I’m more proud of the timber framed house that I built during that two and a half years; I’m a carpenter. It is much harder to build a house than write a philosophy doctoral thesis IMO. I should have just quit the PhD really but I had taken some scholarship money to pay the fees and the Commonwealth Scholarship Fund had paid for me and my family (wife and baby son) to move to the UK and were paying our rent too. During my Masters year I flew back to my home country for an operation that fixed my shoulder; not being able to practice my trade was the whole reason I had gone into academia in the first place. When I discovered the operation had worked so completely - I was told that this probably wouldn’t be the case - and I could work again I should have quit academia then and there. It was the guilt of taking the money and what I felt I owed to the academics from my home country who had written my scholarship references as well as a few people who I had met in Cambridge who were so encouraging to me that led me to stop building for six months and write my thesis. I really disappointed a few people when I ‘officially’ went back on the tools full time after the viva. I drive over to Cambridge a couple of times a year to give a couple of unpaid guest lectures to undergrads but I only really do this out of guilt too.