Talk about getting thrown in the deep end. Or in this case back into the deep end. It’s the end of the second week since week got back from Easter break and I already feel like I’ve been beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead beneath a pile of quite heavy books. Ok, well, maybe it’s not as bad as all that.

By the end of last week it was clear that I was going to have to start my dissertation, give three presentations, write three quite substantial papers, prepare my conference paper and do an editing project all over the course of the next few weeks. Pretty daunting. And that’s in addition to the work each of my tutors is setting week to week. Damn.

So, my first instinct as to how to approach all of this work was to go with my friend Laura and watch a movie at the cinema. We watched Dear John. I thought it was great. It was one of those rare instances where the promotion of the movie has led you to expect a certain story, and then it plays out differently to how you think it will. That was Friday night.

Saturday I now had to finish the transcript of the Dudley Sutton interview I did back in January. I love doing those interviews but I hate typing the transcript. 45mins of speech becomes twenty odd typed pages, painstakingly recreated. It really is a kind of slow torture. It was a beautiful day Saturday, the sun was shining and the birds were singing… and i was inside, chained to my laptop, painstakingly creating this transcript, which I finally finished and sent off some time after 9pm. But it’s being processed now, so hopefully it should be in the British Library Archives pretty soon, making it worth while.