MA-Ness New Term Week 1 and Nostalgia....

Last week was the first week of the new term but alas thanks to lurgy I didn't make it into college for the first week of term. I managed to avoid lurgy over the festive season  - both me and my husband remarked on how it was our first lurgy free xmas in quite a few years but lurgy caught up with me last week, thankfully it seems to have been relatively shortlived so all being well I should be back in this week and back on full MA-ness duties....

The relief of handing in assignments (with time to spare as opposed to frantically trying to get stuff finished - the undergraduate me would be demanding to know who has stolen me and where the real ladylugosi was) was almost immediately tinged with various shades of doubt afterwards - along the lines of 'but what if I'd completely misunderstood the brief, what if the files corrupted - no worry there as I'd printed it out too..., what if in spite of my best efforts to get to grips with Harvard Referencing I'd made a complete dogs arse of it and last but not least the worry of 'what if it just wasn't clever/good enough?'

Oh well at least the answer to the last question should be solved by the end of the month and the next lot of fees have been paid so I'll either be due a refund or I'm all right for the next few weeks at least.....

I did take some photos over the festive period - mostly black and white in the woods, some of them I'm pleased with, some of them are okay and a couple might form the basis of a more physical piece of work, but I am very pleased with some colour (albeit washed out as opposed to dayglo and by dayglo I mean ordinary colour really but it's virtually dayglo for me such is my love and ordinary insistence upon monochrome) ones I took at Temple Newsam of dead and dying flowers - because hey if you're going to work a cliche then you may as well work a cliche to the max....

I've also been doing some more research - also hope to visit a couple of archives soon, proposed visits had to be cancelled due to lurgyness so they're on my to do list to re-arrange and I enjoyed reading a paper about the similarities between the character of Dracula and embalmers (which you can read here) and the bibliography for this paper has lead me to the very wonderful Funeral Customs by Bertram S Puckle which you can read or download here which I am still in the process of reading - am about halfway through. The book shows its age but it is also very thought provoking and is giving me both lots of ideas to toy with and to try and create something from....
If I've understood the brief for this term - this term is more about the doing than the reading about how to do the doing - if that makes sense. Oh well I'll find out later this week......

One of my other fields of interest is ye oldy worldy secondhand postcards and in a shop called Treasure Hunt in Whitby whilst I was there for the Goth Festival I found this charming xmas card - it doesn't look especially xmassy by todays standards as it has no baubles, glitter, snow, trees, cats in snow or santa hats or any of the other familiar xmas symbols but it does have two lovely crinolined and bonnetted ladies one of whom is giving the other a bouquet. And maybe the fir trees either side of them could be considered vaguely xmassy but I think that might be stretching it.

I'm not sure when this is from though brief tinternet research tells me that they were active as a company from 1895 til 1976 if the archive of their wages book held in the National Archive is a true reflection of their trading. For some reason I'm thinking 1930's though I could be completely wrong.

Inside the dedication is signed in biro and I think it says 'from E Foxon to Malcolm' - that's it, no kisses or any other details, I wonder who Malcolm was, what his relationship to E (and what did the E stand for?) was, whether the card came in an envelope and whether they had a lurgy free xmas?