Hi

Back from holidays down at the beach. There's something about floating on your back with your ears under the water that makes me feel like I've gone out of time: body dissolves into water, self recedes. I could be any age, any me.

We stayed in a house down in Dromana, owned by siblings of friends and it came with a beach box. Now I have been beach royalty how can I go back? What a blissful holiday!

I have finished my stint at Inside a Dog, so am now blogging here again. Not that I stopped as it turned out. But anyway. Here I am.

For those of you who are interested (a few people have asked about my thesis) here is my thesis abstract (written in a hurry in the middle of the night):

Melancholy is prevalent in modern texts for children, especially those with a fantasy element, and has a profound affect on plot, structure and narrative closure. This is particularly captured in the image of the everchild – perhaps most immediately recognisable in the figure of Peter Pan, but a recurring motif in modern and postmodern fairy tales. This dissertation looks at three eras of children’s writing – Victorian, Edwardian and Postmodern – and engages with the different ways melancholy is handled by the authors. The melancholic figure of the everchild sheds light on Freud and Kristeva’s theories of melancholia, specifically Freud’s belief that the melancholic subject, unwilling to relinquish a lost love object, incorporates it into the ego, and Kristeva’s further contention that the lost love object is the body of the mother. Winnicott’s model of the Perfect Mother creates a fascinating blueprint for the fairyworld, a domain where the child imagination holds complete sway, and where the integrity of the self is always threatened. The thesis finds that a journey into fairyworld is a journey into the melancholic self via the body of the mother. This journey results in either a healthy retrieval and expulsion of the lost thing or a further concealing of it within the ego so that it remains forever lost in the regressive domain of the fairyworld.