Making an opening statement  so much care is put into the entrance way to Cambridge houses. Most of the places are bereft of gardens,and some gardens are just so inept. If you only have two metres of front yard a Leylandii does not an appealing feature.  But the doors and brickwork, the paths, cast iron and cobblestone,are so invitational.

So often in Australia we can't even find our front door. The front door of the house we are moving to at Cow Flat is obstructed by fences...you enter stage left and lose your bearings and miss the most magnificent part of the house. I can change that. What I can't do it put one of these Victorian entrances into a Victorian Colonial "bungalow".

I love the use of bright colours, random bricks and modern leadlight. So many of the ancient architectural oddities - angels and ghouls,acanthus mollis cornices are perpetuated in newer and renovated buildings.

Access agonies


Oh the appalling inconsistency of my blogging. But it is just not my fault. For reasons beyond my imagination I am kicked out of Google almost every week and no amount of somersaulting will get me back in. It goes like this (and you all know it)....we don't recognise your password. No such name exists. Please re set your password. An email has been sent to the account you used to set up you Gmail account. Gmail account - never heard of you, go back to prison. