the surreal homecoming

Only a week ago I spent my last night in Warren Bank, Milton Keynes, my home for the last 15 months since my return from fieldwork in July 2011. Now I am spending the first weekend in my Hilchama flat in Cape Town. The past six days have been pretty surreal although I can feel myself drifting closer and closer to reality and the days pass by.

When I walked through the doors of my flat on Monday morning it felt as if I had been transported into a parallel universe - everything looked familiar but somehow it was also completely strange. Did I really choose that colour for the walls in the living room? What was I thinking? So many times I had fantasized about what it would be like to be 'home' again, to be in my own flat with all it's space and light, freeing me from the restricting and suffocating living environments in MK. And yet my first reaction to being in the 'space' I had represented as my 'true' home while in the UK was to wonder how the hell I could have painted the walls a pale lilac! The space is the same, but I have changed and my needs, wants, perceptions have also changed - and just as I had to do in England I realise that in order to call this space my true home again I will have to make it my own again reflection who I am now - not who I was four years ago.

And this strange moment acted as a marker for the experiences that shaped the rest of my week as I rushed around trying to make decisions about kitchen appliances, applied for broadband services, assessed my security needs, shopped for food and household goods, resolved ex-tenant queries and wished I could simply drive to Ikea but equally grateful I call call on a host of supportive friends and family as I navigated these different tasks. The PhD took an unfortunate back seat and I only managed to spend a miserly hour or so working on my supervision notes on Friday.

I'm positive though - deep down I'm positive - at the surface I am uneasy, I haven't settled, I feel insecure, I am ambivalent - but I know this is where I need to be right now. This is where I need to be to finish my PhD and I know I will settle and it will be ok eventually.

not everyone can understand

I had a response about my blog post yesterday - the person couldn't understand why I was feeling sad about leaving the UK and in a way belittled my emotional response to all the mixed and confusing feelings I was experiencing. Surely coming home to my 'real' friends and family in Cape Town should be enough to dispel any ambivilance I might be feeling. Maybe for some people but not for me. Because I am sad about leaving here doesn't mean that I care any less for my friends and family in Cape Town than I do for the people I have come to care for in England and who have certainly come to care for me. This 'silly', probably insignificant comment on my blog post upset me and while I've dismissed the whole incident as coming from someone who doesn't really understand me or indeed the complexity of normal human interaction and life as a whole - it has brought into sharp focus that being in the UK for four years has changed me and possibly some people might not like, accept or appreciate these changes.

the farewells start

I've been wanting to write for weeks now but I can't seem to bring myself to articulate the complex and contradictory emotional responses I have toward my imminent departure from the UK. I'm happy I'm at this place in time where I can go back to Cape Town. I've been thinking, almost fantasizing, about going home for so long now. So I expected to be filled with only excitement as my departure date gets closer. But this hasn't been the case. I've been really sad and conflicted, not sure what to make of these opposite emotions. But it's four years of my life I'm saying goodbye to and as the shift from this one, probably defining period, to the yet unknown 'other' stage of my life awaits me, I'm forced to reflect on what has been. I have to accept it as another part of my life's journey no matter how hard I have, at times, wanted to discard this period. So I think it's all those kind of undercurrents bubbling up to the surface that is obviously responsible for my current sense of sadness. Maybe in some future blog post I'll be able to flesh out exactly what I mean - I would like to be able to do that. For now I'm just going through all the farewell events - enjoying the moments shared with friends, colleagues and supervisors, recognising that because the moments are part of the saying goodbye process, they are different and allow a window into something new - a new way of defining, possibly even remembering, these relationships and it does offer the potential for a healthy, maybe even, welcoming alternative memory.

make a cup of tea Lynn!

I started constructing my thesis document this morning. Before this I worked with separate chapter files. I'm having heart palpitations all the way through the formatting tasks I'm doing. It's real! I can't believe it, I'm feeling completely petrified and excited at the same time. Then when trying to update my bibliography I did something with my mouse and 'lost' the complete bibliography for my Literature Review chapter. So I'm making a cup of tea to calm my nervous before I go and 'recover' the bibliography. It's still 'there', somewhere on my software's database but not in the place it should be...fucking hell!

the future has arrived

Since I devised my last work plan about 4-5 months ago, the end of August/ beginning of September was a milestone I've been looking forward to. It marked my proposed final deadline for the last bit of serious work I would do in the UK before returning to Cape Town permanently. 24 August was the supposed submission date, initially for the first draft of my thesis, but then it was scaled back to merely be the first draft of my literature review. Well the date came and went and I rescheduled. August was a low month - my motivation and connection to my PhD reached an all time low and it seem inevitable that I would not, could not, meet my deadline. Last week I was in Sweden attending the Improving Student Learning conference and still had the unfinished literature review hanging over my head.  On Sunday night at about 11pm after a four hour trip from Heathrow to Milton Keynes I decided to send the draft piece to my supervisors. Here are the 'reading notes' I sent along with the submission...

Finally - my literature review (but also unfortunately under-baked and incomplete). Apologies for the delay - I tried to make the most of the ISL conference and didn't want to spend all my time, while there, working on the chapter. Hopefully I'll remember to give you some of my impressions of the conference too and the lessons learned.

Here are some of my 'reading notes' for the attached piece

1) I think it captures the main areas of theory that are useful for my thesis (and research in general)
2) I don't think I've done a very good job of integrating the different theoretical strands - to me each area currently seems to stand alone, independently (think it might be because I'm still in the mode where I'm writing for myself and not writing a thesis for an audience)
3) I'm most unhappy with the section on literacy practices - I don't think it's robust enough - maybe this will come once the Discussion and Interpretation chapter is written and I feel more confidence with my analysis. I'm also not happy with Section 1.4 - I think this is purely because I haven't read widely enough or haven't found a way to bring what I have read about this issue into the argument I am crafting
4) I feel there are sections that could do with more recent readings especially the 2012 Lea and Street and Robinson-Pant chapters. I've read your chapter M but haven't been able to bring it into my writing here. The section on graphic design education must still be done.
5) Given my own uncertainties about the status of this draft I think what might be productive for me at this point (and also conscious that I don't want to waste your time) is if you can highlight/identify areas of inaccuracy, areas that need more clarification and areas that are important but that I haven't signalled sufficiently or that I haven't mentioned at all. Your input in guiding me forward for the next draft would be very helpful.

Green/underlined text - stylistic, sentence structure issues
Orange/ italic text - concern about accuracy and validity of the points/claims being made

So this is how it is, it's the best I can manage at the moment, which really should be ok. I hope I can truly accept that it is ok. Last week amidst the looming deadline and anxiety about the quality of the work I got to visit the city of Lund and made a very brief but memorable trip to Copenhagen - think I'd like to go back. But for now the future has become the present and I am going home soon.

Walking in Uppsala...the road ahead perhaps?

The cobbled streets of Lund, southern Sweden

With the little mermaid in Copenhagen