V-shaped depression over Cape Town

Today's pleasing rain, wind and general wintriness are insufficient to console me for the news I received today, viz. that, while the publisher's external readers think that my thesis is worth publishing, this is only on the condition that I do some substantial rewriting. Every reader of this thesis (all six of them) has found something wrong with it, and the overlap has been minimal - they tend to contradict each other merrily. Every one of them has suggested substantial rewrites in line with their own particular academic and theoretical hobby-horse. I consequently cherish a vision of arriving somewhere in the vicinity of my 83rd birthday clutching a massive manuscript which has been read by absolutely everybody in the field, and the updating of which has occupied another 300 000 words, twenty major theoretical frameworks, and several truckloads of extra reading. I shall greet the news of its ultimate acceptance by the editor with a faint, gratified squeak, before keeling over dead.

This'll teach me to be a generalist. If I but allowed one major theoretical approach to claim me as its own, it would protect me from this sort of assault. But no. I have to be bloody-minded and play the field.

It's lucky that unexpected baby-spawning has put the kibosh on my role-playing game for a bit, since I shall be more or less retiring from regular social activities for the rest of the year. The major rewrite has to be done asap because I need this bloody book on my CV. I have a series of deadlines for encyclopedia entries which stretch over the next six months. The implications are somewhat unpleasant.