apologies

Hi everyone,

Apologies for my poor updating lately. After I got back from London last Sunday I got caught up in a really busy week with work and school, and by the time Thursday night rolled around I was feeling very sick and achey... Friday morning I woke up feeling like I had gone to the gym the day before because all my muscles were sore, and by Saturday morning I was full fledged in the middle of a nasty cold which I am just beginning to recoupe from today.

All in all things have been going well, but they have just been so busy that I haven't had time or energy to really update everything.

Winter is in full swing here, as it gets dark at about 4:00, and everyone around me has begun to point out how terribly cold the weather is. I still haven't felt the need to pull out the old wool winter coat, and so I can't really complain much! In a way I'm looking forward to winter this year, because I'm told that Brighton isn't as wet and rainy as Bristol, and last year in Bristol there were really only a couple of days where I found it quite cold... and even on those days it was usually due to the rain.

With winter here, I've realized that Christmas is now less than a month away, which means I have a month to work on my term papers so that I dont have to worry about them too much while I'm home for the holidays. I've just about got my topics worked out, and so now its just a matter of getting going on the research. This Friday is my last class of the term, and so I plan on getting organized and getting to work next week.

For one of my term papers I'm going to be working around the issues of why people write to the mass-observation archive, and what they gain personally out of writing. Hopefully I can do this through talking about the archive as a source of establishing posterity and looking at the ways it acts as a vehicle for empowerment for people left out of the telling of history. I'm planning on doing this through contrasting people's responses to directives on 'why I write' and directives which ask them when and how they identify as minorities in British society.

For my other term paper I'm going to be writing on theory behind using letters as a source of history, and more specifically looking at the writing conventions typical of war letters... My plan is to work out a framework, and then illustrate it through using some war letters written by my Grandfather to my Grandmother which I am currently awaiting copies of in the mail!

I'm finding that in relation to school, I'm much more of a 'doer' than a person that loves theory... and a lot of the focus of school these days has been theory. Anyway, the term papers aren't supposed to be about the results of your research or your findings, moreso the theory involved in the process of doing research and analysing documents - so I feel quite relieved to have FINALLY chosen topics, which I think will bring up the theoretical issues I am interested in. Still, I think it will be hard not to write each paper on all the interesting stories I find while researching.

all in all things are going really well, and I'm really looking forward to the next month - Especially because I feel as though I am working towards my christmas holidays!

will post again soon and more frequently... I have been saving up a rant on airfare and flights which I'll try and post this week

- C