Thanks to everyone who tweeted nice things. Even those people who reminded me that I’ve still got to do a viva which, unfortunately, will not be till the summer.

In spite of what I wrote here I’m actually pretty pleased with it. Though some of the weekends in the last month that were entirely devoted to making the individual chapters fit together into a coherent whole were pretty unpleasant. I’ve learnt two important lessons:

1. Always record full details for sources you’re using when you write. The process of reconstructing these at a later date because you were too lazy/stupid to do this is one of the most tedious, time consuming and irritating tasks imaginable. I spent years thinking “I’m going to regret this when it comes to writing up” and I really did.
2. Don’t leave overarching questions of how it all fits together until the end. To a certain extent this is inevitable with a PhD, in so far as that the overall purpose only really becomes apparent through pursuing it. But I made it much worse for myself by not seriously addressing these questions until the end.

It occurred to me after I submitted it earlier today* that I can literally trace the development of the thesis through the ‘personal morphogenesis’ category on my blog. The first post in the category was in January 2011, at the start of my third year (part time) and around the time I seriously started writing. The last post is on March 26th 2014… now to studiously forget about my thesis until the viva.

*Unfortunately having had to get it reprinted because I was so overjoyed to have finished the damn thing that I didn’t think carefully enough about what I told the printing company.

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Mark