Getting Ready for the Awf

This will probably be my last blog for a while, as I am off to sunny Canada - land of the big-haired bear wrestlers - on Thursday morning. As usual, I'm reluctant to leave Cambridge (it's my safe place and I feel so warm and cosy here!) but I'm reeeeally looking forward to a proper holiday, especially with Sophie, James and Ryan. Lord Byron will also be accompanying me - I hope he will prove to be an agreeable travelling companion and not as mad, bad and dangerous to know as certain other people coming on holiday with me! Getting ready for the dissertation next year - this mainly invovles panic reading, pulling my hair out and thinking "I'll never find anything to write about - this is it: I'm going to be exposed as a fraud!". Same old, same old ... but I'm sure it will all come out in the wash. Either that, or I'll be exposed as a fraud and sent down!

Things I must read before Michaelmas Term:

- Don Juan (holiday reading)
- The Faerie Queene (I've read the same 8 pages several times before falling soundly asleep! Who needs Night Nurse?)
- Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory" (part of James's bed-time reading regime)
- Piers Plowman (I wrote an essay on it last year and never actually read it)
- Morte Darthur (ditto)
- The Stripping of the Alters
- Empson's "Essays on Shakespeare"
- Andromaque
- The Cat in the Hat (just to help me get over my Dr Seuss phobia)

Things I have managed to read over the past 3 months:

- Troilus
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- Um, that's about it, actually!

Summer holidays pass too quickly! So much to do, so little time...! Eek! Right - I'm off to the bar.