»2nd October 2008
Civil Defence
Welcome to the dissertation of my dissertation!
I have recently been working on my dissertation, which was handed in at half four on 30th September. In the true style of dissertations it had become an epic labour by the end of it and was consuming everything. The title was 'Civil Defence in Britain 1945-1962' which at first glances isn't the most sock rockingly awesome title. The dissertation started out life as vague ideas about nuclear war and heavy metal, think along the lines of Megadeth's seminal 1992 album Rust In Peace. At some point I reinstalled Fallout 2 and then the idea evolved slightly more. At the HIST5000 presentation in december where we had to present a research proposal for a dissertation, mine was on 'Civil Defence in Britain and America in the Early Cold War' which gave me a big excuse to pass off gently mocking Protect and Survive-style pamphlets as serious historical research. At some later point--possibly around February or March--my personal tutor and later dissertation supervisor, Proffesor Childs, suggested I limit the dissertation to just one country so as not to get bogged down in 'cloudy comparative bullshit' (not the Professor's words). Up until the end of examination period, which was only one exam in actual fact, the dissertation had been squeezed in between actual urgent work as a way of stemming boredom in the library. After the exam was over however, the only thing on the schedule was dissertation, so work started in earnest I started sitting around in the post-grad mostly not working on my dissertation at all. These post-grad room sessions were 90% Diablo II, Dwarf Fortress, dicking around on the internet, wandering around the empty university, eating sandwiches, talking on MSN and 10% work related to the dissertation. After the holiday to see Metallica live in Dublin in August with JK, work was supposed to start on actually writing the dissertation and turning my vast untrained militia of notes into an elite corps of the Dissertation Army. That is actually a fairly descriptive analogy of my dissertation, and this is supposed to be military history after all, so I guess I'm supposed to throw in the odd military term now and again, hip hip brigadier.
This is my word quota progress chart, showing day-by-day progress. Each coloured pixel represents one word, there are 15,000 altogether. Each coloured section represents one evening work session at the post-grad room. I had a lot of time on my hands at first. The fifth from last, and three last sections were all twelve hour/all-night sessions.
So, consider this section so far as a kind of introduction or, god forbid, preface to the rest of the update. It will be absolutely smashing if I mimic the structure of a dissertation for comic effect whilst describing my actual dissertation.
How did I write the dissertation? Well first I came up with a skeletal structure, of chapter titles with various sub-section headings in yellow text to remind me what to put in each chapter (these are removed later). Then I added a bunch of formatting things, like a bibliography, contents page, title page, numbered pages etc., seeing as those sorts of things are fiddly to do at the end. Over this structure I then draped my notes liberally piled on/copy-pasted my notes into each section where necessary adjusting the wording. I coloured text red if it was poorly worded/of borderline relevance/probably in the wrong section, and I also added notes or things to do in red text, which I would then leave until the 'clean up' session (which basically meant 'until the last minute'.)
Once my notes dried up, I had to actually start wringing the primary sources I had amassed for useful sounding passages and it was during this period where I could start worrying about questions like 'Is there an argument here?' 'Where is the analysis and judgement?' 'What purpose does that paragraph serve?' 'Is this completely retarded?' 'Why civil defence?!?!? WHYYYYY??QW?EF!!' That was basically what happened in the eight or nine days.
I continued this basically until the last few days of work, at which point I entered frantic panic mode and started mounting all night sessions in the post-grad room with Tom, whose dissertation was on Anthony Eden and the Special Relationship, or something to that effect. Through sticking to the word quotas, STICKING TO THE PLAN, and careful management of my morale: total castastrophic melt-down and complete moral terror was avoided. I became consumed by civil defence, I was living in the late forties and early fifties, I consumed a great deal of overpriced flapjacks and other snacks from the overpriced vending machine, and equally large quantities of reasonably-priced-for-leeds-university-vending-machines Coca-Cola family beverages (only a £1 for a 500ml bottle!)
In the final days and then final hours of the dissertation, I was joined by many people from the other history MA courses who were doing their dissertations as well. Tom, Fiona, Rabia, Phil? Mark? (the phd guy doing a thesis on Kenya and White Settlers...) This was great because a) it probably doubled the number of people from history I know and get on with, b) morale was mutually sustained and c) work was no longer a solitary chore of pain and suffering.
