The talking has to stop now and the writing must now begin in earnest! I don’t have very long left until the summer and I want to have my two case study chapters drafted by then. Then I can begin redrafting what I have over the summer. That’s the plan anyway. But it would be nice to have a final submission date in mind, but I am meeting with all my supervisors on Tuesday so maybe we will come up with one then.

So as it turns to March next week that will give me a calendar month to draft my chapter before I go home for the Easter break on 1st April. The content I am pretty familiar with and I have already run the revised chapter outline past Jocelyn. She has also seen my revised Europeanisation framework which it seems has some potential. So those things have kept me busy the past couple of weeks.

But, as I said, the talking has to stop. And now I have actually done my talk, so too can the preparing for a talk! That has been my main preoccupation over the last week or so. But on Thursday I gave a talk to the School of Modern Languages Research Seminar Series. Devoted blog followers can actually listen to my talk and see the slides as it was preserved on the ReCap system. Simply follow the link [here]

Although the turnout was not fantastic, I knew full well that many people from politics had classes then either to teach or attend. So I was not at all disappointed. In fact, the audience was rather select as it included the foremost professor of modern Portuguese history and politics from the University of Lisbon Prof. Antonio Costa Pinto. He was meant to be giving a public lecture before Christmas but it got snowed off and rescheduled for the same day as my talk. So in one afternoon Newcastle University had two talks about Portuguese politics – something of a record there I reckon!?! The questions I got from the audience were really interesting, some a little challenging, but I think I answered them pretty well. It was certainly nice to get my talk over with and then go and attend the public lecture and then the dinner with some select guests at one of Newcastle’s finest eateries Cafe 21. Overall Thursday was a very enjoyable day, one of the days you live your PhD for!

But now that’s over it’s back to what being a third year PhD student is really about – drafting those chapters! I shall doubtless returning to blogging again soon, probably sooner than I should as I procrastinate just a tiny bit more!