epershand

That was a week that felt a bit odd, which may have been quite a bit down to my not sleeping as well as have latterly been doing.

Also not getting out for accustomed daily walk as often as usual because RAIN.

Somewhat stunned by phonecall from friend with whom I am collaborating on various projects who has recently had some rather devastating health news.

Resumption of contact with two other friends: one of whom I had contacted after receiving what turned out to be, as I had suspected, spam email from her hacked account.

Having the February blahs, pretty much.

(This may get updated over the course of the day)

After struggling to get Zoom link downloaded and operating etc, managed to get into first session I wanted to attend, Foundling Hospital in early C20th, good grief, practices had not changed much in a century had they? Recipe for trauma in mothers, children, and the foster mothers who actually bonded with the children until they were taken away to be eddicated according to their station in life.

Then switched to a different panel and was IRKED by a lit person talking about the Women's Cooperative Guild Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915) which they had only just encountered ahem ahem - was republished by I think Virago? Pandora? in 1970s - and women's history has done quite a bit on the WCG since then so JEEZ I was peeved at her assumption that the working women were not agents but the whole thing was being run by the upper/middle class activists who were most visibly involved. And wanted to query whether working women thought it was very useful to have posh laydeez able to put their cases re maternity, child welfare and so on in corridors of power, rather than deferentially curtseying??? (I should like to go back in time and ask my dear Stella Browne about that.)

Also on wymmynz voices not, or at least hard to trace, in the archives, I fancy this person does not know a) Marie Stopes' volume Mother England (1929), extracts of letters she had from women about motherhood and b) based on 1000s of letters surviving and available to researchers. I could, indeed, point to other resources, fume, mutter.

Update Well, there were some later papers I dropped in on and enjoyed (and was able to offer comment/questions on; but I was obliged to point out certain errors in a description of Joanna Russ's The Female Man (really I think if you are going to cite a work you should check details....) (and I suppose Mitchison's work was just outside the remit of what they were talking about, so I was very self-restrained and failed to go on about Naomi.)

So yesterday I had further converse with another person apropos giving a talk as part of a series of events in connection with an exhibition of archives at a local record office some months hence and they sound keen, and it is something I can do, and have a fair amount of material including visual stuff already. Plus, besides expenses, there will also be a modest honorarium - they actually asked what do I usually get paid - errrr.

So there's that.

And the long review essay is finally in production and while I had some rather confusing emails about this yesterday I think this is down to Academic Journals Having Really Confusing Systems, it is indeed going ahead, and I was obliged to compose a short biographical note, both to reflect current institutional state and also be pertinent to topics addressed in review (my last bio note leaned rather heavily on my relationship with Sid).

And I am beginning to get to grips with article for review, though slightly fearing I may be Interrogating From the Wrong Perspective (journal is Not My Disciplinary Field, though article certainly overlaps it).

Have had the very cheering news that a conference I thought I would never get to again because it would involve transatlantic travel, is coming to London next year, yay yay yay, I am already pondering a paper.

In other personal news, have booked dental checkup and hygienist appointment for next week.

And in other news, the National Trust has reached its target to buy the land around the Cerne Giant:

The money will be used to improve access to the 55-metre (180ft) figure and to link up a patchwork of habitats, improving conditions for species such as the rare Duke of Burgundy butterfly.
It will also enable further archaeological work to help solve the enduring mystery of whom the giant depicts, and when and why it was created.

Like they would have painted a sinister sixth finger (come on down Mr Cromwell insisting on the warts): Hidden detail found in Anne Boleyn portrait was ‘witchcraft rebuttal’, say historians. Hmmm. Oh yeah? Am cynical.

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Overlooked women artists (maybe I will mosey on down to the Courtauld....): The Courtauld’s riveting, revelatory and deeply researched show of ten lost female painters looks afresh at the golden age of British landscape art:

Some of Mary Smirke’s pictures were ascribed to her brother and Elizabeth Batty’s entire output was assumed to have been her son’s.

Men are poor stuff. Men are terribly poor stuff. Men covertly filming women at night and profiting from footage, BBC finds.

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The Black Beauty in the White House: this is actually about the famous horse book, which was written in a house of that name. In Norfolk.

This is the story of a child from a coastal town in Norfolk, who would go on to influence life around the world and who is just as famous today. Not Horatio Nelson, but rather Anna Sewell, the author of Black Beauty. She managed to not only influence the lives of people but also horses (and possibly many other animals as well) with the story, published only a few months before her death.

This looks fascinating though I need to read it a lot more closely: Right place, right time: Luck, geography, and politics:

On 12th May 2020, Mass Observation collected c5,000 diaries from people across the UK. Many of these diaries mention luck and many of these luck stories are geography stories. Geographers, though, have not written much about luck. In this article, I review the literature on luck from within and beyond geography to construct a working definition and geographical approach to luck. The working definition describes luck as chance, fortuitous, unexpected events that were beyond the control of those for whom they are now significant. The geographical approach distinguishes four geographical aspects of luck: the geometry of luck; lucky places; right place, right time; and the practical sphere.