ireland and back again

We’re back from Ireland. It was cold and wet, and there was at least one memorably frozen picnic, but we had quality time with family, and lots of tea and chocolate, and that’s what counts, no? We managed to fit in both the South – with dear friends in their amazing Dun Laioghaire house overlooking the harbour – and the North – mainly Belfast with trips up the Ards peninsula, out along the coast to Castlewellan and Newcastle, and a visit to Greyabbey, where we had coffee and brownies on a bench among the silent, beautiful ruins.

We had never really noticed before how friendly people are in Ireland. Probably because we’d only ever really travelled there from the North of England, and from South Africa, where people are pretty friendly too. This time, coming from Cambridge, the Irish seemed positively effusive. People greet others on the path, and shop assistants are happy to have a chat and to look you in the eye.

And then we came back to Cambridge.

But we’re in a beautiful, spacious, modern house this time. You can keep the oldy-worldy character of those Victorian houses. Give me these huge windows, the bamboo floors and the two little gardens full of flowers. Ok, so it’s rained every day since we got back (the wettest April since, well, forever) and the gardens are sodden, but the little woodland scene from the landing is cheering and the house is warm and dry. My Pilates class has been moved to a different college, which happens to be three minutes’ walk from our new abode, there’s an Aldi up the road (good for cheap groceries even if they are brands you have never heard of), and the city is ten minutes’ walk away. There’s no tv, but there is a DVD player/projector and we’ve been bingeing on The Wire, which we’ve never seen, every night on the big white wall.

And the writing is ticking along. Best of all, just six weeks or so until we’re home again.

cleaning up, moving on

It’s been a week of April showers, and it’s been cold enough to see your breath most mornings, but winter still seems a long way away and I’m very grateful. It feels now as if winter was another country. A rubbish country, where the food is bland and the weather is crap and the people are nasty. A country where you get mugged outside the airport and your hotel has hair in the bath and stains on the mattress. The Foreign Office advise against all non-essential travel there.

But now it’s spring, it’s bright, the days are long, the trees are pink and white, and those heavy bumblebees are floating drunkenly above the flowers. Our time in this house has come to an end. We leave tomorrow to see friends and family on the Emerald Isle, and we’re taking trains and a boat to get there. It takes about 12 hours, but equipped with bacon sandwiches, a flask of tea, and several megabytes of freshly downloaded podcasts, I think we’ll make it.

Being the good tenants we are, we cleaned the house to within an inch of its life this week. Even the mysterious dark blue dust that collects on every surface every day (old carpet fibres under the gappy wooden floors?) was banished. One annoyance was the tiny fleck of chocolate on one of the oatmeal sofa cushions, which we’d sponged away, only to leave a dark tide-mark around the wet patch. Oops. So we put all the cushion covers through the washing machine. The first wash just moved the dirt around and made them blotchy. The second wash faded the blotches, but they were still visible. The third wash brought them up the colour of pale shortbread. Beautiful. Except that now, tucked snugly back into the sofa, they look as if they came from a different piece of furniture. They’re just too freshly laundered for a lived-in sofa. Oops. Again.

There have been some wonderful days in the last few weeks, like Easter Sunday’s trip to East London.  We booked a train trip on a whim, and it was one of those serendipitous days when everything comes together and there’s decent weather, fabulous food, long strolls, and  new discoveries. We went from Liverpool St to Old Spitalfields market, had some soft and sweet char-siu steamed buns and bought a scrap of leather to make an ipod case. (Good intentions.) We walked to Brick Lane and bought salt beef beigels, browsed the markets, browsed the bookshop, and then crossed Tower Bridge and got a bus to Greenwich. More markets, a walk under the river to the Isle of Dogs, a bit of sitting by the river, sheltering under an umbrella while we drank tea from our flask and ate our beigels.  It was high tide, and there were boats to watch.

So there have been some lovely days – the kind you put on your Facebook status so everyone thinks you have a brilliant life. But it’s also been an intense few weeks of work, with a certain amount of stress and general feelings of inadequacy, and it’s good to be going away.When we come back there will be two months left over here, and we’ll be in a new house, with a different part of town to explore. There’s also a big garden, and with any luck quite a bit of summer sun. I’m thinking Pimms and lemonade, and a sprig of mint. I’m thinking many more Facebook-status-worthy days.

bloggity-blog

I haven’t been the most regular blogger, but the experience of putting little paragraphs of thought to screen and sending them out to make their way in the world has been fun. Creating this, my first blog, has also led me to think about the uses and the potential of blogging. I already know that blogs serve different purposes for different people – they make money for some, they are therapy for others. They are diaries, teaching tools, research dissemination tools, photo galleries, archives, news sites, recipe collections, and many more things I don’t have time to think of.

