Hitting the send button on my thesis manuscript wasn’t the feeling I’d expected. I thought it would be eeuphoric but instead it was a a flatness that comes from sheer relief.

It was early. I’d been up since 5 in the morning, tidying up formatting, which had been the bane of my life in the last few weeks. I had been pulling my hair out over headings, renumbering themselves for apparently no reason – of course; there was one which I found with the help of a colleague for whom I am eternally grateful. Full stops were missing in my final run-through, a random page break, a bold line in a table, and an incorrect reference on the second last page of a 365 page document. And of course, there was the conversion to pdf process that saw the pages slighting alter, meaning a few tables had to be reformatted.

What I thought would take an hour took two and a half hours, so at 7.30 in the morning I hit send and into the examination process my thesis goes. I’m hoping that will be straight forward but I can’t be sure.

Thre was no one else in the house awake – how to celebrate? Upstairs and a 45 minute bike session on Zwift. I’ve racked up countless hours on the bike over the course of my phd. It along with the gym have been a welcome release from the daily phd process.

It was quite nice to have an hour or so my own to take in the fact that it was done. The countelss journal articles I’d read,the more than 1 million words written of which nearly 115,000 found there way into the manuscript.

For the next couple of months I’ll have to wait for the examiners to comment and in that time I don’t plan to open the document again as its inevitable I’d find something that needed to be fixed.

For now it’s time to enjoy the family, something that just a few hours later I was able to put in place as we looked after our three delightful grandchildren so our daughter and her husband could go out for lunch. It was wonderful to enjoy the time with them and be free of the thought about what else I should be doing. Then it was out for dinner to celebrate with my long suffering favourite person before heading home to watch the soccer (football) which finished about 1.00am. A win for The Gunners in a game I kicked every ball.