The ante-penultimate day

Here's what I'm going to miss about being a fellow. (I've been thinking about it for a while and you can consider this the definitive list.)
1. being allowed to park my bike in the archway at the front of college. I'm not being frivolous, this is really going to be a blow, because it's very useful. I suppose I'll have to leave it on the pavement, or take it round the back. Bet I forget lots of times and heave my bike up the stairs only to have to heave it down again sheepishly. (Though I don't really know how sheep heave.)
2. walking on the grass -- which is actually only nice in summer, so as long as we get a good bit of rain I won't mind in the least.
3. chatting with other fellows. In fact I will still do this because I'm still allowed to go into lunch and dinner while I'm working for the college, and even after that to a lesser extent.
4. the food, bad though it is for me. But see above.
5. when people ask me what I do saying I'm a fellow is a handy way of dodging the question, like when people say is it Miss or Mrs and I say it's Dr actually. 'Fellow' is a wonderfully vague term, and could mean almost anything.
6. being able to invite people into dinner was a great way of being sociable and hospitable without having to tidy up, cook stuff, or otherwise do any work at all
7. also, going in to dinner gave me an excuse to wear earrings

Here's what I won't miss:
1. the feeling of being part of the establishment. It means you have to be terribly nice to people who are feeling like outsiders, and this is hard work. Now I can be the outsider, which is a more comfortable way to live.
2. the meetings. This deserves several subheadings: a) they take ages b) they make me uncomfortable when I have to make decisions about stuff I don't really know about on very short notice with people pushing in a particular direction. (It's rare for me to leave these meetings without the word "complicit" buzzing round my head.) c) people get angry sometimes, and rude, and d) this is very low-quality anger/rudeness. If you're going to be rude you can go one of two ways: gratuitous insult; or crafted insult. Gratuitous insult is just naff unless it's all-out HBO style, but to my knowledge no one has as yet called anyone, say, a mother-pig-****ing ****-****er at any of these meetings. Which I suppose is for the best. Really, crafted insults are the way to go. In the Old Norse sagas people would from time to time break into poetry, incredibly dense riddling poetry, usually when they'd just killed Thor Longbeard and wanted to announce this fact to his assembled cousins. By the time the cousins or whatnot had worked this out, and were reaching for their axes yelling 'did he just say what I think he said? Garrr!' the poet/killer had disappeared into the swirling blizzard. That is how to insult people. Think, for example, of Jean Harlow and Brigitte Bardot. They did not get on! One time JH introduced BB to someone, mispronouncing her surname as Bardott. 'No dear', said BB, 'the t is silent, as in Harlow'. Of course, better still would if be everyone could just get along.
3. I did my BA, MPhil, and PhD at Trinity; but the time I felt most involved in the college was when I was a college servant, as they call them in those parts. I worked in the Wren for a while, and felt at last like I actually belonged in the place, I suppose because I was doing something useful. It'll be interesting to see if it's the same here.
4. things marked confidential, often with large attachments, either in my inbox or my pigeonhole. My working rule for the future is: if there are reasons why some people can't be told something then I don't want to know it either. It's never something nice, e.g. we're going to have a surprise birthday party.
5. being a research fellow has been rather bad for my research. I can see how it would work really well, if you were a full-time stipendiary research fellow, to have a few committee-type responsibilities and to be roped in to some teaching and other studenty stuff -- it would help keep your feet on the ground and give you some CV experience of academic things. But if, like me, you work full-time on research projects that other people decided should be done (and frankly the term 'research' is not the right one, these are projects which draw on the same skills as those you use to do research, but are mostly just mechanical looking for bibliography and entering it into a system, and will in the future be done much more thoroughly by robots), then it's not a good idea. If you don't have much spare time/brain energy to start with then losing some more of it has a very big impact. Hopefully I can get back to some proper work at the weekends. I feel a need to write something a bit fun, too.

The problem is that this list is uneven enough to make it sound like the fellowship has been a bit of a waste of time, which certainly isn't true. The best bits about it have been a) meeting interesting people and b) getting an in to the library's collections; but I'll certainly still be associatd with the library for a while, and I'm hoping the people I've met won't shun me either. So I've enjoyed it very much, and I will miss it a bit, but luckily for me I will still feel the benefits.