Decisions from the major funding bodies happen in July/August usually. Are you asking why it's taking so long, or why you haven't got funding? I wasn't 100% clear on your question.

Hahahaha! Given the food at conferences (ooh pastry! Wow, pastry again...and a pastry garnish! Divine!) you probably needed the laxatives.

I'm getting more and more obsessed with the Daily Mail: I read the Femail section approximately every other day. It's the same urge that sees me masochistically reading the BBC's Have Your Say pages and weeping for the fate of humanity.

@ phdgirlie: I urgently need to hear the story behind the laxatives!

Yeah, my overwhelming feeling is embarrassment on their behalf: lacking self-awareness, big time!

I always find myself doing frantic rewrites in the hotel room the night before. Mexico sounds ace, though! Maybe wait til you get there and see if you can do last minute revisions with a margarita?!

Well done! Let the research begin!

The last conference I went to they had managed to spell the word "university" wrong on my badge...

Mine:
best: Cotton bag from Aberdeen I got last week with a cool Centre for the Novel logo on it. I take it to the gym and look like a trendsetter!
weirdest: Mini calendar of Moscow State University by night, unusable as it is all in Russian and I speak no Russian (the conference was not even in Russia, but one of the delegates brought them for the packs).

I'd also like to know what to do with all the name-badges I am amassing (I'm thinking of making shoe clips out of them because I am thrifty).

Don't know if you've already posted this off now, but I found this article helpful:

Gump, Steven E.
Writing Successful Covering Letters for Unsolicited Submissions to Academic Journals
Journal of Scholarly Publishing - Volume 35, Number 2, January 2004, pp. 92-102

You can get it as an e-journal if your uni subscribes.

Just out of interest, if you're writing up are you not still paying fees and registered as a student? How can you sign on? I'm going into continuation this autumn, but I've been self-funded the whole time so it's really just more of the same for me.

I agree on the 4-6 hours. If I think about it, that's all I'd really do at work if you include tea breaks and lunches,desk-to-desk chatting and email checking or filing or other non-thinking activities.

That sounds painful I think academia often goes hand-in-hand with walking lots over cobbles! You should get industrial injuries compensation. Are you able to swim with it at the moment? That might help you loosen up without doing anything too high-impact.

In terms of fobbing him off over the next few days: have you been working on any publications of conference papers that would explain why you haven't been so productive on your thesis? As long as you've been doing something useful, your supervisor can't really complain too much.

What would your ideal outcome from the supervision meeting be? A plan for your thesis? A schedule of dates to meet your supervisor over the next year? A set of strict deadlines that you negotiate with your supervisor? If it's just laziness and you're not having any other problems, it sounds like you need to prove to your supervisor that you've got good intentions to do the work and have a plan in place on how and when you'll be doing things.