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10 January is the date for which I'd renegotiated the delivery of my chapter for the Manchester Doctor Who book. I still haven't finished it. I've e-mailed the unfinished chapter to the volume editor without going through the formal submission process, because this isn't a chapter I want to put through that process. It's not far from being publishable actually; but ideally I'd have done some more research into historical drama on 1960s television (there must be some secondary literature out there); and more importantly I just didn't finish the rewriting I knew I could achieve without the extra legwork.
The two visitors I had this weekend helped lift my spirits and break up what otherwise would have been dismal days in front of this machine endlessly rearranging text. I met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
na_lon in Oxford on Saturday. She was well and we compared notes about elderly relatives with reluctance to go into residential care, and news of what was happening in Carlisle, as well as discussing all the telefantasy I'm never going to catch up with any time soon.
My sister came up from London on Sunday. It was her birthday, and she'd been intending to spend the weekend with a friend, but he'd fallen ill and was unable to play host, so brunch with me in Oxford it was. I quite enjoyed the Queen's Lane Coffee House veggie breakfast, but could have done with more scrambled egg and more thoroughly cooked tomatoes. My sister has ambivalent-to-unflattering thoughts towards Oxford as a university, but she is a fan of Blackwell's (where I spent more money - I can't see when I'm going to read the books I got for Christmas, let alone the two I bought today. There's also the article by the person whose thesis topic was 'adjacent', shall we say, to my own. I need to work out a way of responding to it as on the basis of my reading of her article she has not so much driven her tanks on to my lawn as built a full-scale military base. Still, I told her to go ahead and write the thesis in the first place on the grounds that I didn't think I'd be staying in academia; I then returned to the full-time research job and concentrated on that rather than building up my own projects, while she got the fellowship and the book contract, so if there is blame to be apportioned I have a full share of it.
The two visitors I had this weekend helped lift my spirits and break up what otherwise would have been dismal days in front of this machine endlessly rearranging text. I met
na_lon in Oxford on Saturday. She was well and we compared notes about elderly relatives with reluctance to go into residential care, and news of what was happening in Carlisle, as well as discussing all the telefantasy I'm never going to catch up with any time soon. My sister came up from London on Sunday. It was her birthday, and she'd been intending to spend the weekend with a friend, but he'd fallen ill and was unable to play host, so brunch with me in Oxford it was. I quite enjoyed the Queen's Lane Coffee House veggie breakfast, but could have done with more scrambled egg and more thoroughly cooked tomatoes. My sister has ambivalent-to-unflattering thoughts towards Oxford as a university, but she is a fan of Blackwell's (where I spent more money - I can't see when I'm going to read the books I got for Christmas, let alone the two I bought today. There's also the article by the person whose thesis topic was 'adjacent', shall we say, to my own. I need to work out a way of responding to it as on the basis of my reading of her article she has not so much driven her tanks on to my lawn as built a full-scale military base. Still, I told her to go ahead and write the thesis in the first place on the grounds that I didn't think I'd be staying in academia; I then returned to the full-time research job and concentrated on that rather than building up my own projects, while she got the fellowship and the book contract, so if there is blame to be apportioned I have a full share of it.