I've got through quite a lot of stuff (though there is still stuff up there to go through) and boy, there are things there that I'd forgotten I had kept, going back many decades.
Temps Perdu Recherched, srsly. Some things I have just filed and not poked into, as yet.
Though I have been able to throw away, or, as we archivists put it, weed, quite a ( Read more... )

I looked at this and was going: and this is a desirable selling point???
Homes for sale near a football stadium - in pictures
And they all look great, but the lovely pictures exclude crowds of footie fans...
Living in an adjacent area to one of these, our evening travel plans, in the days when, in yesteryears gone by when we went out on Saturday ( Read more... )

Radical Object: Fergusson Vaginal Speculum: The speculum is associated with racialised and state-sponsored gynaecological violence through the work of Marion Sims and the Contagious Diseases Acts and through instances of compulsory inspections of incarcerated women in recent times. But, the duck billed version was also allied to liberatory ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Let the Record Show, which is very good, both as an account of ACTUP during the years in question and what it achieved and how and the reasons why things began to fall apart or at least, began to go in different directions, and as a model for thinking about other activist campaigns and the shifts that take place and that there ( Read more... )

I was delving into my slightly fuzzy memory of an intrepid ?Victorian ?Edwardian lady, having just been reading something which I thought was rather dissing on the lady travellers of the pre-Great War era -
And by a process, which was that she wrote a book which included Outcast Siberian Lepers in the title, I discovered that her name was Kate ( Read more... )

Come across, via idly surfing just now, somebody reporting another person expressing bogglement that they were Nepali-Nigerian, and because those places were so geographically distant, before this present time with modern travel and so on, could not have happened, wow, how weird.
Hmmm.
Okay, Nepal was not actually part of the British Empire, but ( Read more... )

A day or so ago I came across a Twitter thread exploring the horrors that might eventuate from time-travel tourism - having to take the equivalent of Ryanair to get to your chosen epoch, vast crowds in Renaissance Florence and other hotspots -

So I thought, wouldn't you then get the other thing, the whole 'the Sun-King's Versailles is the new ( Read more... )

Actually, what this was was delving into a rather over-stuffed and chaotic cupboard to ascertain a) the state of my supply of the preferred brand of earplugs and b) the extent of the supply of samples of moisturiser.
I habitually purchase those products which are meant to retard the ravages of time upon the complexion in the same local department ( Read more... )

Last time I traveled abroad: when I went to the conference in Granada in February this year.
Last time I slept in a hotel: Malaga airport in February (the conference accommodation was university lodgings).
Last time I flew in a plane: Coming back from Granada.
Last time I took a train: Returning from Gatwick to Victoria as part of the ( Read more... )

I am coming around to a consideration that I am officially An Old and in a risk group, though only by reason of age and not for any concomitant reason of health, and therefore that international travel is probably not going to be the most sensible of ideas in the foreseeable future.
I note that An Institution with which I have some association has ( Read more... )