So that's my broad introduction preface nonsense over, I covered the context, my main points and arguments, primary and secondary sources and attempted some ridiculous survey of the 'historiographical debate'. Now onto the flagrant copy-pasting of notes (with a minimum of editing for comic effect.)
Smoking in the fifties was totally sexy and endorsed by hotties.
Remember, all these notes are things I wrote down at the time, the only editing and formatting is to keep this from being too boring or to do some formatting I originally left a note for. Watch as I invoke the powers of the God of History to bring this to you. HISTORY POWER! HOOOO!!!! Holy shit it's in chronological order! (I swear by the F5 time/date function on Notepad)
22:34 22/07/2008
Didn't get much work done today. Mostly played on Dwarf Fortress. An indian cleaning woman came in and seemed frustrated, something about doing the hoovering. Perhaps she was looking for a plug or something. Booked the coach tickets for Metallica.
You can tell how little the post-grad room was used over summer by the fact that the indian cleaning woman coming into the room was deemed noteworthy.
22:38 30/07/2008
Pissed around a lot again. Did 353 words of fairly useful notes from Left, Left, Left about the CND.
22:30 06/08/2008
a very unproductive trip. only a few ntoes from ambiguity and detterrence. internet is bad for work.
22:08 07/08/2008
highly productive session. played on df a lot, pains in stomach from hot dogs last night. got loads of times pdfs and added comments at the end to speed up searching later. got some good ideas for chapters
For quite a while, things went on like that. That was during the stage where I was still writing notes and not really doing much intensive work.
These are the sort of great images that gave me the idea in the first place. Sadly this is an American source so I wasn't able to use it in the end.
21:08 02/09/2008 Busy day today. Met with Gooch for ten minutes (he wasn't in his room at 2 for some reason so I was waiting around until about quarter to three) and he pointed me in the direction of memoirs and cabinet minutes. Used the microfilm machines for the first time and got some quality notes from aroun 1954-1957 relating to CD. Tried to find some memoirs in the library and got hold of a book on Clement Atlee, Atlee's memoirs and Eden's memoirs. Bumped into Tom from history who told me about the name of the Eden memoirs. Went back to the post-grad room for a while and talked to Tom.
This is what you could roughly call the second period of the dissertation. At some point over summer, Professor Childs became ill and wasn't in uni and so Professor Gooch (they're both called John, so it's not very helpful to have first names here) became my supervisor. Most of my meetings with Gooch revolved around me reassuring the both of us that I was 'on track' and that 'everything is falling into place'. It really wouldn't look good if I came to Gooch, my new supervisor, a little over a month before the thing was to be handed in saying things like 'Well I largely didn't contact Professor Childs much' or 'I haven't started writing it yet' (I think at this point I still hadn't started writing it yet.
This was also the point at which I started regularly seeing Tom in the post-grad room after I'd informed him I'd only found out about it before we broke up after exams, and that it was largely empty all of the time. In true School of History style, it turns out Tom had been going to the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI) round the back of the Union which was a similar post-grad facility which I DIDN'T KNOW EVEN EXISTED. Tom suggested that they probably did actually tell us all about this at the first meeting at the beginning of the year (I was just starting to think that the Military History Crew were just kept out of the loop or something.) Being told in the first meeting would have made a lot of sense, and would also explain why the none of the people on the MA entirely knew all the facilities that were available to them. The School of History is really big on keeping things 'need to know' it seems.
13:29 05/09/2008
Came in to see Gooch again today. Hopefully he will be in.
Wrote down progress made on microfilm sources and memoirs.
chapter ideas
context, british defence 1945-1962
the government side of civil defence
the public reaction to civil defence
the artwork of civil defence, changes in advertising style?
Amazingly, my ideas for chapters didn't change too much after that. The chapters that finally made it were, 'The Development of Civil Defence 1945-1954', 'The Development of Civil Defence 1954-1962', 'Civil Defence Advertisement and Promotion' and 'Reactions to Civil Defence'.
Here's a joke I made in the presentation back in December, 'Whilst this may look like a picture of a sofa fort, it is actually a diagram of a highly effective fallout shelter.' That got a few laughs but I was being pretty flippant really. In the end I had to take this sort of thing seriously.
