A Week in the Life of Elly

Tuesday

Gigantic bowl of porridge for breakfast (poached quinces, sultanas and cinnamon), to cheer up a rainy morning spent finalizing a lesson plan on medieval manuscripts for the summer school I will be teaching in London in August. During the afternoon I work on incorporating yesterday’s findings into my (rapidly growing) chapter, being pernickety about footnotes and punctuation and somehow finding my word count increasing by nearly 3000 words. Reading days can be a little slow, but writing days I find energizing and exciting, reminding me how much I enjoy research and the fact that what I’m producing is 100% original. One of the things I love most about a PhD is that you can observe recognizable improvements in your writing and research skills even over a matter of weeks; my work is unrecognizable now from what I produced even six months ago. There is a small distraction in the afternoon in the form of a stray horse that has escaped from somewhere and is trotting around campus looking lost and distressed; fortunately security manage to catch it and calm it down, feeding it grass from the side of the campus car park. I contemplate taking the horse home, but decide against it. I leave work relatively early to tutor a student in Fulford; I work part-time as a private tutor in English, teaching a range of pupils from year nine school attendees to Italian businessmen looking to improve their English (the latter sessions tend to involve wine, so I look forward to those the most). My student’s mother, from Hong Kong, has made me an intriguing Chinese black sesame cake that she is keen for me to try. It disappears in an instant, and the recipe goes on my ‘to-make’ list. I head home, go for a quick run in the glorious evening sunshine, make a bowl of Vietnamese chicken noodle soup with the leftovers from last night and find myself heading to bed at 10pm, exhausted but feeling productive.

Thursday

Poached eggs and roasted Yorkshire ham on homemade soda bread for breakfast, before I have a quick wander round my garden to check on the progress of my new-found love for gardening, instilled in me by my mother. I find it incredibly relaxing, the manual nature of its tasks a pleasant antidote to all the mental wrangling that a PhD involves (cooking has the same therapeutic effect). The chillies, peppers, tomatoes and courgettes are coming on nicely, but the rainbow chard has been sadly decimated by slugs. Slug pellets go on the shopping list. I head to campus to do some final reading for this chapter, on ideas of contingency and the future in late nineteenth-century social and literary discourse which I suggest manifest themselves in the Arthurian literature I’m examining from the early twentieth century. I meet some friends on campus for lunch, and head home in the late afternoon for some more tutoring, where I set my student an exciting creative writing activity that I wish I’d had a chance to do when I was his age. After this it’s off to the gym for a spinning class, which leaves me starving and eager for chicken soup. Afterwards, I go to the pub to meet up with some friends.

Saturday

I personally think it’s important to take weekends off as a PhD student, and treat your research as you would a nine-to-five job. Somehow, though, I always manage to make my weekends much busier than the days I’m actually working. This morning, after a breakfast of homemade sourdough bread with homemade jam (rhubarb, vanilla and cardamom), and tea (loose-leaf, in a pot – no time for that during the week!) I potter around the garden, planting my new gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes and finally getting round to mowing the grass, which seems to be growing about two inches every day at the moment. Then it’s yoga at midday, which I’ve taken up recently and find incredibly relaxing, giving me something physical to focus on and calming my mind: I think all PhD students should be given free yoga classes. Afterwards I have tea and lunch in the bar at my gym with a friend from yoga, and leave feeling very zen. Later, I wander into town to stock up on fruit and veg from the market, then spend the afternoon working on a recipe for coconut scones with papaya and pineapple jam. I work as a freelance food writer for a number of online companies, and I have a deadline for this recipe coming up. I spend an hour or so baking, photographing and writing, then take some scones round to the neighbours (one of the downsides – or benefits, depending on how you look at it - of food writing as a job means there are constantly delicious things sitting around in my kitchen whispering to me to eat them all. My friends and supervisors benefit from this on a regular basis). That evening I have friends over for dinner – tamarind-glazed pork chops with a pear, fennel and watercress salad, and saffron-roasted cauliflower with raisins and pine nuts, followed by homemade mango, cardamom and lime frozen yoghurt. I make food, they bring wine, and it’s even warm enough to eat outside. An excellent evening.