I understand why so many people blog. I also understand why more people don’t blog, and why more people don’t blog more. The concept for this one was easy to generate – it’s a blog for people who already know me and might want to read a little about my experiences on sabbatical – but it can be difficult to think of a central idea to hold a series of blog posts together. And more than that, blogs are difficult to sustain. The recommendation seems to be to blog at least four times a week to generate interest and retain readers. Happily, I’m not too bothered about that as this is more like a friendly chat every few days (or weeks!) than a marketing tool for me or my product. I don’t mind if a new post gets three hits or a hundred and three. But if I did create a blog that was more than the online equivalent of an corridor chat, would I be able to keep up the momentum?

I like the idea of a blog that pulls together some of the work I do, and that links in to some of the blogs I read and the ideas I find enticing. Perhaps AcademicalSabbatical will lead to something more substantial in the future. I do think blogs have great potential for academic work, although the tension between writing regular posts and writing those crucial journal articles is a difficult one to manage, unless you wake up with a stock of more words in you every day than I do. If you’re a researcher and you blog (or you don’t) I’d love to know how you think about the uses of blogging. Drop me a line and let me know.

spring!

Blossom in the trees, warm sunshine, and the first picnic of the season in a field by the river, with crusty bread, ham and baby beetroot. We have had some blissfully mild days, and there is a promise in the air of many more. Even though the winter wasn’t a harsh one by any standards, this emergence from the short gloomy days of January and February into bright mornings and long orangey-blue twilights, feels like the very definition of newness. The thing about being in the North – and, in fact, in the very place from which we English-speaking South Africans draw so much of our cultural knowledge – is that annual celebrations fit their place in the year. Christmas feels Christmassy, Easter feels Eastery. The lambs, bunnies, eggs and fluffy chicks all seem fully appropriate to the slowly awakening earth and the newly welcoming city spaces, where it’s suddenly pleasant to linger.

A few days ago we had one of those days that are just meant for playing outside. Fortunately we had a new toy to play with, a 20p Android app called Paper Camera, which lets you take pictures that look like pencil sketches, pastel drawings, or paintings. For less than the cost of a KitKat Chunky, we had an entire day of entertainment. Here’s a taste.

day trips and days off

There’s a lull in the writing today. A draft of the current paper went off to my mentor yesterday, so I think I’m entitled to take a day to enjoy the sunshine (yes, really!), browse the bookshops, stroll by the river, and sip a chocamochafrappachino.

Last week, you may remember, also had a free day. A leap day, that is, which is obviously an extra day, to be spent on treats not work. We took the train to Ely, a little town near Cambridge named after its eel industry. It also has a huge Norman cathedral (hm, now where have I seen one of those before?) and a house where Thomas Cromwell used to live, which now doubles as the Tourist Information Centre and has a lifesize resin model of Cromwell and his wife outside. Very tasteful.

The cathedral looked impressive from the outside, as cathedrals tend to do, and when we discovered it would cost £7 each just to look around, we chose to enjoy that imposing exterior all the more. There was, however, a free exhibition of Quaker tapestries in one of the cathedral halls. Not only were the tapestries lovely, they were in a hall that (we later discovered) is apparently one of the most attractive in the cathedral. It had a gorgeous, glowing Mary – all fabulous hips and flying golden hair – that was like no other statue of the Virgin I’ve ever seen.

Probably the best thing about Ely is that people were nice. I keep harping on about the coldness of Cambridge people, but when shop assistants smiled at us, and people actually greeted us on the riverside path, it felt like we’d re-entered a space of humanity. I don’t always need friendly chats from strangers, but an acknowledgement of shared existence is generally welcome.

Not only did we escape Cambridge for Ely last week, we also went to London for a mini-break. We saw family and friends, and had some fabulous sunny walks through the woods and by the Thames. We drank beautiful coffee, ate some memorable lime and coconut ice-cream, and talked and talked and talked as if we’d been starved of meaningful social contact for weeks. Apologies to those whose ears were left ringing.

Happy international women’s day to everyone who is or knows a happy international woman!

warming up

Oops, where did the last two weeks go? So much for at least a weekly update. Perhaps it’s a good thing – it means that writing energy has been channelled into articles instead of blog posts. Well, into the one article that I was beginning to think was really just so many thousands of words of nonsense, until a few puzzle pieces fell into place today and I started to believe in it again. Let’s hear it for non-representational theory everybody. Give me an N! Give me an O! Give me an… oh never mind.