18:22 14/09/2008
fucking ridiculous. nowhere is open and i'm sat in some stupid wireless area (with no reception) in the union. power pack is playing up again so will have to get lots of work done quickly and then leave this debacle, it'll be MUCH better when it's back on regular term-time.
18:26 14/09/2008
it is noisy and totally unsatisfactory, not the place for work to occur, i was unable to break/get into the social sciences building like last time this happened. battery was saying 39 minutes and is now saying 1:19
Actually managed to go over word quota again. Going to move out now, a couple of rah wankers have come in and are making a lot of fucking noise trying to check their Facebooks with one complaining about not being able to 'surf the internet without a mouse'....
Completed the Beneath the City Streets notes. There will no doubt be more notes to take from that book if I need to, but there are already a LOT of footnotes from that book.
Need to finish looking over the notes from Notes The Times PDFs.doc
Going now, what a fucking debacle.
This was six days into my writing up stage, and the fourth day of actually working on the dissertation. At this point, I had set myself the target of knocking out 750 words each time I worked on the dissertation. This quota system was largely what brought the dissertation together. Whilst in the final sessions, I was somewhat undermined by focusing on meeting quotas a little too much and leaving too many thoughts unfinished and paragraphs left floating in limbo. Still, I wouldn't have been anywhere near that point without quotas. Stalin knew when he was onto a winner with the Five Year Plans.
"We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us!"
- ████ ████████████, 16th September 2008.
"We are ten to fifteen thousand words behind next year's phd students. We must make good this lag before 30th September. Either we do it, or we will have to ask for an extension!"
- Joseph Stalin, 4th February 1931.
18:31 22/09/2008
Carl has been content lately. He admired a fine Metallica album lately. He talked with a friend lately. He was irritated by a late bus lately. He was accosted by business vermin lately. He worked on a dissertation lately. He was worried by a deadline lately. He was dismayed by freshers lately. He enjoyed a truly decadent game of Diablo II lately. He enjoyed a fine game of Dwarf Fortress lately. He enjoyed Malham Cove lately. He went on a satisfying walk lately.
He is a casual worshipper of Arnie.
He is a citizen of Heckmondwike. He is a student of Leeds University.
Carl likes denim, rock, guitars, RPGs, spray paint, and metal for its heaviness. When possible he prefers to consume tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches, lemon lucozade, and nut M&Ms. He absolutely detests yuppies.
He is highly strung. He enjoys the company of others. He is somewhat reserved. He often makes detailed plans. He is assertive. He is often late. He needs alcohol to get through the working day and is starting to work slowly due to its scarcity.
The 'business vermin' incident refers to my trip into Leeds on the 219 that day. I had to sit in one of the areas near the back of the bus where two rows of seats face each other. Which was good as first as I had more room to stretch out and listen to my music, which I think was Slayer at the time, possibly the 2001 album God Hates Us All. Anyway, at the stop opposite the Porsche garage just after the bus crosses the ring-road, about twenty (what I will henceforth refer to as) Business Shits got on the bus, they all looked younger than me and were all dressed in suits that were clearly new. This wouldn't have been so bad if they didn't insist on SURROUNDING ME on my completely undefensible seating area near the back of the bus (usually, spreading your stuff out and leaning back in a relaxed way is enough to discourage people from sitting near you I have found, particularly if you're sat further down the bus.)
So I thought I'd make a few animated gifs seeing as I'd reinstalled Animation Shop again.
They were holding idiotic and obnoxious conversations, not even about 'business', just about shit-all. I refused to give up any ground to them, Yngwie Malmsteen's song 'Stronghold' was going through my mind despite me switching to the most openly aggressive music I could find, in this case Slayer's 1994 album of hardcore punk covers 'Undisputed Attitude', a great, great record, a personal favourite, and somewhat underrated by the music press. One of the business boys had to perch right on the edge of the seat next to me, and one in front, who I'd single out as a weaker element of the pack, looked pretty nervous. They probably didn't like me as much as I didn't like them. Long hair, dressed like Lars Ulrich circa-1983, clearly listening to 'mosher music'...
