Over 18 months ago I posted a short piece
announcing my intention of resuming this blog on a more regular basis again. I
outlined some ideas for continuing the blog, looking to overcome a few of the
impasses I had reached with it in the previous period.
There’s nothing like foresight.
At the time of writing that piece I was at the beginning of
a known medical situation that I expected would see me out of action for a
month. As it happened, complications left me hospitalised for several months. After
discharge I continued to have ongoing serious medical problems. I am definitely
on the mend at long last, but I have been out of action for over a year and am
even now still not 100 per cent. I am expected to be back to full health before
too long, but I am still in the process of recovery.
The physical impact is easy to assess. I have not been able
to return to fieldwork yet, and have only been gingerly easing myself back into
work more generally.
The mental impact is harder to gauge. My intellectual
stamina and concentration levels are still diminished. For a long period I
avoided attempting to engage with theoretical questions, even reading articles,
because I wasn’t really up to it. That is, happily, changing now, but I am still
not back to my best. (I have always had unreasonably high expectations of my
ability to engage with arguments, however, regarding this as a proper part of
any engagement with a discipline and its theory).
I am, though, now beginning slowly to get back into thinking
about folklore. Earlier in the year Professor James Grayson, the current
President of the Folklore Society, was kind enough to read a version of a paper
of mine at the Society’s AGM Conference on ‘Folklore Yesterday, Today and
Tomorrow’. An earlier version of the paper can be found here. I can hardly claim to have been actively involved in the AGM
conference but I wanted to be present somehow: the future of folklore (and basing
that future on the history of the discipline) was definitely always going to be
something I wanted to throw myself back into when I could.
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| James Grayson |
More recently I made it to (and through) the Folklore
Society’s 2015 Katharine Briggs lecture, given this year by that estimable scholar
Julia Bishop. I confess to bias – Julia was one of my tutors on the folklore MA
at Sheffield, and she’s one of the most inspiring teachers I’ve ever been
privileged to study with – but it was also an excellent overview of a century
of collecting children’s lore. Hearing a lecture on research outside my usual
areas of interest may have made it easier for me to manage, but it also gently set
me thinking again about more general theoretical questions. I’m starting again
to read on folklore, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to start writing about some of
these things again before too long.
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| Julia Bishop |
It wears me out, but it’s what I want to do. It’s nice to be
back, even tentatively. Thanks for bearing with me. See you again soon. Happy
New Year.
