Sauntering Vaguely Downward

I'm not usually a fan of the articles contributed by members of the academic community to the esteemed publication Nature, but this one really pissed me off.

"Design your own doctoral project" by Jesko Becker.

I warn you, take a deep breath and brace yourself for an onslaught of unabashed, tone-deaf horseshit if you decide to click that link. Reading it made me want to scream. A lot. Because so very few people in the world are in a position to spend months or years, as this author clearly did, doing a vast amount of unpaid labour in order to cook up a doctoral project and then chasing funding for it. You have to already be nicely sorted out for that. This aspirational bullshit is exactly the kind of thing that puts off less privileged members of the academic community (which, M. Becker, is 99.999999% of them) from pursuing doctoral work in the first place, or makes them feel like failures when they can't complete it. Doctoral work is already very badly paid, and even if you are lucky enough to land a funded position, the funding is almost always insufficient to cover the actual duration of projects. Nearly everyone with a PhD that I have ever met in the UK worked at least a couple of months on their doctoral theses without pay. It is an absolutely shite system and it is not to be encouraged. So don't go telling people, "You don't need funding, just follow your dreaaaaams!" People have to pay rent. They have to eat. Some of them have families to care for. They need money to do those things.

It doesn't just take "autonomy, determination and perseverance" to make an unfunded doctoral project happen. It takes MONEY, and not just money for the project. YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM, M. Becker. You are not the solution. Bugger Off.

I’ve not been about much this month. My apologies for not keeping up with responding to comments and posts. This is because the past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. For one thing, we finally got our act together and began work on the house. The first big job that needed doing was the roof.

The roof was a cheap and nasty MDF slate affair. The original tiles that covered the cottage, which would have matched the neighbouring cottages and houses, were lost. The roof had not weathered the years well. Repairs had been bodge jobs, and it leaked, so the walls on the first floor suffered from damp. This meant that we couldn’t plaster or paint them, because they’d be ruined in six months by water damage.

We decided to replace the cheap pseudoslates with the real thing, and to have the front porch and bay window fitted with proper mini-roofs as well. (I think of the bay window roof as a hat.)

The scaffolders arrived at 8 AM on a Monday morning.


The old roof, from the back, post-scaffolding and pre-roofing.

( +12 images showing the transformation )

Now that all this is is (almost) done, we can feel confident about redecorating and repairing the interior of the house, as well as repainting the exterior. And once we’ve recovered from paying the bill (yowch), we can think about Phase 2: Converting the conservatory into a livable room.

In conclusion, responsible home ownership is ruddy exhausting. Also, expensive. Also also, why was it so exhausting even though all I did was organising the contractors, make a lot of coffee and answer questions about what I wanted?

At least it looks nice! I think? Reassurance would be most welcome.