I saw my big brother Mark yesterday, for the first time in quite a while. He’s over briefly from France to help conduct a PhD viva, staying at the old family house in Harlesden with my parents. Mum thought it would be nice if I went over so we could all have dinner together. Needless to say, it was a wonderful meal: I hadn’t seen Mark in such a long time it felt absolutely fantastic to catch up with him. My niece and nephew, Oliver and Elise, are apparently doing well at school, and Mark seemed as dazzlingly bright as he always has.

Mind you, all the talk of a PhD viva across the dinner table once again made me ruminate on whether I ever could have done one. Of course, my masters took me so long to write that I decided to call my academic career a day after I finally completed it. I’m still extremely proud of my MA, but the question remains: could I, as someone who uses a communication aid, have done a PhD Viva? A Viva is a sort of examination where the examiners ask the candidate questions about the thesis they have written directly, so there’s a lot of talking involved. That’s obviously usually verbal, but could it be done with a Voice Output Communication Aid? It would probably be a very slow process: having to type out an answer to any question put to me would have taken quite some time, especially if the answer required any detail or substance. I strongly suspect that, before long, I would have become very uncomfortable and needed a rest.

To tell the truth I don’t think I’ve come across a record of a person with my level of CP doing a PhD. My Australian friend Darryl has one, but he is able to speak normally. I’d be very interested to see if anyone who uses a communication aid has done a PhD. As for myself, my 40,000 word MA thesis still sits proudly on my shelf; yet that faint niggle of curiosity at what might have been and what I could have achieved is still there. Oh well, I suppose that, at the end of the day, I still have time.