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so the interview in sheffield went very well, but in the end I lost out to a 'more advanced' silverback candidate with years of postdoc shuffling and project management. fair enough - better value for money, I might have made the same decision.

the panel kept stressing how 'extremely impressed' they were though. the principal investigator called me at 9pm the same evening and clearly regretted having to turn me down.

this doesn't pay the bills, but as far as rejections go it was pretty smooth.

there are also certain advantages to the situation. sheffield is pretty far from anywhere - and the positive feedback left me thinking that mortuary practice would represent a possible avenue for a postdoc field shift. basing a project on the same subject say in the geography department here would, in terms of intellectual cross-pollination, be a far less insular proposition.

at the moment I'm inclined to roll with my immediate gut response to the initial job advert; I saw it and I knew I had to apply to this. such reactions don't come along that often; when they do they're invariably worth pursuing, whether in the form of blondes on your doorstep or unexpected offers from strange men who read your alien abduction thesis. in this context, being benevolently turned down from sheffield isn't even a setback, so much as a minor skin-shedding.

amphibious geese grazing on the lawns of king's college, and a solitary chinese woman meditating in the rain.

lost a whole night's sleep yesterday, before I finally caved in, surrendered my principles and downed some hard painkillers.

I have an impacted wisdom tooth that is coming on sideways and strong from the lower left, perfectly perpendicular to my otherwise vertical ivory. draw back the cheek and you can see it at the back, relentless invader jutting malevolently out of the pink gum-flesh. gray, misshapen and enormous.

the pain has subsided to a dull ache now, for the time being, but it was fucking intense while it lasted. evil gnome cracking my teeth slowly with a nutcracker, while driving a searing white-hot rod of metal down through the left side of my head from the crown to the corner of the jaw. a little oddly, it also gave me an intense ear-ache.

at the moment I'm inclined to rank this phenomenon with tapeworms and george bush as evidence of a malevolent creator. if anyone has a good explanation for wisdom teeth, I'd like to hear it.

so we're walking down a street in edinburgh, coming back from dinner with some old packmates of the blonde beast. risotto, well-bred children and a fluffy pink unicorn named Lord Azrael. crossing over a bridge, I spot a pink sign over a closed-down locale - it's a semicircle jutting out, with lettering on the sides, like you'd find over a small cinema. the place could have been a club, maybe an arcade. get this however. as we get closer, I realize the lettering - some of it is lit up with little lights - is in enochian.

now, I just started teaching myself enochian script last week, on a whim, to kill time while waiting for my supervisor to get back to me on the final draft of the thesis. I don't know. maybe the world is actually full of random signs written in angelic alphabets dating from the late 16th century, and I just haven't noticed this because until last week I wouldn't have recognized enochian if it came up and bit me on the kneecap... still. I'm going to pursue this. if you never hear from me again, go up to edinburgh and look for the weird pink sign with the enochian lettering.

[if anyone else knows any public signs in enochian, please, send pictures.]

disheartened with the senseless doggy-paddling and palliative drudgery of cambridge - yes yes, you've heard it all before - I find myself in a cafe nero's in the capital, en route for the 23:00 night-coach from victoria station to edinburgh.

typically, scarce had I sat down ere an old, pink-faced bulk of a man with a huge guitar - crusty wrinkled face, wispy short-cropped hair, leather jacket, fingers like smooth mighty sausages - started asking me if I played any musical instruments. 'bass? guitar? keyboards? drums? what about drums?'... apparently he needed 'someone like me' for his band. I would have quizzed him further on what 'someone like me' meant, but his voice was so low it was completely drowned out by the sound of the coffee machine. after a while I realized it made very little difference whether I pretended to hear him or not, so I let him drone on about boomerangs - 'they come back and hit you, you know' - and whatnot while I logged on to teh interweb and conducted my business.

I don't think I've taken a bus journey this long since I did frankfurt-london in '97 (38hrs) and iguasu to buenos-aires in '98 (26hrs). the projected bus journey takes 8hrs40mins, thankfully overnight - I arrive at waverley at 07:40, with no defined departure date yet. though an old friend has his post-viva drinks on thursday night, I need to buy cheese down south and my plane for norway leaves on friday.

for the moment, this is what I am armed with, this is what my black little hemp rucksack contains [aside from rechargers, cables, a shift of clothes and a toothbrush]:

the collected fictions of borges - in English, because Borders does a thin line in original-language literature. I haven't re-read ficciones since I hit my 20s, it's about time. the pages of this edition are pleasingly textured. thick and slightly yellowed, with frayed edges that whisper of paper-knives and leather armchairs.

sarah franklin's ethnography of preimplantation genetic diagnosis in the UK, born and made. the endlessly deferred submission date for my fucking thesis is starting to threaten intellectual nihilism and embittered stagnation. good to keep myself occupied, if only to note from the first chapter how schlecht most academic writing in this vein is - turgid pedestrian prose, awkward sentence structures, limp analyses and flat, uninteresting narratives full of banal, predictable, politically correct decenterings. yech. hopefully it'll pick up in the wee hours, as I cross over the Scottish border. god, I hope the coach has overhead lights.

