The results are finally in! The standard of entries in this year’s competition was exceptionally high. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did.

(Thesis: The Ascendancy of the civil funeral celebrant and their experience of funerals during COVID-19.)

As I wake, the cold light of dawn flits across my unopen eyes, still sleepy and swollen from yet another wild and sleepless night with you. A wry smile plays across my parched lips as even the time to drink water was wrested from me by your insatiable demands. Friends tell me that our relationship is unhealthy – we spend too much time together and when we are not together, I do nothing but talk about you or write you notes in my journal, you are my constant companion. The shape of you, the questions you bring to mind, the letters of your construction and how they dance across the screen with ease when we are in perfect unison even the arguments are filled with passion, always fully referenced of course.

I know it is not always perfect but that is my fault, mea culpa my skinny chaptered love. Sometimes I leave you alone for days on end. Our relationship then moves quietly and inexplicably to the realms of the perfect storm. I feel guilty and unworthy of you. I am nothing but a cuckoo in the nest of your intellect and your original thoughts. I procrastinate, I mumble the promise of focussed time and whisper sweet Pomodoros to you. I know you need more and you deserve 80, 000 times more than I sometimes give. But never doubt my passion for you, it burns as brightly as it did when we began this chapter together. When you doubt me look back at where we have been, index the trail that we have begun and we that we will finish and be bound together. Viva together my love.

 So, like a Wordle demanding to be solved let’s start our puzzle again, freshly entwined in this danse macabre. Let us laugh in the face of the doubts of others, the rising debt and our locked in lifestyle. You and I my thesis love, we will rise and fall together in our passionate ars morendi. Memento mori my love but fear not for I will be there at your final breath, like the full stop in Joyce’s Ulysses, it is inevitable but I will be there - your loving doctor.

Always yours,

Tracy Ward

XOXO