis.blogspot.co.uk/ .

Let me say here now quite clearly, if you have not submitted a doctorate you do not know how intense that last run up to submission is. I say this as someone who had talked several people through it, had read quite a few books and has quite a good imagination and I  UNDERESTIMATED IT. I went through the anal retentive. I went through the stage when it took over my brain. In the end it was just a matter of keeping focussed on what I was doing. I allowed nothing to come between me and finishing. I suspect, although I do not know, that it is a similar type of focussed effort as that of a top athlete.

Work has been busy as well. I have done a lot of teaching. At some stage I will add up how much but for about ten weeks I had at least a class a week and sometimes two. Classes last 2.5 hours which is longer than most. I have stopped having feedback forms, I suspect people think it is arrogance but I  do not think that I teach perfectly, I just think that I know at the end of the class whether I have succeeded or not. There are occassions when I walk out of the class on a high. If I do that then quite often I get unsolicited feedback telling me how marvellous it was, when I go out of a class feeling I have failed I get told how useless it was. It is not the material I teach, that remains the same, it is the ability to engage the class with the material.There are a number of things that change this. Sometimes it is simply how tired I am, other times it is whether I have had enough preparation time, how fresh the course is, how warm the classroom is or whether the technology works.

This is going to be short I realise as I am actually not really into writing at length at present. Indeed if you had asked me before I finished what I would have done after my thesis was submitted I think I would have said read some light fiction which has nothing to do with thesis. However it has come clear over the last few days that at this stage there are three things I find I want to do.  The first is to exercise until I am physically tired, I suspect that this is in the hope that if I am physically tired as well as mentally then my body will not keep my brain awake but I suspect there is more. Then there is getting out of Sheffield into the countryside and the wilder the better. The orderly detail of towns and cities is too much like the regimented process of getting my thesis ready to submit. Finally I have found that the one task I settled to with some relish is redesigning my website. It has needed doing for two years but on Friday which was not a good day, redesigning it was all that I felt up to doing.