It's been an eventful life! I suppose the central, pivotal event in it was failing my PhD at Cambridge, not once, but twice. Read up on Colin McCabe and the Faculty of English at Cambridge if you're interested in the background to that. From my point of view, I can just sum it up by saying if you're not on either side in a civil war you can expect to get shot down by both sides! But, as the Dalai Lama says, we learn more from our failures than from our successes. I put academia in the bottom drawer and spent the next few years leading a bohemian kind of life, mostly in the south of Spain. I think I learned more from that than I had from my years as a university student. Gradually, though, I drifted into teaching, and hence back into academia. When, at the age of 40, I got a job at a Japanese university - and married a Japanese woman for good measure - I started to dig out that stuff from the bottom drawer and rework it into papers for publication. Bit by bit, I started to become something of an expert in the field, and when I got a sabbatical year I dedicated it to writing a monograph. When it came out I packed it, and all my other peer-reviewed work, into a cardboard box, in triplicate, and sent it off to Cambridge for consideration for a PhD. In 2013, 40 years after first registering as a PhD student, I finally got that PhD from Cambridge! The monograph (the book on early modern attitudes towards suffering listed in my profile) played a major part in that. In April 2018 I retired, and now spend my time doing pretty much exactly what I want. I walk the dog, take trips to interesting places, go to the hot spring - and, above all, create videos for my new online educational channel, "Ano sensei! Educational videos", on YouTube (which you really should subscribe to, 'cos it's a gas!).