New Year, Old Habits

Obviously I should be cracking down on the ever-growing piles of work on my desk. Instead I've decided to enter the AbeBooks Arabian Nights competition... I won't spend too long on it. Really, I won't. If I put off my next PhD chapter any longer a) my supervisor will hunt me down and demand my funding back, b) I will never get any sleep again and c) I will never ever get round to finishing the PhD and will therefore never ever get round to finding a proper job!

Christmas and New Year were lovely, despite the sense of impending doom that always accompanies January for me. Sister 2 has her birthday on Christmas Day, and brother managed to return from the wilds of the NHS in Bristol, despite still being at work at 9pm on Christmas Eve. I received many book-related presents, which has forced me to decide two things: 1. I need more shelving space; 2. I'd really rather have a career that's focused around books and reading. I therefore spent the dregs of 2008 writing applications for work experience at various publishing houses. A heavily competitive industry, of course, and yet another industry impacted by the UK's current recessions (yes, even Mr. Brown calls it that now...). It's strange reading the headlines on the BBC news website - every day, one familiar firm or another seems to be going under. Today it was the turn of the Wedgewood brand. There is something deeply unsettling about all this - not only the loss of any kind of financial certainty, but above and beyond that, the loss of choices. For example, as a child of the New Labour education system, I currently owe the Government a rather large amount of money. It grows daily (the interest rates on the amount owed seem to be miraculously unaffected by the current climate, funnily enough...) whereas my chance of earning a wage that will cover repayments plus rent plus energy bills plus general living costs plus travel costs plus insurance and so on and so forth seem to diminish daily, limiting my choices of career and geographical location considerably. It's perhaps no surprise that the vast majority of people I know are intending to leave the country entirely. What a waste...