I knew I hadn’t posted much lately, but I didn’t realise that there had been quite so little for so long… I’ve got lots to catch up on, then. So this post will be a brief rundown of what I’ve been up to, and there will, I hope, be more on many of these points later.

First off, of course, I’ve been doing lots of teaching at Lancaster. I’ve had my Making Modern Britain course, my own special subject (Fake News or Fact? Ballads and News Culture in Early Modern England), the MA core course, and a PGCert distance learning module on Local and Regional Economies and Societies, as well as my PhD and dissertation students to supervise and the mentoring on the Lancaster Castle MOOC last autumn. I’m just in the process of marking the 3rd year dissertations and beginning to supervise the second years, who are working on a wide range of topics from Elizabeth I to 20th century Ireland and even Top of the Pops… nothing there to make me feel old at all! I’m also taking on some supervision of research projects for the PGCert, so that will be interesting.

As well as all my hourly paid teaching, I’m still working as the Social History Society Administrator, so I’m currently up to my eyeballs preparing for their conference at Lancaster in July. This year it’s going to be in person, so there’s lots of organising to be done.

A few weeks ago I went to the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Dublin, which was a really great few days away catching up with people I haven’t seen for years, and meeting up with some others that I previously only knew from Twitter – and it was nice to see people in the flesh again after lockdown. I was talking about my Pilgrimage of Grace project, which meant I had to get it out and dust it off again for the first time in probably much more than 6 months, so it was good to get my teeth into a bit of research.

Back in March I also published a new article, ‘Popular Propaganda: John Heywood’s Wedding Ballad and Mary I’s Spanish Match’, in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, which I’m really pleased about. The whole process of publishing with them was lovely.

And on the subject of publications, I’m finally able to go out and about talking about John Balshaw’s Jigge – I’ve got a number of talks lined up over the next few months, not least one in Brindle itself, which is really exciting.

In other, non-academic, news, I’ve joined the local community choir, the Valley Singers, and I’ll be singing my first public soprano solo in donkey’s years at their concert in May! I’ve also finally gone back to Tae Kwon Do, after lockdown and a leg injury got in the way for two years!!!

I’m really hoping that over the next few weeks I manage to find the time to write a little more about these things!