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I have handed in my final essay of my degree. It was about ‘reflexivity in visual media’ and was completed according to the schedule above. The time line starts at midnight, and ends at the deadline of noon. Some notable points are the finish with an easy 20 minutes to spare for printing and handing in. This turned into a slight panic when I forgot to print the references page, and then the university computers wouldn’t read my USB stick to print it again. But the paper copy was accepted at 11:57 - three minutes clear. Easy does it.

I wasn’t hardcore enough to manage an all-nighter on it, and as such it never quite got to the word limit of 2500, stopping dead on 2000. The large flat line at 3-7am was when I was asleep due to feeling like a rather un-intellectual lumpen mass. Then there was a smaller flat-line at 10am when I walked up the hill from my house to campus so that I could finish it and print it without having to run up the hill.

What mark it gets, I will have to wait and see. But I can tell you now that it included the phrase: “so perhaps it could be turtles going out in every direction.”, a reference to the wonderfully obtuse Slavoj Žižek and the quote “My Dad went to New York and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.

Just three exams (sadly all mundanely computer science ones) and my degree will be complete!

It’s the Fifth of December, it’s dark and I am just leaving my Wednesday Welsh lesson in the Merched Y Wawr (Women’s Institute) building.

Plastic garden chair
Plastic garden chair
Plastic garden chair
Something large and round shrouded in a green tarpaulin
A portable charcoal barbecue.

Being carried through the evening streets by five apparently sane and sober individuals.  Need I point out that the students (OK, I admit I’m one too) are still in Aberystwyth?  Bless them.