back to the web

Once again, I have been falling behind in updating this blog, but then the last couple of weeks of term are always manic so that might explain why. Now there feels a bit of time to breath and look back on it all. Once again it has been a mix of web journeying, train travel and book voyaging. A highlight was heading off down with a group of students to the National Maritime to learn about the Northwest passage. We got to work our way through admiralty charts from all periods, see the improbaility of the kind of maps that Hudson was basing his travels on, view at close quarters Franklin's last letters and read some of the most adulatory and least reliable works on Hudson that I have ever come across. For a wonder the trains also worked and the whole group of us were able to get group tickets to London and back cheaply and on time on the Chiltern network. I am rapidly growing to appreciate that service. It may meander its way along but it does tend to arrive more or less on time - something that could not be said of this weekend's jaunt. 

Now here is a querry? Would you not have thought that setting off on a train from Birmingham to London at 9:30am one would be perfectly safe for two pm carol singing? Would you not have been absolutely certain that one should be able to arrive for a 6pm opera? Well, when all is said and done, Virgin trains did succeed in bringing me to my destination in time for the opera but the singing went out the window. At 11:45 our train was still sitting somewhere outside Coventry. At about this time, Virgin rail anounced that because of flooding and/or signal failure (reports varied) no trains would be continuing. Instead when they had found enough buses for our 9 carriage train, they would meet us at Berkswell station and bus us back to Birmingham! What amazed me was how muted the protest was. There was definite muttering, but it did not even reach the level of disbelief whereas I was sitting there thinking in what other country could this happen? We patently did not want to be back in Birmingham. We had all left there at 9:30. Why take us back? If they could get the buses surely they could take us on? The majority of British train users however seemed to be resigned to the fact that they might not ever reach their destination or the shows that seemed to be the main reason for us all heading south. To do Virgin rail justice, it did then get the train through and we arrived only 3 hours late and they did allow us free food and water; they also brought me back in record time for a Sunday train the next day.

Well clearly too much of my time has been spent on trains in the last wee while, but that has had some advantages for the book voyaging front. I am still working my way through the trials and victories of Augustine, but at least I am no longer totally stalled. I have also had rather a lot of fun reading M. M. Kaye's Shadow of the Moon. It is a great read - a fictionalised love story, but at the same time a beautifully-researched account of the Indian Mutiny. Sometimes the story loses it a bit as Kaye's fascination with the mutiny takes over (Kaye was the grand-daughter of one of the earliest historians of the Indian Mutiny, John Kaye), but it is a good read despite its horrendous back-drop.  

One of my students has also got me more intrigued by the Klondike gold rush (in which I have always had an interest) so I have journeyed from one continent to another and followed some of the women on the trail of gold. 

Along with my students, I have also travelled with the Incas as they journeyed the length and breadth of their empire, consolidating their rule, voyaged with Frobisher up into the frozen arctic (those early explorers were MAD!!!), and sympathised with Sebastian Munster as he tried to make sense of the geogaphy of the Early Modern world. Most recently I have picked up Anthony Grafton's What was History and am suffering pangs of jealousy. I want to have his breadth of knowledge. 

It is time to leave the world of the world wide web now, however, and get back to the pages of a good book. I may be jealous of Grafton, but I want to know more of what he has to say, and travel back with him through the pages of time and the understanding of history. Later, however, it will be back to something and I shall either travel in the mind out to India or up to Yorkshire. M.M. Kaye is going to be competing with Jack Sheffield's Mister Teacher for my spare time. I feel that ironing and cleaning should also be in the competition, but with two good books calling to me, I can predict that they will lose, and instead I shall be travelling vicariously through another's words.