Category: ballads
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Tidings of Good News
I was warned on Wednesday that my luck will have to run out eventually. That may not sound too much like good news, but the converse is, of course, that, in order to provoke the comment, things must be going relatively well at the moment. Work on the commonwealth chapter continues, with some quite major…
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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…
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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…
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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Christmas 2013
I’ve been rather unpredictable in my blog posts lately, mainly because I used to write them on Friday evenings as a review of what I’d done during the ‘normal working week’ (Show me a scholar who works a normal working week? No? No, me neither…), but since the summer the whole family has been going…
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Back on track?
You may have noticed that I didn’t post a blog last week. This was mainly down to the tremendous amount of stress I was under – several problems, nothing to do with my PhD and way beyond the scope of this blog, came together to make last week the week from hell. What few attempts…
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A Change is as Good as a Rest?
This week has been rather different to normal. Foolishly, at 8am on Monday morning I was at Preston station in the hope of travelling to London, but the storm rather got in the way. Instead of arriving in London at 10, it was lunchtime when I got there, so I missed a few hours’ work…
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The Way Through the Woods
Yesterday I met my supervisors to Discuss the Chapter. I took a list of questions and comments, a piece of work on some manuscript miscellanies that I’ve been studying and some examples of ballads that fitted some of the categories I’d been working on. Between us, I think we’ve managed to find an approach that…
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