Anyway, as a result of what I hope was my withering glare and defiant aura, or more likely the fact, it was their stop, some of the Business Boys got off the bus. 'Great,' I thought 'their number is lessening, the multitude of their fuckings is decreasing' but NO! As business boys left the bus under a hail of failure, more of their number moved up from further down the bus to close their ranks around me! Perhaps, they were merely moving up so they could sit with their friends... or perhaps they were trying to encircle and destroy me! Well, fortunately I was able to roll a successful morale check and I broke through the Business Boy's lines and made my way to the front of the bus to get off at my stop.
I missed the opportunity to make a defiant, victorious gesture as I stepped off the bus (something along the lines of a 'Ha-ha!' and involving swinging away on a rope would have sufficed) but at least I was able to get away before my mood for the coming evening of work was shattered.
22:41 24/09/2008
12 HOURS IN THE POST-GRAD ROOM. NOT VERY MUCH WORK DONE, CONSIDERING HOW MUCH TIME WAS SPENT.
9,720 WORDS.
DO MORE CRAP ON CHAPTER 2
SORT OUT QUOTATION MARKS
CARTOONS?
By this point it was getting very near to the end of the dissertation and I was pushing my time in the post-grad room ever later and cutting even finer my time to get down from uni to the back of the train station on Aire Street to catch the bus. The last few times that I went back for the bus at eleven I was practically jogging down to Aire Street like some retarded late-night, back-pack-wearing, pony-tailed power-walker... Good job all I had to contend with was drunken freshers instead of the usual drunken, surly normies, i.e. non-post-grads.
By this point, my progress log was becoming ever more incoherent. Whilst before, I might leave reasonably detailed instructions for my next sessions, by this stage it was all in caps and the instructions were ever more panicked and incomprehensible.
This note was made after I'd rolled into uni at about ten o' clock in the morning, a normal time for anyone else, but which for me required a herculanean effort to make it there on time. The reason for the early start was, amazingly, Professor Gooch said he could look at some of my draft and pass comment on it, which I wasn't expecting at all considering how late it all was. Handing in draft material was a new experience for me, Simon Burrows never seen any of my draft for the Napoleon Dissertation last year.
On the mad dash down to Aire Street after this session I listened to the 1990 death metal landmark Entombed's Left Hand Path and I felt that I had made a unique connection with the title track, the six and a half minute epic 'Left Hand Path' which I recomend you download and listen to right now.
19:34 28/09/2008
Itemised word totals.
Intro - 1,233
Chap1 - 3,367
Chap2 - 4,255
Chap3 - 1,239
Chap4 - 1,218
Concl - 0
Bibli - ~500
07:06 29/09/2008
Long session, highly productive in the last hour or so. Finished of chapter 4 (not very good) and did most of chapter 3. need to finish of chapter 3, add the conclusion, tidy up the introduction, add shit loads of footnotes to break up ibids and also actually do something from the protect and survive book.
13,669 words.
This was the penultimate writing session and the second all-night session. At this point, the word quotas had done their job, it was now up to me to complete all of the objectives listed. As it turned out, 'chapter 4 (not very good)' was cleaved in half during the final session when I found myself over the word limit and unable to explain why talking about the CND was relevant to the way my other chapters had developed, the 'shit loads of footnotes to break up ibids' never happened nor was anything from the Protect and Survive book used.
The Final Push
Or alternatively--'will bring us to the word limit'. I found this in one of the books I was looking at and thought it would really look pretty snazzy on the notice-board in the post-grad room. Totally inspirational.
Unsurprisingly, the final period of work on the dissertation isn't covered in my progress log. Of course, a mere lack of primary sources isn't going to stop me. Onward!
Session Start (extar:jk): Sun Sep 28 19:57:59 2008
[...]
[20:39] Carl www.extarscube.com: this time i'm not going to miss out on any fantastic slayer merchandise
[20:41] jk: so you'll be bringing £200 and leaving in slayer environmental armour?
[20:41] Carl www.extarscube.com: haha that'd be the best case scenario yeah
[20:41] Carl www.extarscube.com: or the slayer garden furniture set
[20:42] Carl www.extarscube.com: next time nin come round i expect to see some awesome merchandise
[20:42] Carl www.extarscube.com: like a The Slip-flask
[20:42] Carl www.extarscube.com: and packets of 999,999s and 1,000,000s for baking
[20:43] jk: hahaha
[20:43] jk: like they'll be in the UK ever again
[20:44] Carl www.extarscube.com: yeah you can just see trent telling robin finck that 'that guitar is coming straight out of your pay packet if you so much as consider breaking it!'
