Thursday 12 March 2015

Quite a month...

...you know when you carefully plan something and then it all falls apart? Welcome to our failed experience of buying a house. After much wrangling the whole deal fell apart leaving us just a week to find a new place to live. For the first time in my life I think I used the word 'stressed'! Finally we found the perfect flat to rent and here I sit, one week after a rather rapid house move. Thanks to our gracious friends looking after our BBQ and extra large hammock, we managed to downsize from our big, rambling Victorian house to a two bedroom apartment. We absolutely love the new flat! It's pretty near the centre of Nottingham and overlooks the Trent. I don't think I will ever get sick of the sunrise through our 5th floor window or the novelty of having a dishwasher for the first time in three years. We've enjoyed living in Lincolnshire but it was time to move on.

So, what else happened in February/early March?

Well we went down to Cardiff to see the family (including our beautiful nephew), we've played an unusual amount of adventure golf and I've finished Alice Munro's short stories (which were amazing!).

I've travelled to Glasgow to speak at the University of Strathclyde and, as of two days ago, I finally have a copy of the new book in my hands. Yes friends, Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an introduction is out and available at all good bookshops! I'm pleased with the way it looks (EUP have done a great job) and hope that it will really help folks approaching this material for the first time.

And I won a British Academy grant to fund the British/Russian project which is amazingly exciting and means a good number of 2015 foreign trips. While I have won some small external grants before this is my first big one. In modern academia securing such grants is absolutely vital so I am chuffed to bits!

I've taken up swimming again for the first time in ages (very lovely) and said goodbye to my horse friends in Lincolnshire in the hope of new Nottingham-based horse friends.


So, currently I sit surrounded by boxes and the bed is still in its plastic wrapping but, I have to say, I feel extremely positive about the future here in our new city and am looking forward to exploring its parks, cinemas and art spaces over the next few months.

Whatever you are up to, I hope things are good with you.
CSW