C'est typique...

...I take a huge bag of books and papers down to Yorkshire with me and end up using just a handful. I've only really managed to work on one chapter of the thesis too but I'm fairly happy with the outcome and it's been useful as a 'getting my head back into it' type exercise.

The findings of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (www.uknea.unep-wcmc.org) have been published since I was last working on my thesis (well working with anything approaching earnest at least) and the prospect of reading the big pile of technical reports I knew I was going to have to read at some point was, quite frankly, terrifying.

In actual fact, the UKNEA has proved to be a huge help and I've rejigged my work a bit to align it better to their approach. All in all I think it's given my work a much better focus and hopefully one less thing to get slammed for come viva time.