[20:49] jk: man fuck the uk
[20:49] jk: how can a game cost both £40 and $40
[20:50] jk: jesus, i hate the *cough* free market
[20:50] Carl www.extarscube.com: has brown announced a new 'retard tax' on 'shit games' or something?
[20:50] jk: it's just that shit is more expensive here, it's the same with pc hardware too
[20:51] jk: no-one seems to notice the price discrimination over here because everyone in the government is 400 years old
[20:51] jk: they're barely round to regulating these new "talking pictures"
One way in which morale was maintained throughout the final hours was the promise of seeing Slayer once more at the end of October. I often found myself returning to the question of what could top 'Slayer layer cake' in the battle for Most Ridiculous But Awesome Merchandise To Buy At A Concert--which I'm sure will soon be made into a retarded celebrity talking heads 'Top [multiple of five] [pop culture item]' presented by [celebrity from three or four years ago] on ITV2.
During the final week or so, I had realised that I could use one of the monitors from the otherwise unnused computers in the post-grad room as a second monitor for my lap-top. This isn't complete tech-wankery here, there was a legitimate reason. The screen on the 'top only goes up to 1024x768, which isn't very large; and seeing as the majority of my primary sources were PDFs of The Times, I needed a good way of being able to see the PDFs and my dissertation in Word without having to scroll windows around etc.; and this is where the dual monitor function moved beyond merely 'cool' to being 'very useful' as well.
Anyway, at various points in the final hours I taken screenshots of my desktop just to illustrate how things were going. I think these screenshots speak for themselves. Not that that's going to stop me running my commentary alongside them anyway.
That's the sort of thing I spent hours staring at. At least until the last few hours when I thought I should finally get round to removing 'Michael Mouse' as a contributor. Check the time on the Windows clock. Click on image for full size image.
For quite a while I had various little in-jokes and notes left strewn around my dissertation. For example, up until the point where I actually assigned page numbers to the chapters in the contents page, I had a fifth chapter included on there entitled 'I Rule'. Fortunately, I managed to remove all of the jokes before printing out, but a couple of small notes to myself slipped through the net.
The most embarassing was a note to myself on the timeline after '1961 - Skybolt cancelled' (Skybolt being an ill-fated nuclear missile developed by the British before Polaris) reading '-This would probably make a plausible end point. (Where did this date come from?)' Which shows firstly how thoroughly I proof read my dissertation; secondly, how I simply copy-pasted the majority of my timeline from an old document I wrote without properly citing sources; and thirdly, how lax my grasp of the 'context' of the British nuclear programme during the period actually was. Hopefully, they won't look too closely at my timeline.
A second, less embarassing, but more frantic note to myself which slipped past my proof reading was in the bibliography, where I somehow left one of my panicked '!!!!URL!!!' notes in after a source, to remind myself to actually tidy up all the online sources crap in my bibliography. I did of course find a URL for said source, but for some reason didn't remove the note... Thankfully, that one won't be too noticeable.
As the final push progressed, I grew steadily more tired and incoherent. I talked a great deal of mumbling shit to Tom and Rabia in the post-grad room... we all did. Eighteen straight hours working on a dissertation, attempting to maintain concentration levels, and worrying about all the parts which are still wrong really takes it out of you. We were all working towards the deadline thinking it was twelve o' clock on Tuesday 30th September, but at about half ten in the morning, Rabia got a call from her friend saying that the deadline was actually half four. This gave us the best part of another five hours to carry on work with the dissertation. Despite me thinking I had to have it ready for twelve, I still found plenty of stuff to fill my time with until about twenty past four, when I had to dash off to get the thing printed and bound. A massive effort by any measure, all the more astounding was Rabia's dissertation: by her own admission, she'd left it right to the last minute having a good eight thousand words to go in the last session. Whilst I arrived at the room at eight or so to start work, Rabia and Tom had been there since before five. It was amazing how each of our dissertations came so down to the wire like that despite all the different methods of work we'd arrived at.
