It’s been an eventful week. On Monday evening, I was privileged to be able to take my talk about John Balshaw to Brindle, where he wrote his Jigge in the mid-17th century. It was a fabulous evening – I travelled in thunderstorms and the sunset on the way home was amazing. The talk seemed to go down really well (as my fiend put it, I seem to have been quite big in Brindle), and I was really pleased by the interesting questions from the audience. I’m now looking forward even more to thinking about how we could go about putting the Jigge on in Brindle.

Then on Thursday I did a second talk, this time online for the Tudor Music Forum organised by Samantha Arten. It was something a bit different, because rather than talking about my research, I was drawing on my experience as an editor of the Historical Association’s members’ journal, The Historian; my teaching experience and my role working with Sovereign Education, to talk about writing for non-academic audiences. I started by giving them my top tips, and then we opened a really interesting discussion, in which several of us bemoaned the lack of publishing space for interested, intelligent audiences who might nevertheless not be specialists. Yes, there are a few isolated examples, but they aren’t valued by the academy and they aren’t easy to find a publisher for…

Anyway, I’ve spent much of the rest of the week marking. I’m now up to date, having marked my feasibility studies, PGCert essays, and an MA thesis, so it’s been quite a varied week.