Sally is bored of her writing tone. She has to talk like this all day – though she gets away with a livelier style whenever she can.

Professor Mitty obviously was enjoying freedom from the constraint of academic writing with his daft little bit of nonsense. She had kept his work from the writing group, whilst ensuring he had not hung on to hers – that really would be Pearl Before Swine.

I shall analyse it, Sally is now speaking directly and verbatim. Does he think that making words appear to odd ways on the page is creativity? whoosh zoom                                                             the night sky lights up the florid thoughts of the                                                                         zzz zzz

Is he trying to be neo Lewis Carroll? No doubt there’ll be some intellectual excuse for this – he’ll have to be neo somebody! He’ll say he has a relationship with words on the page, scatter–ology or some daft made up phrase to infer a thousand layers if pretentious meanings.

I like my anal phase comment. I think he’s having a I Really Ought to Retire Crisis, and is being, if not rebirthed, going back to his early twenties to the writing career he’s always wanted but ran out of money so he stayed in uni which he thought was the next best thing. He shared this with me over a glass of sherry in his living room, which I once would’ve told you was a precious day, but being a writer’s writer you’d have perceived that and would prefer not to be told. He’s forgotten how to write after all those years of sensible – no dull – prose, telling all his students to write the same five chapters in their thesis. How can he bear to be an examiner and read so much of the same? Sometimes I think we his students were little elves to his Santa. He had a big project and hoped that our work would help his. Our thesis titles got clipped to be ever more like his research field. How apt that I mistyped rehash for research. But as our supervisor, he held sway so that we didn’t see over time how far our proposals were stretched. Over 6 years, he probably thought I couldn’t trace such a trajectory. But I did.