This has been a weird fucked up year. At the start of it, I expected to be back in London by this point, doing a PHD at the LSE and generally having severed ties with Coventry. Yet in actuality I’m here, I now own a house and I’ve doing a PHD part-time over six years.  The weird thing is that I’m actually glad about it. No matter how much fun London may be to live in, I couldn’t do everything I’m doing here in London, I’d find it too distracting. Plus my supervisors here are far better than they would have been in London, no matter how interesting it would have been to have sessions with Richard Sennett if he’d accepted me.  I’ve had two things published in journals, with a few more to come next year and my first conference paper, on a research area which I was unsure I was interested in at the start of the year. There’s not a chance in hell I would have bothered to sit down and write those if I’d just moved back to London after two years away. When I went there last weekend for a gig it felt really foreign to me in a way it never had and I really didn’t like the crowdedness of the place (though that was partly me being a grumpy twat as a result of getting shit faced till 4am on Friday night). The point in London when I’d have to “go home to Coventry” was always unbelievably fucking depressing to me and this time, for the first time, I was oddly glad. How strange. I appear to have settled in this weird little town, there are a lot of really safe new people in my life and I seem to be becoming rather content here. Apart from getting stressed because I have absolutely no outside organization of my time and it seems to leave me feeling the obsessive need to plan. But I figure this is just practice and a sign, which is leading to a new years resolution,  that I should smoke less weed. I’d much rather control my own time than have it controlled, even if it’s initially slightly tricky.  Next year will be easier though: my paid work is very structured, I’m auditing one/two classes and I start teaching, which ought to be interesting. So things seem likely to start to cohere in a really positive and satisfying way. This year was really truly shit at points but in a way it seems to have been really good for me,  in terms of making me think about what I really want in life, rather than what I find exciting and distracting. I seem to have these things and be set to get much more of them. Plus I’m so fucking excited about the next year of my life. Taking in themselves, these two things seem to suggest this was a very good year… though an exhausting one.  I don’t even think I regret the shit bits any more, as I think they were a necessary part of me getting from where I was at the start of the year to where I am now. So in conclusion: this has been a fucking excellent year and I think I’m almost certain to be able to say the same thing at the end of 2009.