Well, after fretting about my dissertation for two years and working on it for a grand total of two and a half months, it’s finally almost all over: tomorrow I will head out to the university, hand it in, and be free.

The bulk of the writing was finished about two weeks ago, and since then I’ve been cutting out words (because it was, predictably, way too long), editing, proofreading, and endlessly reading and re-reading the thing, making sure every last i is dotted, every page numbered, every reference referenced, etc. And mostly, I’ve been worrying about treasury tags. Now, I am an avowed stationery freak. But in all my decades of prowling the aisles of office supply stores, I had never encountered a treasury tag. The first I heard of such a thing was when I started this master’s degree. All of my term papers were (theoretically) supposed to be bound together with treasury tags, so when my first paper rolled around, I turned to Google for guidance. Google showed me that treasury tags look like this, and when I finally figured out that you use them by punching holes in your paper and threading the tags through, I promptly went out and bought a heavy-duty stapler, because there was no way I was going to hand in a term paper held together with bits of string. I mean, what century is this? Fortunately, I got away with my rebellious stapler action for two years. But unfortunately, there was no getting around the treasury tag thing for the dissertation.

Now, the topic of treasury tags is excruciatingly boring (really!), so I will spare you the details of my office supply odyssey. Suffice it to say that your treasury tags need to be of a certain length in order to hold your paper together in the appropriate way - and since I was still a bit fuzzy on just what the “appropriate way” was, I had no idea what that “certain length” could be. And thus began a very looong process of trial and error (because God forbid I actually break down and ask someone how to do something) which involved me buying boxes upon boxes of treasury tags of various sizes from every single stationery shop in Brighton and Hove, trying to find the right fit. It was all a bit Goldilocks and the Three Million Treasury Tags, really, and I started to get a bit desperate and obsessed as the time to hand in my paper drew near and I still hadn’t figured out a way to hold all my precious pages together.

Finally, two days ago, at the last stationer’s I could think of, I got some tags which were somewhat too long, but which I figured were not so drastically wrong that it would prevent me from graduating. Last night I printed out my paper, this morning I made two more copies of it (I have to hand in three), and this afternoon I filled out my cover sheets, punched my holes, and threaded through my tags. And this evening, I gathered my stuff together for my trip to the university tomorrow, I tidied my desk a bit, and I ripped up the envelope from the university which had had my dissertation cover sheets in it - and promptly found three perfectly formed, perfectly sized treasury tags tucked into the bottom corner of it. They had been there all along, conveniently provided by the University of Sussex at the start of the summer to spare idiots such as myself any last-minute treasury tag trauma.

Sometimes you really, really just want to kick yourself. Hard.

Anyway, I now have way more treasury tags than anyone outside of an archive could possible have any use for. If anyone has any craft ideas, please let me know…