Bluebell season

I like spring. Well, I like autumn too, but spring has the flowers! First the white ones - snowdrops. Than the yellow ones - daffodils and primroses. Than the blue ones. As a child, I remember ‘going bluebelling’. We did it every year, with my Gran. This was before the Wildlife and Countryside Act of…

Signs that you are getting old

Life as a retiring academic continues much as it has been. The book I have been writing since shortly after I retired is due to be published in September, but now the US/Canada rights have been sold (hooray) there's more work needed on what we had assumed was the completed manuscript (not so hooray, but…

Macbeth at the RSC: the Red Finger Club?

One of my A levels was English Lit. I was encouraged to apply to do the subject at university but I felt I’d had enough – if I studied it any more, I’d cease to enjoy it. So this is never going to be a theatre review blog, although I see a lot of theatre,…

The joy of bookmarks

When I was a Saturday girl at the local library, I found some pretty bizarre bookmarks, most notably a rasher of (raw) bacon. I never need to get to this level, as I have literally dozens of bookmarks to use. I buy many of my books second-hand, and from time to time select some to…

Church and the new normal

What does church look like here, now, two years into the pandemic?

How to reverse pre-diabetes

As the title suggests, this is going to read like a smug post. In fact, I feel more relieved than smug, and I offer it here in case it encourages others. As regular readers know, back in the summer I had blood tests which by chance revealed that I was pre-diabetic. My GP advised me…

Sugar, sugar…

Sugar cubes: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Würfelzucker -- 2018 -- 3582” / CC BY-SA 4.0 When you reach the age of 60, the UK NHS offers you some exciting experiences - or at least that was the case before the pandemic. There's a one-off general health check, which wasn't very encouraging about my body weight, but at that point I didn't…

The first time: how to publish in academia

Last week I was asked by someone relatively new to the academic game how they could start publishing. This being 2021, I rapidly realised that I should ask Twitter before answering. I wasn't sure how far my own experience, back in the 1980s, was typical in Arts and Humanities subjects, let alone how it would…

The glamour of the academic life

Recently, on Twitter, there was a very entertaining account of a nightmare experience of giving a paper by Duncan Wilson, a historian at the University of Manchester. Just remembering the time I gave a talk in a uk university, 3 people turned up and 1 fell asleep after 10 min. They then told me there…

Shedding stuff

How do you get rid of someone's belongings in a way that's appropriate and respectful (and even helpful!)?