Do you ever reach a point, when you're working on a particular project, when you're absolutely saturated with it and are beginning to tie all the work you've done together, when you suddenly decide that it's all absolutely diabolical and you need to throw it out of the window and start again?

I reached that point with my dissertation yesterday. I'm now looking at spending the next few days forcing myself to accept that, in all reality, it isn't utter dross and making sure I have a plan that I like and that I think will give me a chance to put some depth into my dissertation but not drag me way over the word limit. The word limit is 10,000 including footnotes and quotes, and 8,000 excluding them. It
sounds, in the abstract, a horrifically high number, but when I consider that my last 'standard length' essay (admittedly a good one-and-a-half times as long as it should have been) was 3,500 words long, it's not actually very much for a semester's worth of work on a broad topic.

The topic in question is the Roman dictatorship in the Republic. I think I might have a question/direction for the work now: 'How different were the first century dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar from the traditional Republican idea of the office?' The general idea (and this is you now getting me thinking it through in something approaching a clarion state of mind) is to discuss the origins of the office and
its intended uses, and then its role in the early years of the Republic (it was in use for the first 200 years regularly, then infrequently till 202BC) before talking about Sulla and Caesar and their revival of the office. And then linking that all back in some form slightly more advanced than, 'and as dictator Caesar created the Julian calendar. He could do this because he was Pontifex Maximus and thus in charge of ensuring the Roman calendar fitted with the seasons. Previous dictators had been involved in religious activities, but this was mostly limited to holding festivals or hammering a nail into the Capitoline temple.'

Anyway, that's the dissertation. And that's really pretty much it on the work front: I've been keeping my head above water in my year-long module, but need to start working on my extended essay for it (you should just see the beautiful PhD thesis I have to read as part of my research) so I'll be taking a break from the dissertation for a little while.

I also have to write a 750-word profile of someone to take to an interview I have in three weeks. Yep, that's right, there may actually be life after university. I've been preferring not to think about it for most of the year. If I do think about it I just get a gaping hole of terror in the pit of my stomach as I contemplate the idea that I have no definite idea what I want to do, no howlingly obvious 'make a career out of me' talents, and a non-vocational degree. The concept
of selling pasties to hordes or ravening tourists for another summer doesn't really appeal, but it might have to be done all the same to scrape some finance together.

Anyway - a while ago I applied to do a postgraduate diploma in 'Professional Writing' in Falmouth, on the theory that it sounded interesting, would give me some more experience in something I'm thinking possibly about pursuing, and I could move to Cornwall (home) for a year and get good at surfing¹. I just got a letter inviting me for an interview, so I'm going home for a 'weekend' for that in a couple of weeks. I'm currently maintaining that they're probably interviewing
everybody who can string a sentence together and so I should get my hopes up.

Whatever I do next year, I'm probably very lucky to be graduating this year. St Andrews, being in Scotland, may not be able to charge tuition fees, but the University is desperately trying to boost its funding in other manners to cover that - with the result that the accommodation fees for university halls of residence are about to skyrocket. I don't have the figures at my fingertips, but its something
like 30% plus inflation, now spread over three years, which will make weekly rents, even in the cheapie, crappy accommodation head over £100, and the private sector will keep up because they can - the demand for housing is there, and I did hear a rumour that private landlords had been asked to keep the rent that high so that more students went back
into halls! Being as this is St Andrews University and we have a certain notable student, the howls of student wrath have made it into the Torygraph today. I'm not entirely sure whether that will help though - they seem to think that St Andrews is in Edinburgh...

Anyway, after all this work and student angst, I'm taking the weekend off. Sunday night has been reserved in order to throw things at the telly as Return of the King fails to pick up any Academy Awards (I feel the need to avoid getting my hopes up for this event). I don't know how good my aim will be by then however, because Saturday is the occasion of the latest ScotMeet. Sometime on Saturday, somewhere in an
Edinburgh pub, I'm going to meet a bunch of crazy people.

I'll let you know if we ever make it out of the pub.

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¹I guess you mean the 'sea' kind not the 'net' kind Swi? ... ed