Category: family
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Ravenscroft’s Brentford Catch
This afternoon I spent a thoroughly enjoyable hour with my family recording Thomas Ravenscroft’s catch about Brentford for a colleague who is going to give a talk there next month. The term catch is interchangeable with what is now the more familiar name, ’round’ – the word used to describe simple, popular songs like Frere…
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Lancaster Castle
Back in February, as part of the Embodiment and New Materialism conference in Lancaster, I was part of a drama workshop which took place in Lancaster Castle. It was somewhere that I’d been intending to visit for a long time, but had somehow never got around to it. So over the Easter break, we all…
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Summer holidays with history
After being rather unwell at the beginning of 2016, I decided that this summer I would spend as much time on holiday as I could. This was only made possible by the fact that we have access to a caravan that is currently in Oban, and we have a trailer tent, and it meant that…
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Final Countdown
This afternoon I had my mock viva, which was an interesting experience. It was reassuring, in that I survived and there was only one question that I felt I completely flunked. That said, there were several others that brought home to me the need to be certain of my own position, which of course is…
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Autumn Break
As we didn’t get much of a summer holiday, what with the small matter of a thesis to finish, we’ve just enjoyed a few wet and windy days in Dumfries. We got completely soaked through at Caerlaverock Castle, the only triangular castle in Britain, went on a boat trip to Threave Castle and saw red…
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Easter vacation
With the children on their Easter break, work over the last couple of weeks has been rather hit and miss. Mainly miss, to be honest. But I have spent some time working on a short historiographical piece about the relationship between ballads and news, which I’m happy to say is nearly finished. In the…
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Easter holidays
This week is the first week of my children’s Easter holiday, so I am juggling childcare with work. Cramming little bits of work into wherever it will fit isn’t easy and it certainly doesn’t allow for extended research or writing, for example. But there are little things that I can do. I went through a…
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Panel and Paper
This week has been half term, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing with my children. We’ve been on a couple of walks, one round Tarn Hows in the Lake District and one from Wrea Green on the Fylde, close to where I grew up. But this has also been the week…
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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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