Well, I’ve been away for a while and it feels like ages since I’ve posted anything here. What have I been up to? Well, The Boy and I spent a weekend in his House on the West Coast where we relaxed with my sister and her boyfriend, and a friend of mine. They all came over for dinner and stayed the night. My sister and her boyf rode up, from their rather distant home town, on their hefty BMW motorbike. It’s a really nice bike actually – chunky, powerful, capable, and not silly. Sports bikes are great-looking things but, in all honest, they’re not particularly practical if you want to actually ride anywhere beyond the corner shop. I went out on the bike with my sister’s boyf and it was a brilliant ride, if a bit rainy towards the end. We went into town to get petrol, then rode until we found the end of the speed restrictions….then hit the accelerator. I love biking, even though I’ve barely done any. I’ve always loved bikes, always wanted one, and very nearly bought one a few years ago when I was living and working in Aberdeen. I still have ambitions to get a bike and get my licence but that’s all a long way in the distance, and down the list of priorities, well after things like a house, a job, a kitten etc.!
After this, the Boy and I went to Dunblane Hydro for a chill-out break. It was his birthday and so we booked a really nice room, with a particularly vast bed, and thoroughly relaxed. The Balmoral Restaurant is really, really nice. The first night I had a pinenut, sunblush tomato & rocket salad, followed by a beautiful piece of beef with onions, mushrooms and mash. The second night I had the potted salmon which was gorgeous, followed by a generously sized supreme of chicken with asparagus and a little dauphinoise potato. All very very nice and, for the night of the Boy’s birthday, I sneakily arranged for a cake, complete with candles, to be brought to the table as a surprise. T’was good! The staff were lovely and the birthday massage we both had was fantastically relaxing too.
A couple of days later, we set off on another trip. This time we went to Largs to go sailing with Scotsail on their ‘start sailing’ course. The Boy has always been disparaging about sailing, always maintaining that the only kind of sailing he’d want to do would be on a luxury yacht. Personally, that type of sailing is not sport and I find the idea abhorrent. Sailing is about getting out there in the elements, surviving without all the poncy, pointless crap we rely on in everyday life, and just focusing on where we’re going, how we’ll get there, and what we’ll eat. The yacht we were going on, a 37ft Fantasi, was moored at Ardrossan, so we were taken over there to meet our skipper – we were the first to arrive as the rest of the team were coming down from Aberdeen and were stuck in traffic. The yacht was quite different in set-up to the one I’ve sailed on before but it was very nice, spacious and comfortable. And our skipper was excellent – a very relaxed and patient man.
The weather was fairly poor – actually, in sailing terms, rough. We were regularly sailing in winds of over 20 knots which is pretty stiff. At times, we were sailing in winds of 35 knots which is officially a gale. Coming out of Ardrossan harbour is pretty unpleasant. If you’ve taken the ferry to Arran, you’ll have come out of this harbour but, on a large ferry, you’d never notice the waves. But there were pretty big standing waves and almost instantly everyone started to look a bit pasty and concerned! Fortunately no-one was seasick because it wasn’t long before we hit calmer waters and everyone’s stomachs resumed their normal positions. Once we were headed for the water between Largs and Millport, the skipper handed over the helm to me. The layout of the yacht made this a bit more challenging since it was different to the yacht I’d previously sailed. The last yacht, a Moody 31ft, had a tiller – when you use a tiller, if you want to go right, you push the tiller left, and vice versa. However, this yacht had a wheel and, with a wheel, if you want to go right, you turn it right. I really had to fight to get myself out of the habits I’d learned with the tiller and it was funny how ingrained those habits had become even though I ‘d only been out a couple of times on the other yacht! However, I got used to it and steered the yacht round past Millport and then into choppier waters where the yacht was heeling well. I love it when the yacht heels – that is, tips or leans over – because for me it’s very exhiliarating. However, our ‘crew’ from Aberdeen were not so keen – in fact, they were scared!
