training day

this morning I got out of bed at 4:30 am to catch at 5:40 train that was headed to Dorchester where I was signed up to take a day-long training course put on by the Oral History Society. When I signed up for the course a few months ago I had taken a very casual look at the train schedules to check to see that there were regular trains running from Bristol to Dorchester - but I obviously didn't look closely enough or I would have noticed that my options for arrival times was either 10:45 am (45 minutes after the course started) or 7:45 am (a couple hours before the course started). Luckily for me the trains run regularily outside of the morning hourse, so I was able to catch a train home at a decent time... Every day I hate the british train system just a little bit more.

The best part about my 5:40 train journey, is that unlike the journey home which had no changes - this journey required a change at westbury station (or so I was told by the man who sold me the ticket)... according to my itinerary I was supposed to get off at Westbury and then catch the train to Dorchester 8 minutes later around 6:30ish.... This put a damper on my plans to sleep through the journey, because I was so paranoid of missing my transfer station.

Little did I know, until just one dreary eyed station before Westbury, that there was no change required at all. What was actually the case was at Westbury the train I was on took a 8 minute stop to detach the first two carriages from the two behind it, so that two could go in the direction of Dorchester and the other two to some other little village in Dorset... Bearing in mind that I had no idea that it is custom for trains to split into pieces and go in different directions, this was a very difficult concept for me to wrap my head around this early in the morning.

Picture me, pre-morning coffee, standing on a platform at 6:38 in the morning being told that my so called 'transfer' involved getting back on the exact same train in the exact same seat that I had been desperately trying to stay awake in for a good hour. It wasn't pretty.

In the end I was able to sleep because I thought to set my alarm on my cell phone to nudge me awake minutes before my expected arrival time (something I have been told about British Trains is that the are quite frequently late - they are never early) so I could trust that my alarm would be alright.

And although it was early, I was actually quite happy to get to Dorchester early because it meant that I could do a few hours of exploring and actually get to see a bit of the town before I sat in for the course.... and what a little town it is. With a population capping around 17,000 its certainly not the biggest place but it has some very nice old buildings and picturesques walks - specifically, I chose the 'Thomas Hardy' walk through town which highlights different sights related to the famous authort.

What is most remarkable about Dorchester is its over-the-top assortment of museums... I have started to notice a trend that because England is so easy to travel around to (every little town is close to another little town) it seems that towns, especially those that are within a few hours from London do as much as they can to drive tourists towards them - in Dorchester this takes the shape of the following museums (keep in mind this is a city of 17,000 people)

- The Teddy Bear Museum (reasonable enough)
- The Dorset County Museum (that one's only expectable)
- The Keep Military Museum (that's fair, lots of relevant military history and 'the keep' is a huge military building)
- The Dinosaur Museum (Dorchester is on the Jurrassic Coast of England, but that's stretching it a bit)
- The Mummy Museum and Tutankhamun Exhibit (right now we are getting a little bit outside the realm of British History)
- The Terracotta Warriors Museum - In the brochure's words - "The only museum outside China exclusively devoted to this world famous discovery!" ...referring to the Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor of China.... (at this point I think you can see where the connection to Dorchester is a bit more than just a stretch)

I am posting a great photo that I took below, which includes a sign directing you to the many many museums... and if you look closely you can see where there was a new addition and they have just added on an extra sign for the Terracotta Warriors. I thought that, especially with the little add-on - the photo really captured the very odd museum phenomena in Dorchester.

Aside from the museums I enjoyed a nice walk, and a great breakfast in the market where I picked up three apples for under 50p... There is an unbelievable variety of apples here, and although its a fruit that I never particularily liked as a child, I am starting to really like them as I taste new type after new type.

Ok so the real point of my post was to talk about my training day! so here we go...

I think in the back of my mind I have always really been interested in Oral History, but until recently after doing some reading of works based around it and working in the museum (Which has a huge oral history library) I hadn't really put all the pieces of my interest together... if that makes any sense. Now, I'm finding that my interests in oral history fits in really well with my more general interest in public history, how the public looks at history, and how the public thinks about their own place in history, etc.... It also connects to the ideas that have been floating around my head about Canadian national identities, and traditional historical narratives - thinking about how communities who are outside the realm of the more 'traditional history' contextualize themselves in the broader story of Canada and in some ways write their own history through exchanging stories (family history, folklore, etc).

What's also nice about oral history is that its a very active aspect of a historian's work - it gets you out of the archives and libraries, and personalizes history a bit more - and the interviewing process incorporates a lot of the aspects of journalism that have attracted me in the past.

Anyway, after starting to get interested in learning a bit more at it, and scouting out some interesting programs in the field in the U.K. (of which we have none in Canada), I came across this course and decided to take it..... and what a course it was!!!!

The day went over everything from how to approach projects, how to use questions and objects to help people reminisce and bring back memories, what questions to ask in interviews, how to deal with sensitive subjects in interview, all the way to getting to use the recording equiptment and learn techniques about microphone use and what not. (A good microphone and a mini-dish recorder and the new items at the top of my want-list)... It was amazing and it gave me sooo much to think about, from about a MILLION ideas I have for projects of my own, to ways that I could incorporate it into the work I am doing right now.

It just seems to be such a fascinating and approachable method to history - obviously traditional historical research comes with it to put the stories into a more factual context, but what I like about Oral History is that the exchange of stories is something that just about everyone is capable of participating in, and the end result is a medium that is entirely accessible (you don't need a high degree of education to understand a person's story about experiencing racism upon arrival in England or Canada, or about their experience fighting in a war).

Anyway, I'm getting increasingly more exposed to Oral History here through work and through different projects that I have been stumbling across, and it seems to me that it is a field that has not been as developed and utilized in Canada has it has been in the U.K. and the U.S. Hopefully that is something that will change - in the past decade or so it has really taken off here, in terms of the field developing and funding being offered for projects.

My partner who I was interviewing was a 60 year old lady who had just bought herself an I-book (apple laptop) for doing some recordings and did some preliminary funding proposals to get practice - and now it turns out she got all the funding she applied for, so she is going ahead with her project - which I think is just fascinating... basically it is based around reminiscence therapy, which is where elderly people are encouraged to talk about their memories as a way of keeping the mind active and just in general getting good feelings from thinking about happy times (its been proven that while in older people short term memory fails, elderly people are increasingly able to remember stories from their long term memory).

Her project is centered around working with groups of people who live in retirement homes who after moving out of their house often don't have much of their former belongings surrounding them - what the project does is brings groups of people who are new to the retirement home together to talk about light-hearted subjects from their memories (first date, summer vacation memories, etc) and then the interviews get recorded and the participants get copies to exchange with each other and to keep for their families. Wow - its such a cool thing!

Anyway, I certainly have a lot to think about... but I need to get to bed for now because I have an early train to catch again tomorrow to meet my Dad in London!