This is post number 400, apparently, and I tend to use such landmarks for reflection. Why should this be any different?

It's a particularly interesting time for such consideration, as I'm coming towards the end of my years as a full-time student, with various options being contemplated. By September, I'll need to find some alternative to the grant that has supported me for the last four years. My doctoral thesis won't yet be finished, though I hope to have made huge in-roads into that by then. I'm looking at economics jobs to be working at while I finish. This is broadly labelled the Safe Path.

As I write this, I'm also coming to the end of putting on my first show. I am immensely proud of it (particularly tonight, which was our best performance so far, and which also featured my parents in the audience - the first time they've seen me do any live comedy) and I feel like it might be the start of something good. I am enjoying collaborating with Andy, and feel we work well together. I also think I could be OK at this, and it is certainly more exciting that consultancy. However, it's performance art, and as such carries with it the prospects of poverty and failure. I think it would be fair to label this the Risky Path.

My plans depend greatly on my current circumstances - I'm going to be married in May, and I want a family. If I had been in a different situation, I'd give the Risky Path a proper go without hesitation - when you don't have more than yourself to think about, it is much easier to put up with a low income in the pursuit of a goal. But I'm not, and I don't regret that at all. Cath brings more more happiness than any career ever could.

But I don't want to squander any opportunities I have. I'm fortunate to have a number of useful talents, one of which could be comedy writing, another of which is a reasonably functioning and intellectually curious brain (which, happily enough, may be valued by a company with a good pay schedule). I do hope I can find a compromise - secure work to provide the sort of life I'd hope for my family (and which I was lucky to enjoy myself growing up) but continual efforts towards writing in between. You never know what might happen.