It strikes me that if I only write one blog post per term, I’ll be finishing my DPhil after blog post number nine. Now, three years reading impenetrable German books and scowling at undergrads in libraries and trying to look busy seems rather a long time, but nine blog posts does not.
It’s already racing by. When I came back to Oxford in September, in the first couple of weeks of my DPhil, I met a few assorted second years. “Oh, wow,” I said appreciatively when they introduced themselves. “Second year. So you guys pretty much know what you’re doing, then?” “Oh, no, no,” was the slightly mournful reply. “Not at all.” Given I’m now in the weird first-year-second-year transitionary no man’s land, and only three months from being an undoubted second year — yeah, I get it. Don’t get me wrong, I am doing work, despite what my Instagram suggests (“you realise you’re holding a drink in ALL your photos,” a friend said as she scrolled through my feed, “and how do you eat so much food?”) and I’m presenting at conferences, and I have a proper profile on the faculty website. There are authentic thrills to be had in research — it’s like being the first detective at a crime scene. And yet. And yet. I am still at heart the very same as the undergrads who I will soon be teaching. Imparting wisdom when I myself am still convinced that hitting “skip intro” on Netflix is somehow the very peak of efficiency and means I’m taking less break time. “Gaming the system,” I’ll murmur wisely, as I watch my fifth episode. But, as a man once said, time’s wingèd chariot hurries nearer, and adulthood is getting harder to ignore. I now have a house. A house! Not a flat! And not a house share, either, but a proper grown-up just-the-two-of-us house. Gone are the days of communal laundry rooms and fire drills, the charmingly chaotic Dolly Alderton-ness of keeping a bottle of sourz on the kitchen table like a port decanter, of balancing a laptop on a kitchen chair to have movie nights, of sellotaping pretty wallpaper over damp in the corners. (True anecdotes from the two years of my undergrad I spent living with girls, all of whom are now far-flung and similarly grown-up but who are still very dear to me.) Just a couple of months ago we came for a viewing, pointing, in silent, open-mouthed reverence, at the skylights, the roses in the garden, the sash windows, the open-plan kitchen. It’s all very smart with lots of stone and stainless steel and glass which is terrific for my Instagram, but bad when you’re sleep-deprived from midnight DIY and still getting your bearings among stacks of boxes and an unfamiliar floor plan. “That’s a lot of bruises,” my DPhil friend remarked mildly when I hitched my skirt up over bright purple shins at a picnic. Time does have a funny way of moving on, doesn’t it? I have my transfer of status in a week (oh Lord, a week!?) an oral exam to allow me to go into my second year — and yet it seems like yesterday when I sat in my first supervision meeting and matter-of-factly told my supervisor that I’d really rather not do it, thanks, it sounds terribly unpleasant. This Big Thing that’s been on the horizon since September will soon be forgotten, and my DPhil — and life in general — will take me to places I’d not even given a second’s thought to. Assuming, of course, that I’m not thrown out of the University in disgrace. Will report back!
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The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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