In other news, Cambridge had a very balmy 17C day yesterday, more than double the average for the time of year. It was slightly eerie to feel hot in the sun in February, and to see people in sleeveless dresses sitting out on the lawns with the trees still bare. But it was also lovely to rediscover the simple pleasure of the air on your skin. I realised that in the cold I’m always, unconsciously, slightly tense, as if protecting myself against some vague, anonymous threat. All those layers, shutting your body against the wind, shutting your door against the cold outside. Quick changes from clothes to pyjamas, huddling under duvets, cuddling hot water bottles… The sudden heat of yesterday brought a welcome relaxation from all that.

And in the garden, purple crocuses burst out into the warmth. There’s a little frost forecast for the weekend, but the days are lengthening, our moods are lifting, and it feels as if Spring is almost here. I wonder if Cambridge-dwellers might start acknowledging each other on the street as the weather warms up. No, that’s probably too much to hope for.

watching the english

Finding a place to live has given me headaches at various times during this sabbatical. Rental costs in both London and Cambridge are famously stratospheric and transport, if you don’t live near the city centre, is either costly but plentiful (London) or costly and sparse (Cambridge). Of course you can cycle in both places, especially Cambridge, but that costs money too – £30/month to rent or about twice that much for a bottom-of-the-barrel secondhand bike from the market stall, the kind that if it were a horse would have been made into glue some time ago.

Weighing up transport versus affordable rent versus a furnished place versus flexibility to allow us to travel a little at the end of our tenancy in our current house, we finally found a place that looked suitable and arranged to view it on Friday. It was a 20-minute bus ride from the city, in a village with a (frozen) duckpond, up a cobbled footpath, beside a church that was as oblong and steepled as a child’s drawing of a church. The place we’d come to see was a newly-built annexe to an old farmhouse, surrounded by fields and barn conversions. The couple who owned the farmhouse were in their 60s or thereabouts, and after we’d stamped the snow off our boots and shed our coats in the huge Aga-warmed kitchen, they took our coats and served us coffee. So far, so nice.

In the brief chat before we viewed the flat, we discovered that the couple owned about eight acres of the surrounding land, had recently bought the field opposite the house but needed permission from the ‘ferocious’ local planners to erect a boundary wall, that she wasn’t entirely happy having neighbours in the converted barns, didn’t think much of the skills of the bell-ringers at the church next door, and thought it ‘catastrophic’ that the current tenants of the annexe, though generally very careful with the expensive wooden worktops in the kitchen, had damaged it by putting down a ‘not-very-good-quality pan’ which had seeped into and stained the wood. When we asked about shops nearby she told us about the Waitrose in the next town, the deli and the butcher in the village, and the local supermarket, a Costcutter, which was owned by ‘the Patels’. The polite smile died on my face as she went on to say how ‘there are lots of them’ (she didn’t add that they all looked the same to her, but she might as well have), and they weren’t very polite as they were often too busy chatting to serve the customers, so the Costcutter wasn’t a favourite but it was useful when you needed a pint of milk.

Indeed.

As you can imagine, this brief excerpt of conversation was dissected in minute detail after this visit. I have two questions – why did she feel the need to emphasise that the shop-owners were Indian? And, more pertinently – why did she feel the need to emphasise that the family was Indian with me sitting across from her at her kitchen table? Was I supposed to think, ‘I’d better be on my best behaviour’? Was she trying to say  ‘But you’re not like them, you’re different’ (almost as good as ‘some of my best friends are…’)? Or was she trying to say ‘Now that I see the colour of your skin I’m not really that keen on having you rent our flat’? In which case, why offer it to us with apparent willingness at the end of the visit? This may be yet another instance where I simply failed to read between the lines of English ‘tact’, though my Northern Irish husband couldn’t do it either.

I honestly have no idea what she was implying. I’m going to put it down to the petty, unconscious racism that I think is still pervasive in this country and is particularly unpleasant when accompanied by significant wealth and an evident sense of entitlement and Englishness. As always happens in these cases, I wished afterwards that I’d said something at the time. But as somebody wiser than me once observed, these kinds of incidents always blindside you, you never see them coming and it’s only with practice that you learn to respond appropriately in the moment. I don’t particularly want that practice, but I suspect it will come.

Clearly, I have my own prejudices. They made me slightly apprehensive, before we came here, about being in Cambridge, the very seat of Englishness and entitlement if there ever was one. It’s all too easy to see how this country breeds class hatred. Yes, there are many wonderful English people. Yes, they can be warm, welcoming and down-to-earth. (In fact, some of my best friends are English.) And yes, you find prejudice, bigotry and xenophobia everywhere. Those are general truths, but we live in particular worlds and have particular experiences. This was one of mine, and I’m still unpicking and trying to make sense of it.

