Research is like a labyrinth—you go one way only to realise you should have gone another way, and then you go back and you discover the way isn't there anymore, it's now mantled with hissing ivy, and you need to find some other way, perhaps that way you weren't sure about, but now seems quite useful... You also find yourself turning into a strange creature, growling or guffawing at some phrase by scholar or subject, with paperclips in your hair and post-its up your sleeves, pdfs of the articles you haven't read yet dripping from your eyes, to squeal only with delight at the ding of a text from the library concerning a rare scrumptious bird of a book... And as you go along, feeling the way word by word, a deadline in the form of a big bird caws and caws your doom. You tell it to bugger off, but it just hovers there, until you accept it, like the way you accept winter, as a bleak yet mandatory fact of existence ... S'pose there's a minotaur somewhere in this realm, wearing the tight trousers of an evil elf-prince and singing his charms like David Bowie... The scary-exhilarating part is, once you enter the labyrinth, there's no way out.




<<