when i have long stressful periods, i do tend to neglect my diet a bit. simply because i don't have time to do much shopping, i eat less fresh stuff. what i do to counteract that, is that i drink smoothies and pure fruit juices. in one shopping session, you can get enough to last you two weeks, unlike fresh fruit and veg which would go bad in that time.
i also make sure that if i eat one proper meal a day, it's breakfast. cereal with milk and yogurt mixed up in it is always a good bet, plus those juices.

simuzosha, it depends on who your funder is. british funding sources in general won't pay you even maternity leave, as your funding is not a wage but a studentship. you are thus not entitled to anything. either you keep working full time on your PhD (and keep being paid) or you interrupt your PhD AND your studentship in order to take it up again later. you could try not interrupting your studentship and hope that you will finish within the funded time slot anyway, but if you don't finish, you won't get extensions - maternity is not a cause for claiming extensions (only for claiming interruptions). that's what i understood, anyway, maybe others have better knowledge. at the end of the day, it is up to your funder, so check with them (check the "contract" you signed).

hey piggles,
it would tarnish your name more if you'd "pretend" to go ahead with the competition and pull out later. your current institution will then not be able to nominate anybody else and will thus lose a chance of getting a funded student. if you tell them now, they will be fine with that, as there is still time to let someone else (a runner up for example) have a go. if you "pretend" to go ahead, you are also cheating that runner up of their chance. that seems quite egoistic and unfair to me. also, your exams will be graded anonymously and the department's likes/dislikes of you should not affect your grades.

on the other hand, i think you should try every chance to get funding. ESRC open competition is very competitive, it is not very likely that you will win funding. next year neither. so if you pull out now and then next year don't get it, your unfunded. that's quite a risk.

my uni has it's own funding for full 3-year PhDs. you can't apply to that if already enrolled.
you can apply for year-to-year uni funds. they will usually not go very far though and you never know if you'll keep getting it next year.
the IFUW funds PhDs that are beyond the beginning stage. the welcome trust does not - apply before you start or all is lost.
myself, i started self-funded, got some school funding for the second year fees and finally some significant money from my home country research foundation for the next 16 months - then i'll have to see again.
so if you start unfunded and go from there, you're likely to be spending a lot of time on funding applications, living of a patchwork of funding and there will likely be times when you're out of money. but it's doable.

you can apply to ESRC while in your first year, for funding for years 2-4. don't know if that applies to other RCs. some departments won't let you apply for ESRC if you are already in your first year, but from the part of the ESRC it is possible. as an EU student you would qualifiy for a "fees only" reward. again a reason why some departments would prefer UK students above you, as they would simply get more money, overall.

mokey, my optician explained that they keep a range of budget frames, and for the lenses, it depends on the correction you need. i need -10/-9, so he said he could get me a cheap pair of glasses for about 40 pounds. and that's a small village optician.

their are a few reasons why it gets so much more expensive: with that sort of correction, standard glass lenses will be _very_ thick. special (expensive) glass will help keep them thinner. also, they will make your eyes look very small. you can minimize that by using extra small frames. ah, but that excludes the budget ones.

so, yes, you can get cheap glasses, even from standard opticians - but maybe they won't look good. some opticians have told me "with your eyes, you can't get the cheap glasses" but what they actually meant was "if you get the cheap glasses, it won't look good".

my mum did a proper diet (weightwatchers meetings and all) last year. she also went back to dyeing her hair, which she had displayed in proud grey for a while. overall, now she appears about 15 years younger. in fact, she could easily be my older sister.
i always thought i'd refuse to engage in our society's cult of youth. now i'm not that sure anymore.

on another note: how do your partners cope with ageing? and how do you deal with him/her growing noticeably older? my partner is seriously worried about going bald. buying tonics etc. but he doesn't like to talk about it. i find it reassuring that i'm not the only one growing older

piglet, i just turned 32 too (well, a month ago)

all i know is that 4 stars means "national competitiveness" and 5 stars means "international competitiveness". i've also heard that in some cases they won't give a department 5 stars even though they have all the output and stuff, just because it is new/recently established - gotta keep some incentive there...

i've also found i can't get ANY reduction on the costs of glasses/contacts from the NHS, even when i had no income at all, due to living with a partner who has an income. it is assumed that this partner will come up for such costs, i guess. don't like how that pushes you into dependence - i'd rather be dependent on the state than on any individual (male) person.

anyway, on the evening before my 30th birthday, one of my teeth broke off. since then i've realised that i'm truly getting older. i'm already half blind and a quarter deaf (so to say), so i'm looking forward to some great technological innovations - or else, long years of deafness and blindness. ageing is one of the "facts of life", i guess.

i guess that if you manage to get a post-PhD-job, then at least you will be paid for your work. as a PhD student you get insult added to injury in that although you are working hard and stressed, you don't get rewarded and your work does not get acknowledged. (ok that's an over-generalisation, i hope you get my point)

although you might be doing nearly exactly the same things day in and out, it's just a better feeling to be able to tell your friends and relatives that you are working, have a job, that somebody is paying you to do what you were educated to do, what you have studied so long to do. somebody is acknowledging your work (at least with money). then it can't be totally useless, can it?

for my masters which took a long time, i just told everyone "in two years". and then (sometimes) i added "you know, i say that everytime some asks, as it is such a dumb question, so you get a dumb answer"

so what to do?
i, too, can recommend "the elements of style" - that book was given to me by my supervisor on my first day, and i have passed it on to several other students since.
most importantly: write, write, write, and then write again.
for me it helps to have a clear idea in my mind of who i am writing for. a person - sometimes my granny, sometimes a specific friend. sometimes that is more important than knowing what i am writing about!
i have to say i also found the slides from a "how to write essays" course offered to our undergrads, and available online, very helpful; because they helped to think about my writing analytically rather than emotionally (frustration etc.)

mokey, i totally understand where you are coming from. i was extremely frustrated about my writing when i moved to the UK and started my PhD. although i considered myself to be a good writer with excellent style, some finesse and subtlety, and always wrote easily, i just couldn't do it anymore - and just because of switching from German to English, both of which i consider to be my mother tongues. people kept telling me that my writing was fine, but i was always dissatisfied.

mokey, i think tricky and olivia's advice combined would work. the problem is that while they are being loud, they don't notice. but if you were having a fight with your partner or kids, and then suddenly you'd hear loud music from your neighbours, you'd realise instantly that they are probably hearing you, too. and you'd shut up or at least tone down, no?
i mean, how are they to really understand how loud they appear to you through the walls, if they never hear anything from you?
so if you moved there for the quiet, maybe you need to spend some effort to educate your neighbours!

Error404, you might very well encounter internal biases and pettiness wherever you go. they are obviously not very visible immediately but that doesn't mean they aren't there.

however, you having been at the same place for all your university life might make some issues more accenuated. perhaps a new place would let you start afresh, instead of lugging along the whole baggage from how people have known you for the past 5 years.
but then, at a new place, people might have biases based simply on where you are from, what you look like, the first impression you make on them, rather than from their experience of you in the last x years. both sorts of biases are problematic.
and going to a new place has other costs, benefits and disadvantages that you'd need to take into account.