So far, so good.  I’ve managed to successfully avoid doing any work on my PhD for two weeks.  This may not seem like a cause for celebration (indeed, bits of me are itching to open a book or rifle through a few ballads or even do some filing) but I am extremely poor at doing nothing.  I find it very, very difficult to switch off, so the fact that I’ve taken two weeks off for the first time in a year is quite an achievement (and last year I only took two weeks off because I was moving house, so I wasn’t exactly doing nothing, I just had too much else to do!).   So this week we’ve been on a lovely walk from Chipping, we went cycling round Brockholes nature reserve and yesterday we went to the sea-life centre in Blackpool so that my little one could meet the Octonauts.  Such are the joys of combining parenthood with postgraduate research.  This evening we all went to choir practice, having joined the local church choir.  This is something I haven’t done for years, so I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The school term begins in the middle of next week, which is when I go back to work.  Plenty to finish off before the new semester starts.