Haunts of coot, hern, swans, assorted waterfowl, and ancient enemy
Today I excursed off to The National Archives at Kew with little optimism in my heart that I would actually find anything relevant to my current research enterprise, but one has to do these things, and at least I could get an uptodate reader's ticket out of it.
Fortunately today is cooler than it has been of late.
I am not sure it was really such a great decision to take the London Overground to Kew Gardens rather than the Tube, but it was not a total disaster.
The water feature outside TNA did indeed feature a heron, coots, ducks and geese of various kinds, swans and gulls.
Obtained my reader card with reasonable expedition, acquired the items I had preordered, and decided that, those coming up blank, due diligence required that I order Another Thing, Just To Be Sure.
So as the system informed me that the current delivery time was approx 40 minutes I thought ?lunch, and exited the reading room, and as I did so, someone came up to me and said, are you [real name]?
And lo and behold, knock me down wiv a fevver, it was ancient antagonist from the job before the job I retired from, ever so keen to catch to up for Old Times Sake. Well, those neiges d'antan are now water under the bridge, and I will confess to a certain schadenfreude at the thought of my substantial publishing record, which may be somewhat niche, but is still of dimensions not, I depose, to be sneezed at. Not to mention my small and idiosyncratic media profile (had an outing with Sid last week: this may or not come to anything). Whereas they married - that was an unedifying saga into which I will not go - and I think have had a career as a freelance researcher ever since.
And lo, I was not moved to nostalgia.
Also bumped into A Distinguished Colleague slightly later on.
The mad social whirl of TNA. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2790295.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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