Home

Blog Posts

  • Finally, a good week!

    After a couple of dodgy days at the beginning, the week has definitely ended on a high.  I spent quite a lot of time at the beginning of the week consolidating the ideas that my trip to the British Library generated and I wrote a thousand words in a couple of hours, bringing together my…

  • The British Library

    I spent this week working in the British Library, looking at lots of old manuscripts and some printed music.  I’ve been looking for ballads in commonplace books and found some really interesting stuff.  Yesterday I looked at the two oldest known pieces of English sheet music, which was amazing.  Highlight of the week, though, had…

  • Dread Again

    [I’m told that for some people this dangled mid-sentence and never got to the point I wanted to make, so I’m trying it again]   It  has been a relatively quiet week.  I spent two days working on my chapter, determined to get something that vaguely resembled a draft ready before I went to London. …

  • Fibre optic cranes and writing the common weal

    I don’t have a lot to tell, this week (after all, it’s only a couple of days since I last posted) so I thought I’d just share the good news that I’d managed to write a bit of my common weal chapter and then post some photos of some of my favourite birds from today’s…

  • 2014

    The year of big, scary life changes.  The year in which my husband is likely to retire and in which I need to become the main breadwinner for the family.  The year in which, 20 years after starting at the University of Manchester the first time round, I should earn the title of doctor. So…