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  • Welcome to 2013

    And so a new year begins. I have spent a lot of it so far cataloguing ballads, to the extent that my analysis spreadsheet is now so enormous that I am probably going to have to take it to the university print services department to get it printed out – I guess it will be…

  • Let it snow

    I’ve just discovered it can snow on my blog until 4 January.  It’s irresistible!

  • Back to work

    So I took Boxing Day off as well as Christmas Day, and went back to work yesterday by reading Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Thomas Cromwell.  I can’t say I was impressed, not least because I came across three of my pet hate ‘must have’s (that is, “s/he must have thought/been/looked etc”) by the bottom of…

  • It’s Christmas!

    I’m taking a break from the madness to say merry Christmas. I have a house full of family, five children playing games together on my living room floor; lots of food on the table and a kitchen full of cooking smells. Christmas, it seems, starts here.

  • Apocalypse now?

    I’m sorry, I’ve got to say this: It’s twaddle. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on pre-conquest Latin American culture and the impact of the Spaniards, particularly on the Aztecs, but they believed that the world had ‘ages’ and no Mayan said the world as a whole would end tonight. Apart from which, whose ‘midnight’ are…