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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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Brain cell
GIANTmicrobes | Brain Cell (Neuron). If anyone should feel a wish to buy me a last minute Christmas present, this would be perfect. I have a ‘brain cell’ mug that I’ve had since I was an undergraduate, and this would be its perfect postgraduate companion.
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Christmas Break
I decided at lunchtime today that I’m stopping now for Christmas. I’ve still got all the presents to wrap and a lot of sorting out to do before my Christmas visitors arrive, so having got my last self-imposed deadline out of the way yesterday, I am going to give myself some time off. I may…
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Back to writing
Yesterday, rather unexpectedly, I sat down and started writing again. I was overcome with an urge to sest my thoughts down on paper (well, computer screen) as I read the first publication in a ballad flyting from 1540. I wrote down what I thought about it, how I interpreted it and the background to is…
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This week
Most of this week I have spent analysing the extant sixteenth century ballads. I have a big spreadsheet with the names of the ballads in one column and all sorts of topics and features listed across the top. I have comments in some of the boxes, and others are just ticked off. It’s a slow…
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This is an interesting blog post, and confirms something I had long suspected. There is another angle that the author hasn’t considered – the need for academics in some fields to travel for long periods to conduct primary research is hardly conducive to a ‘normal’ family life. I already have my children. In fact, if…
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