During the days of Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal the three Fs were central to his manipulation of Portuguese national identity. Upon my recent return to Lisbon, I would like to add a fourth. So the list now reads: Fatima, Football, Fado and Food Poisoning!

So by way of an update you are right to assume that I have been especially busy since my last post and, given that my last post referred to the fact that my teaching had started, there are no prizes for guessing that it is the teaching rather than the PhD thesis which has been occupying my time of late.

Being a module leader is a real responsibility. The contact hours of teaching lectures and seminars is only half the work, but that is something I feel confident about and am enjoying. I’m also looking forward to getting my teaching peer reviewed again this year. But I have also been busy organising the project groups, responding to student emails, writing the exam and I also have an undergrad dissertation to supervise which should be interesting.

But a couple of weeks ago it was nice to set my ‘out of office’ email and leave Newcastle for a few days and forget about teaching. It is always nice to go to Lisbon and the conference was definitely worth attending. Two days of ‘Portugal and International Organisations’ at the university where I spent my Erasmus year in 2004-5 was definitely right up my street! The most important thing was to meet people and to get my paper out there. I gave my talk on the morning of the second day of the conference, first thing in the morning so before the offending hotel breakfast food poisoning had taken effect. It seemed that it went down well and I seem to have passed the Portuguese scrutiny test and it sounded like what I was saying made sense with what other speakers were saying. I am also happy with the comments I received from leading academics and the interest and enthusiasm about my work they seemed to have. There is also a very distinct possibility that my paper will be published too which is all very exciting.

Conference papers do not write themselves and the feedback I have received is all positive for my thesis. But with the teaching and preparing for the conference it has been really hard to carve out some really good thesis writing time. So in my ‘writing up’ year I do feel really guilty for not getting as much writing done as I would have hoped. But hopefully I will get a decent amount done in the remaining few weeks before Christmas. What I know for sure is that 2012 is going to be a very busy year!!!