I shall be released

Finally, so many months later, the news is in that I can take voluntary redundancy/early retirement. Not quite yet, though. At the end of September, in fact. So it will have taken about a year from decision to departure.

There was a feeling of happiness among the four of us today, though certainly for my part tinged with fear. I think it will be hard to live on the reduced income. But if I'm successful in getting onto an MA course, at least it'll be more than a year before I go mad with loneliness and boredom.

Here's the course I'm probably going to apply for. Really full details of the progamme there. A lot of it is fairly familiar to me from my first degree, but I only really got into theory towards the end, and after. Some of it, like post-colonialism and queer theory, was still very new then. On the whole I'm a bit surprised that the main approaches don't seem to have moved on that much. It doesn't look as if anyone with the impact of a Barthes or a Derrida has appeared in the last 30 years or so.

Exciting times ahead, probably.