I have done my best with those fits I mentioned below and committed them to paper and the colour printer. My supervisor should now have the last two chapters to read over and ridicule at will. Actually, so far he has been quite gentle with my work so it can't be totally awful.

I'm taking a little breather while he corrects the drafts, taking a little time to consider the holiday that I have just booked with N to South Africa. It should be great, although the SA students here have persuaded me that the country's cities are swarming pits of crime and violence! The film Tsotsi helped also! It will be fun, anyway, because I shall have a local guide. I am especially looking forward to seeing some animals in the raw in the Kruger or similar park. Hopefully they will be in the mood to show themselves.

I have also just finished reading the adventures of Prince Florizel in RL Stevenson's new Arabian nights. Prince Florizel is an unlikely character who solves crimes and brings the perpetrators to justice through his desire to satisfy noblesse oblige. What an impossibly noble, honourable, pompous and disturbingly elitist man he was (Florizel, that is)! I thought RLS was letting himself down severely with that character: a Prince totally impervious to temptation, above earthly delights, possessed of ultimate authority and the ability to make all swoon before his untouchable self, until I read the last paragraph and found that RLS was taking the p**s after all! Was RLS a fan of the aristocracy and divine right? I don't know, but after writing several chapters in which a Prince could do no wrong and was stultifyingly dull in his propriety, RLS takes him down a peg or two by invoking a revolution in his home country of Bohemia because of his constant absence overseas on matters of honour! Florizel then has to work in a cigar shop. Nice touch, RLS.