Sphinx

Subject Heading: Why you are not getting that article/chapter any time soon

(1) It’s been a horribly busy term and I simply haven’t had any time to focus on research or writing. I have a couple of commitments in June and early July, plus taking a short holiday (at last!), but I’ll then be able to get down to this properly.

(2) I have, as I do every year, underestimated my tiredness and overestimated how much I can get done during the vacation. I now have to focus on teaching prep as I’m doing a couple of new courses, but once term settles down I’ll be able to get back to it, honest.

(3) I’ve got a heavier teaching load than normal, including topics I’ve never taught before, but things should get better by late November as we move on to more familiar ground. Once I’ve got the first batch of marking out of the way.

(4) I’ve been ill. Again.

(5) This isn’t something I tell every editor – you’re special and I know I can trust you – but the illness, as you’ve probably guessed, is depression with a side order of severe insomnia. I can manage the teaching, but writing is a different matter. I think the fog is starting to clear a bit…

(6) The paper is actually rubbish, and your volume would be much better off without it. Seriously. Please stop extending all your deadlines for my benefit. I don’t actually want to write the damned thing.

(7) There’s a bit in Anthony Powell’s The Kindly Ones, set in the period of the Phoney War, when one character remarks “It’s impossible to write with Hitler about”. That, but for Trump, Brexit, Johnson, Syria, Brazil, China, climate change, plastic, insect apocalypse (not the fun kind), antibiotic resistance…

(8) Having now read through your editorial comments in detail, I need a couple of weeks to rewrite the entire paper as an acrostic expressing my view of your professionalism and manners.

(9) In terms of the universe, we have the lifespans of mayflies, and I’m spending this brief moment in the sunlight writing pointless words about some Ancient Greek whom nobody is interested in except to misquote him. Who cares? Seriously?

(10) Black, black, black.

(11) Okay, I had a slightly better afternoon and managed to hack out the attached; I think it’s a pile of crap, but if you’re so desperate to include something from me, here’s something, take it or leave it.

(12) And of course I’m now even further behind with everything else I’m supposed to be writing, but the fact I’ve actually managed to get this done, and can have a brief moment of relief at ticking something off the list and feeling slightly less guilty, means that I then move on to the next overdue commitment, rather than giving up the whole enterprise as a bad job…