The infamous paper on pan-Albanian nationalism is at last off my desk and into the next stage of the publication cycle. It’s been hanging around my neck since I started this job in May 2002. The basic problem was that we didn’t have a full-time member of staff in the field writing it, so it bounced between a part-timer who is normally based in London and me for almost two years. But I spent most of the last month filling in the gaps, notably writing an entire section on the Albanian National Army. And now it’s in the hands of my colleagues for review, and hopefully will get published next week.

Basically the way you get around a project you have been procrastinating (can one use “procrastinate” as a transitive verb?) is to think how good you will feel when it has been done. And that’s how I got this one out the door. At least, to the extent that it is out the door…