Friday 19 May 2017

The question is 'what happened to April?'

So, here I am in the middle of May. When I wrote 'write a blog post' on my to-do list this week, I imagined I had written something profound(!) in April. As it turns out I haven't updated since March. I honestly don't know where the time goes.

To fill you in on goings on since my last post then: it has been an unusually quiet couple of months really. This has been great because work has been extremely busy: end of term, marking, grant applications, furthering some new projects, taking over as the new Secretary of the British Association of Modernist Studies. I also seem to have been involved in a million workshops, training days and committee meetings. So, all in all, outside of work things have been peaceful.

Easter was a rather lovely three week gap in usual university busyness and provided enough time for me to crack out a couple of grant applications (one already successful, one submitted today), spark off a couple of new potential projects (including one with a new friend in Sweden), and complete the final faffy bits and pieces for our forthcoming journal collection entitled 'Raymond Williams and Performance'. We also managed to get over to sunny Stockport to see the family and enjoy the planes at Manchester Airport with our nephew. Shout out to my dad, long time committed reader of this blog, who has been a touch under the weather recently. We had a jolly bank holiday at Lord Byron's house Newstead Abbey and I've enjoyed a couple of trips down to London for a BAMS (yes that is the acronym we go by) exec meeting and to give an invited lecture to the great students at Drama Studio London. We also enjoyed a wonderful gig from the ever-mighty Steve Hackett last week at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham.

Today is a finishing off day though, frankly, so much is dependent on other people fitting in their bits of various jigsaws that is has ended up being quite reactive. But things have been done. Once the marking is out of the way (we are nearly there now) it is time to throw some things in a bag and jet off to lovely California for a few weeks of sunshine, great food and country music on the radio. We are looking forward to taking my great in-laws to America for the first time. This means that we'll be missing the Election fall out which makes me rather happy but is a disappointment for politically-minded D. Then we are on to a summer of great, exciting projects. I have set some strong, challenging objectives for the summer period, and am looking forward to working on two new journal articles and two conference papers. This is book-ended in September by our first trip to Japan. Extremely excited by that prospect!

So, have a wonderful start to the summer friends wherever you are in the world.
CSW