Speaking of which, a little about our fellow crew from the North East. There were two boys and a girl. The girl and one of the boys were a couple. The boys were English and the girl Irish and all of them worked in the oil industry. On the first night, the single guy marked himself as a bit of a twat at the restaurant. He ordered white wine for the table without consulting any of us as to what kind of wine we liked. He ordered the house white and then ‘tasted’ it before he allowed the waiter to pour (!) and he summoned and dismissed the waiting staff in such an offhand manner. Finally, when a couple of us went to the toilet, he paid the entire bill on his credit card. This put me off him right away – I did not want him paying for my food and I certainly didn’t want to be paying for the bottles of wine he ordered and we did not drink. Not cool. This could have been forgiven but he then went on to make an even bigger fool of himself. When standing in the cockpit of the yacht, the skipper commented about the direction of the wind. Smartypants fat-wallet disagreed and said that the wind was behind us – while looking at the weather vane on the top of the mast which told him that in fact the wind was not behind us at all! It struck me as odd to 1) contradict the skipper 2) contradict the weather vane and 3) not pay attention to the fact that you could actually feel the wind on your face, not on your back! Again, you could have forgiven him for his mistake, since he simply didn’t understand it and this was a beginners course. However, he kept spouting things as if they were fact when often they were completely wrong. His biggest offence though, came when we were actually out sailing. He did nothing. Sailing is very much a team sport – when you tack, i.e. use the wind to change course etc., you need the helmsman/woman to organise the team and steer the yacht, and then you need two people on the winches, one to let the sail go, the other to pull it in. As you can imagine, you will tack a fair bit when sailing. This guy tacked perhaps once throughout the entire trip. To give you an idea – I lost count of the number of times I was one of the people on the winches and as helmswoman, I tacked the boat at least 4 times in a matter of an hour or so as I sailed her round the tip of Arran. This guy literally sat and watched. Now and again he would lean over to pass someone the winch handle. Apart from that – nothing. There is a lot of physical work to be done and, in that wind, it’s quite challenging – it’s your body against the elements. The things I did included hauling in the mainsail, pulling up the mainsail, folding away the mainsail, pulling in the foresail, tacking, helming, bringing up the anchor, putting out and bringing in the fenders, and so on and so on. All of this is fairly physical and occasionally dangerous work – trying taking down a main sail when you have to balance yourself in 25 knots of wind. The rest of the team participated in these jobs – we worked together to achieve them. All but this one guy, who sat in a corner pretending to be asleep – all of the time. I honestly can’t think of a contribution that he made. It really pissed me off – and the Boy too. Everyone else was mucking in and learning and this idiot just sat there – a flaccid, useless lump who seemed to feel he was smarter than everyone else. When it came to learning how to tie knots (very important in sailing!) this guy thought he was the shit. He was – at two knots – the rest he couldn’t work out and, given that he’d been such a smartypants with the first two, his inability to do the rest drew hearty laughter from the rest of us!
I had a really enjoyable trip and learned an awful lot – I now better understand the process of tacking, from all perspectives. I feel much better at the helm and I’m pleased to have learned both tiller and wheel now. I think I’ve got my head round a few of the ropes (they all have weird names), the sails and the knots, and I’m beginning to understand the uses of the various instruments and how to plot a position on a chart. All of this only goes to drive my passion for learning further. I love the freedom of sailing. I love the very idea that if you organise your sails properly, you get some wind, and then a 37ft vessel weighing tonnes, is propelled forward. That, to me, is still amazing each time it happens. It’s exciting, it’s peaceful, it’s challenging, it’s draining and tiring and very physical – all of that makes it very appealing to me. I will learn more.
However, all of this aside, I’m now back in the land of the very real. My thesis still sits here waiting to be done and my deadlines creep forward with ever increasing speed. I’m struggling to get things done right now – there is just so much to do and not enough time to get it done. I simply can’t manage to do what my supervisor wants me to achieve. Having said that, I have recently had my book review of an anthology accepted to appear in print in a journal a year from now, and I also got to sit in as part of an interview panel/audience for an academic post. The department here is looking for a temporary lecturer and we were invited along to see the presentation part of the interview process. It was very interesting to see the different approaches and styles and I have lots of useful notes to go on for when I’m applying for jobs. However, having seen the CVs of those candidates being interviewed I’m now terrified. Each of them, even the reasonably recently graduated ones, had around six publications. So far I have one forthcoming article in a book, and six reviews. The reviews, unfortunately, don’t count for an awful lot. However, I simply don’t have time to write and find pubishers for another 5 articles – I have a thesis to finish!! But I think I have a strategy – I am already in the process of drafting an abstract for a conference next summer. I think the key thing to do, once I’ve finished my thesis, is to get at least two things published within 6 months of achieving my doctorate. In order to do this, I’m going to have to attend conferences which will help me meet people and network as well as force me to create and shape work into new and coherent papers that could, potentially, be made into articles. Publishing is the key to getting into the shortlist for any academic job but, sadly, it’s also extremely difficult to get work published.
We’ll see what the future holds. Stress, stress and a bit more stress is most likely. In the meantime, I’m off to stress some more.
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Tags: academic jobs, academic publishing, Ardorssan, Balmoral restaurant, biking, BMW, Buttock Point, conference, Cumbrae, Dunblane Hydro, Fantasi 37, foresail, Kyles of Bute, Largs, main sail, massage, Millport, motorbike, PhD, Portavadie, publishing, relaxation, sailing, thesis, winch, yacht
Life of a PhD Student 