Oh, and we’re not taking that flat.

a wintry weekend

What do you do if you go for an afternoon walk and find the river frozen? You break a bit off, of course, and make some impromptu winter sculpture.

And when you find sections of the river frozen not smooth, but into pretty crinkly patterns, you make some more.

And you take pictures of the waterbirds standing around on the ice, looking a bit bemused.

And when the weekend gives you snow, you make a snowman, carrot nose and all.

And you walk into town, marvelling at Midsomer Common and Jesus Green turned into pure white playgrounds, and take some kitsch Cambridge snow pictures, like this one.

cold snap

I thought I was depressed, but it turns out I was getting a cold. In a way, the head full of snot when I woke up on Wednesday morning was a relief – as in, ‘Oh, it’s not the black dog, I’m just sick!’. I’m feeling a bit better today, thanks for asking. Just in time for the weekend, what a relief.

In addition to the fact that I have a cold, it is also really cold. Freezing, frosty. Pretty, but icy. No real snow yet, but that may be coming. And with impeccable timing, the catch on the very old sash window in the bedroom gave in on the coldest day of the year, leaving a permanent 3-inch gap at the top. I tried channelling my inner Arctic explorer, but it turns out I don’t have one. So I got my hot water bottle and fluffy socks and whimpered under two duvets for a while.

Fortunately I live with a DIY genius who fixed it in minutes with just a paperclip. Well, it was a piece of wood, and it was actually hours because he had to go and get it from Homebase, and he went for a swim first. BUT it is fixed and that’s what counts.

In foodie news, I tried to make Vietnamese banh xeo last night. Ten bowls of crunchy veg, fresh green herbs, and dipping sauce, and it all looked beautiful. It proved a bit harder to get the pancakes out of the pan intact, but they tasted good. I pretended it was tropical outside and the lamps were floating on the river for the Hoi An full moon festival. Sitting wedged up against the radiator, wearing three layers and a blanket, I was just about successful. Roll on springtime.

two thoughts after a CRASSH

I went to a seminar this week at the amazing Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). It was a double feature on fashion, in a series on material cultures of the long 18th century. The first talk was on cotton, the second on naval uniforms. I had two thoughts. The first was: why am I the only person in the (standing-room only) seminar room who is not white? I was reminded of a 2nd-year black student who explained to me, in a  lecture I gave on Ingrid Pollard’s work on exclusion in rural England, that black people don’t like going to botanical gardens and that’s why I didn’t see too many of them in Kirstenbosch.

I guess black people aren’t that keen on clothes, the long 18th century, or historical materialism either. Or maybe it’s Cambridge they don’t like.

My second thought was about the way we approach research in the humanities and social sciences. I’ve been to a fair number of research seminars in my time, and they have ranged from the almost laughably abstract to what I think is best described as documentary. The CRASSH seminar was in the second camp. Both talks were filled with pictures, and the speakers described rather than theorised. I don’t know enough about historical studies to know if this is the norm in that discipline, but I have a vague sense that historians are good at providing a great deal of intriguing detail about something you didn’t know you were interested in. The effect can be mesmerising. You’re basically being told a story. The storyteller is powerful, authoritative, entrancing, pulling an example from a museum collection, another from a novel or a poem, another from a scientific text of the time. They give the impression that they’ve exhausted all the sources, and extracted everything of value. They’ve wrapped it for you into a neat package, tied with their own intricate bow. But then you emerge from the seminar room, and you’re not quite sure whether the talk shed any light on anything except the topic at hand.

A day or two later, I happened to be reading Douglas Bruster’s essay on ‘The new materialism in Renaissance Studies,’ and this bit resonated: ‘To the extent that it succumbs to… the “allure” of its objects without justifying its focus on them (by mean, for example, of a more comprehensive theory both of objects and object-criticism), the new materialism runs the risk of being seen as tchotchke criticism, its anthologies the belated J. Crewe catalogues of the early modern era. Indeed, it seems significant that the “docent” impulse in new historicism – by which I mean the impulse to lecture on an object or anecdote in a masterful, controlling way – marks so many new materialist essays… [I]t hints at the critical fetishism that pervades the new historicism.’

This is all about historical studies, but I’m really thinking about geography, and not even historical geography. I’m not about to set out a critique of materialist geographies here, and these ideas don’t apply directly, but they are giving me some tools to think with.