28.07.05..8:42 pm

1. Barcelona, I am at your doors. Or rather, Barcelona I am currently trying to figure out how I'll be able to make the 4.30am roll call at Stanstead and in the midst of my waging battle with M to just catch the goddamn last train, he is still insistent upon 'sleeping' for a couple of hours and then spending two hours on a bus.

2. My thesis supervisor left for good this week. Still no replacement. It's not that I was getting loads of help from him in the first place, but it was nice knowing he was there. I've got it on good authority, however, that this situation is being rectified.

3. Also on good authority I spent most of Tuesday grinning with appalling glee after having been told I've received a distinction on one of my essays. The appalling glee was tarnished somewhat by Successful Woman Syndrome wherein I convinced myself(successfully.. O the irony..) that the external examinator is sure to hate it, that the rest of my essays will thus be fails to compensate such an inglorious oversight on my prof's behalf, and that my thesis is the most pointless case of self-indulgence ever and thus I'll fail on those lines regardless. I hate SWS. It's a kick in the crotch right when you start feeling good about yourself. It makes me really not want to discuss it with anyone in case I either jinx it or upset someone. (Not you guys, of course. Fortunately the online diary community is rife with SWS, and a whole whack of SMS too.)

4. My thesis is now comprised of trying to demonstrate how abjection, hopelessness and absence as fundamentals of the spy genre. And also then how these three factors effect masculine narratives. I'm narrowing down. Such things are good.

5. I only realised a couple of days ago that my thesis deadline coming up by two weeks also means that I won't be able to go to Sweden to see Zanna as I was due to arrive on 29 Aug and leave 5 Sept. How much does that bite?

6. There's not really any '6' other than me wanting to round things off nicely, so I'll simply YAY BARCELONA again and wrap this eggshell up.

****emmms