zizek's mapping ideology, for some theoretical counterpoise. zizek may perhaps qualify as turgid - more like 'metamphethamine baroque', though - but at the very least his ornate bloatings are lightning quick, penetrating and entertaining.

brenda dentzler's history of american ufology, the lure of the edge. mostly for midweight entertainment, now that I've scrapped the idea of xenoethnography for my postdoc. I've been meaning to read it since last year, but with nine hours confined on a bus in the middle of the night I might even get around to it.

and finally, my trusty black vaio s5xp laptop, Tantalos of the false Apple sticker. displaying an amusingly appropriate sense of timing, not to mention the near-infallible pinpoint accuracy of just-past-the-warranty programmed obsolescence, Tantalos' keyboard has started to malfunction. the letter F doesn't entirely work anymore. this places serious limits on my use of favourite four-letter expletives.

a couple of simple moves, and the forces are in alignment again. all is good, all works in an orderly fashion.

now, for some more job applications...

went to london with a mission yesterday, but the precarious alignment of forces that constituted my path through the day was blown completely off the rails. in the end the mission failed, I missed my seminar back in cambridge and by the evening when I did get back, I was too tired to participate in the closing socialities. it was all I could do to write off the day, head back to college and order some take-out pizza.

essentially, the problem was that on the day I lacked the inner equipoise to recognize that certain forcefully imparted advice - despite being delivered persuasively and with total certainty - was neither helpful nor particularly informed. not that I am blaming the advisor here. under other circumstances, clearer of mind, I would have recognized the dynamic at work and ignored their advice, more or less tactfully. as it were, I drifted along - trusting apparent authority and in a mood of experiment - and only narrowly avoided a very serious mistake.

the entire pattern of the day was disrupted, ending on a jinxed and abysmal note, because I failed to protect it from the forceful impositions of well-intentioned others. a sobering reminder.

I woke late this morning from a strange dream.

masked travellers in black flowing burkas, riding amorphous feral steeds made up of rolling tentacles. sometimes the traveller and the creature flowed together, making up a single creature, sometimes they divided. I was one of them, an ally, but the creatures shied me, sniffing my hands distrustfully, recoling into swirling balls.

then there was a medieval village torn out of time, dark and frozen in an arid waste - full of lofty spires and crystalline cathedrals, thatched roofs, sloping chimneys. there were no inhabitants, or the inhabitants were dark-clad and soulless. I'm not sure.

in a high chamber was a woman dressed in white, sleeping. I entered her bedchambers just before dawn, she had to be taken out of the frozen village but there was little time. she was, at the same time, all three of the recent women in my life, flowing between each - sometimes e, sometimes a, sometimes k. this was betrayed in small details: a dimpled smile, a nightgown, the set of the hips. she despaired that there was not enough time, that the reunion rescue would be thwarted by the rising sun.

I took her out, we ran across rooftops outlined against the brightly lit, immense, translucent cathedral that stood in the heart of the city - a structure built of liquid light, against the starless dark night sky. at the gates of the village, the beastly black rolling steeds recoiled, shifted like flowing starfish, feral. not angry or dangerous - merely distrustful.

I woke up before we got out, but not frustrated; somehow it felt like there was no place to go beyond the gates. not yet, anyway. I don't know why she had to be rescued or from what - the dream was about things set in motion, breaking patterns, floes thawing. it may be that like sleeping beauty, tornerose, she needed to be rescued. or maybe, instead, she needed to be set free. she was like the woman that comes in my dreams, sometimes, the beautiful soulmate that I recognize immediately, but yet she was not - or maybe I was not. I did not care to reunite with her - this was a serious task that had to be performed, not an occasion for loveplay or basking in dream fields. I did not miss her when I woke up. in fact I did not feel anything much. still, the dream was potent.

I wonder whether releasing the white-clad myth-woman from her frozen prison was an exorcism, or part of it. releasing something harboured in captivity, toppling a pedestal. if it was, we did reach the gates. at least for the most strenuous part, the task is done.

incidentally, walking into the institute a few hours later thinking about some minor improvements I might make to the final section of the thesis, I kept coming back to a segment from shakespeare:

it seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

like a rich jewel in an ethiope's ear

beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.

the lines, of course, are from romeo and juliet.

catalytic overreactions aside, the day has been acceptable. lumbered with a spring cold that makes me slow, inefficient and dry-lipped - still managed to print out and bind a pre-submission copy of the dissertation and hand it to supervisor. making his life easier might buy me more brownie points to grease my slow inching down the tight narrow tunnel to submission, the light, final rebirth. failing that, a ringside spot in heaven cheering for the cherubs 'd likely require less points.

also had a genuinely strange conversation about monkey porn with my terrified, long-suffering desk-mate at the office, evil squirrel lady. right after I lured her to eat a two-year-old ferrero rocher from my top desk drawer.

finally, en passant, I have decided to update my windows live contact list. any of you regulars and irregulars, scoundrels and lurkers who want to add me on what-used-to-be-msn - use the mail addie for the first comment below.