Just when I was thinking I had probably said goodbye to the blog, life changed in a good way.
I’ve just accepted a two-year Post Doctoral Research post.
At Durham.
This obviously means some big changes. Not least of which will be me moving long distance, again. For the start of November. But this time, M might come with me (but not to start off with). So we might totally decamp from Southampton, where we have lived since 1999. It’s odd, in all my recent wanderings I have somehow felt safer because there was always that home to come back to. So though this time I won’t be changing countries, it feels just as scary as moving abroad.
But also not: I was born in Middlesbrough and lived there ’till I was 8, so in some ways I will be going home. I am so excited about being able to share that landscape with M: he’s only visited twice before when we have gone up to see family there. He doesn’t know the Dales, or the Moors… but he soon will.
The project is really exciting, it’s a Leverhulme funded investigation of the landscape archaeology of the Great Depression in North East England. It has everything I love: innovative use of GIS, social archaeology and landscapes, politics and identity. I really feel like it is a return to my roots, to the work I was so proud of doing at Greenham and a chance to really find my voice again. The PI is an academic that blogs, Dr David Petts. He also tweets, and there is going to be a ‘public’ side to the project, though the exact shape of things is yet to be determined.
So unlike Crete and my more recent commercial activities, I will be doing things I can and probably should talk about here! I am so excited, and I already have a reading list a mile long, especially for the public archaeology side of things as that’s an area I know I need to catch up on in terms of recent thinking and practice.
So more soon, in my now long established blend of personal, geekery and academic(ish) ramblings… In the meantime expect a lot of #packingdread type tweets… and lots of househunting and moving information requests…
Girl with Trowel 