The Syme Papers (2010)
“I was looking for anything, at my wits’ end, or rather my grant’s end, holed up in a studio in King’s Cross – part of a flat brown block looking over the skips and lorries of the Caledonian Road. The grant was running dry and so was I, sending beer money back home to the wife-and-two in Austin, Texas. I was supposed to be writing (on a Fulbright as it happens, toot my own horn) in order to (one … two … three): finish the book, publish (publish!), scoot home, win tenure, and start building the (...rather expensive) picket fence. Writing, hunched over the schoolboy desk I pinched from one of the aforementioned skips and pushed against the squat window (which, sealed at the sill by paint, locked by a smear of paint over the what-d’you-call-it, jig, hitch, thingum, clasp, bolt, had clammed up – stuck fast, unbudgeable, unopenable, as the days got longer, hotter and thicker with the dust of lorries and skips on the Caledonian Road). Writing Fire and Ice: a history of the Plutonist – Neptunist debate on the composition of the Earth’s crust and its evolution into modern geology.MoreLess
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