Somehow, probably as a result of focusing too much on meeting word quotas and less on the actual argument of my dissertation, I managed to sail over the 15,000 word limit and even the upper limit of 16,500 words (you're allowed 10% +/- the word limit). To solve this problem I had to chop half of my fourth chapter off, which kind of made it a bit pointless as a chapter in itself, still, at least it brought the entire thing into focus more, looks like chapter four had to take one for the team.
This is the actual screenshot of my desktop from 11:03 on the morning of 30th September. Click on the image to view the full size image.
After I had found out that we had another five hours to work. The unending, cold stare of the man in the Times advert helped to keep morale high. Morale by this point of course had become a total joke. I was largely incoherent, slipping in and out of concentration, unable to write analytically for more than a few minutes at a time, typos abound. I was actually muttering 'civil defence' over and over again at times, Rabia by this point was justifying to herself cropping out entire chapters, and Tom was occasionally yelping out of sheer boredom. All the while, from my second monitor, raised just above our heads by the desktop computer case, the professional golfer from the 1950s Bryllcream advert stared out unendingly over the blasted, charred landscape of the post-grad room. Books littered the floor, and there was a strong smell of caffeine drinks. I had long since gone to 'DEFCON 3' with a 'light' Stimulation Drink Energy Drink and then further onto 'DEFCON 1' with a high airburst dettonation of my one remaining full-yield thermo-caffeine Energy Drink (by this point I could only of Energy Drink in terms of 1950s nuclear weapon technology.)
Things are obviously getting pretty hazy at this point. Fortunately, Tom and Rabia, recorded some of the things that we each said on their Facebook statuses.
Preface - "No, it is that bad. You've read it, you're confused. Believe me, so am I"
Tom's idea for his preface.
"I can't contradict myself, because I haven't actually said anything"
Rabia had learned that Carls knowledge of american history is intrinsically tied into Kevin Constner films. 3:20am - Comment
A moment of realisation after trying to jump to the defence of John F Kennedy during the 'Name your favourite twentieth century American president' debate.
'Plannin' n' shit, yo.' I ended up going with this picture as my title page because it pretty much sums up civil defence as a whole. Men looking at models of ruined buildings. Think about it.
The final piercing crescendo of the dissertation came a few minutes after half four. It was handed in to Maria di Stefano's office and that was it. It was all over. The dissertation, the MA, everything. Unable to truly appreciate the gravity of the situation I shuffled off to the library to deposit the nineteen or so books I had checked out, and to get the largest library receipt I've ever seen, and then to persuade the woman behind the library help desk to print out my entire library record for me to marvel at, despite me having ceased to be a student around half an hour earlier. What followed was the most catatonic trip to the Old Bar ever, where I had to eat a Chicken, sundried tomato and pesto sandwich along with a foul coconut-cherry flapjack to try and do something about the random bouts of dizziness I'd been experiencing, no doubt due to not having eaten anything for about twelve hours and having not been to sleep in over twenty four. I was doubly dismayed by the Old Bar no longer stocking Staropramen due to some made-up 'discontinued' bullshit and by the unwillingness of the bar staff to pour me a pint of half Guinness/half Cider, which I have now decided to call a 'Liverpool Stout' if I have to bullshit my way around unhelpful, procedure-obeying bar staff again. If you don't have a problem pouring a Snakebite, then you can't have a problem with a... a Liverpool Stout... Yeah!
Clearly, 'going out' around Leeds later on in the evening (we went to the pub around half seven or so) would have been good, but it would also have been completely unrealistic as by this point I was totally sleep deprived and uncommunicative. So the final day of the dissertation was brought to an end and I walked down to catch the 209 at nine and go through my pre-planned ritual of drinking a cleansing Lemon Lucozade and listening to Death's 1998 masterpiece and final album, 'The Sound of Perseverence', which has become my post-momentous-uni-event album of choice now.
The final push at the dissertation has already become a legendary event of heroic proportions, in years to come, veterans will meet in dusty bars to talk in hushed and reverent tones about the event. Now it's over, all I await with bated breath is the actual mark. Hopefully the fifty pound note I left between the Acknowledgements and Timeline will do the trick.
Extar, over, out.
TCP/IP, it's fucking me off. Other protocols doing little more. Definitely got worse. Now making me curse. Removing IPX. Will it ever work? Never!