Hello friends 🤗
Feeling in a bit weird this week for reasons I cannot pin-point. Not positive or negative. Just strange. Social and physical battery got drained during the week but but on the whole it was good to see family and even meet some new people from the Disabled People’s Archive.
Thinking of working tomorrow (and taking the bank holiday some other time) since I don’t feel I have done very much work this week. With it being a bank holiday, there is also a bit of a forbidden allure to it (ridiculous, I know). I will leave the decision for Beck to make tomorrow morning.
📆 Activities 🛼
Monday 29 April. Grandma’s vigil.
Tuesday 30 April. Grandma’s funeral and wake.
Thursday 2 May. Train back to Manchester; meeting with student
Friday 3 May. Oral history interview; meeting with staff from the Disabled People’s Archive (with Kirstie!)
🚨 Future of the Newsletter 🗞️
Update on last week’s issue: instead of changing the format of this newsletter or starting something completely ‘new’ for sharing my research, I have decided to try using the ‘notes’ section of Substack for those tidbits. Thank you everyone who shared their thoughts to help me make this decision!
So the newsletter will stay the same and occassionally I will also post a ‘note’ (which I will also link to in the next newsletter). That way, people can choose whether or not to recieve notifications for any research ‘notes’ and still get to read the more personal stuff. Plus, it feels like less of a big commitment so if I only do it once and never again, it doesn’t feel like I have failed to follow through on something.
☀️ Narrative Ambitions 🩼
Loving the (intermittent) sun. Today, I sat on my balcony reading Tony Gould’s monograph, Summer Plague: Polio and its Survivors. (Shout out to my brother, Samuel, for the birthday present).
Just from reading the introduction, I am inspired. The writing is so nice: the way it paints a picture of the epidemic in a particular social milleu, providing just enough detail and flowing in the way that fiction does.
So far it seems purely narrative: any analysis being implicit, and no explicitly stated argument. as a trade book (it is published by Yale) and this style may well be limited to what I have read so far. Regardless, I would love to write this kind of history book.
Can I write something that just tells the story of the white cane? I doubt it would make sense career-wise, so it would have to be a vanity/hobby project. Probably not much chance of getting published, either.
Perhaps I am feeling a little tangled in the analysis at the moment. Perhaps this is my childhood dreams of being a (fiction) author resurfacing. Sometimes the heart is willing but the flesh (including brain) is weak.
I may (try to) write it anyway. At least, for as long as it is fun. It can stay on my laptop and/or I can send it to interested individuals. Or even publish it myself as a series of blog posts. Just to get the basic narrative out there. That is, if I can get over my concern about whether doing this might ‘de-value’, or prevent me from using the same material for, any academic publication that ‘counts’ for employers. I hate that I have to think about these things. I just want to share what I know!!
🧩 Entertainment 📺
📺 Watched Baby Reindeer with mum. Exceptionally well written and unflinchingly brave.
📘 Finished reading The Housemaid (not as good as the other book of the same name, but okay. 3 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️
📘 Read This Post Has Been Removed. Short but the right length - finished it in one morning. Makes me want to know more about moderators’ law suits against Facebook. 3.5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️
📖 Started reading Carrie Soto is Back. If it wasn’t by Taylor Jenkins Reid there would be no way I would read a novel about tennis set in the twentieth century.
🧩 Started a new jigsaw - Pokemon this time!
🎮 Continuing to play Legend of Zelda. I got past the part I was stuck with and discovered a new map, which has renewed my enthusiasm to play
📺 Continuing to watch Gossip Girl
📺 Finished Interior Design Masters and Married at First Sight UK