For the last few years, it has felt like a pall hanging over me. While I loved my subject, at the back of my mind I always knew I had something to finish. A growing part of me was starting to say that I would never get it finished, and that I just was not good enough. These last two mornings, though, I’ve woken up with that pall gone: no more feeling guilty about going roaming when I have work to do; no more doubting myself. I know now that I have good, valid ideas: I have successfully shown that there is a relationship between fandom and cinephilia. I have written a thesis I can be proud of: it is quite a substantial piece of work, one which I am told stands out from the norm. Knowing that I got there at last feels amazing.

The question remains, of course, what next? While I have irons in one or two fires, nothing is firm yet. That, though, is not a major worry now, and I know I can do anything. The idea of doing a PhD begins to appeal again, but that can wait – after seven years, I think I need a break. Yet ideas are already beginning to bubble up in my head again: I now feel free to think, reflecting yesterday for instance that possibly one of the reasons I’m so fixated on Happy and Glorious is that it alludes to the pre-credit sequence of the spy who loved me, one of my own cinephiliac moments and a passage of film about which I write at length in my thesis. The two moments are, for me, linked; one of the very things I have been obsessing over for so long was used in the olympics – how cool is that? What are the chances? But how does that change the dynamic, and was the reference intentional? The bigger question now, though, is how to move forward, how to put such reflections to good use.