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Showing posts from 2003

Without Work, Without a Home, Without Jillian and Without an Appendix…

I recovered reasonably quickly from my appendicitis saga, and just in the knick of time to fly out to Washington DC to do my thesis research, and more importantly to spend time with Jillian. I got into a routine pretty damn quickly, which involved waking up, seeing Jillian off to work, and then either doing some online research or biking across the city to the Library of Congress. I think it actually took me two days to find the reading room in the library; “Excuse me, how do I get to the Main Reading Room in the Jefferson Building? Ah huh, so take a right, two lefts, walk 800 yards, go up two flights of stairs, then take a right, one left, another right and straight down that corridor until you enter a new time zone and then down the elevator one floor. OK, got it.” It’s a f***ing maze; like those they make mice do (except they don’t ask questions at every juncture… or have to get into elevators and press buttons… yet). Then another two days of looking up at the frescos painted on the...

Life in the Armpit of England

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It has been so long since my last episode (‘How I Became a Post-graduate Alcoholic’) but at the same time so little has happened. That’s what you get for living in a campus the size of… well, a Polo field (don’t ask…. I have NO idea how small or large a polo field is. But too small for 600 students and associated staff anyway). Indeed, I have stuck it out in Silsoe, near Luton, the armpit of England, and I have been spat out the other side alive and well and a Master of Water Management. All that was required of me over the course of the last few months however was a thesis. Talk about a trial and a tribulation all rolled into one… it took me some very long weeks of research and many more of writing to finally get it to some semblance of an academic paper worthy of a pass (or even worthy of merely wiping my rear end with). In fact, I was in DC to do the research and most of the writing. It won’t take much time for you to put two and two together; I chose to do my work there because Jil...