Among the irritating things in life is correcting a typo. or similar in a Ph.D. thesis after submitting the final version, because neither you nor the examiners had spotted it;¹ but the cheerful news is that I passed my viva voce last week and am due to graduate in January.

The Department presently seems to be hoping that I’ll come up with a project to work on under the auspices of C.E.C.H.; that, provided it could gain funding in the first place, would enable me to spend some time as a postdoc. and remain in academic research. This comes rather out of the blue, considering how long it’s been since I last thought I had any prospect of getting a foot on the academic career ladder, but my supervisor was intrigued by the initial suggestion for a topic which I came up with, so we shall see...

1. Actually, it’s worse: I spotted one even before the viva, and fixed it... but failed to notice my PDF reader saving the revised file to the wrong directory, so the version handed to the University was precisely the one the examiners approved. The file to be found on this site is therefore the updated version. (I have thought for a while that academic texts might benefit from software-style version numbering...) ↩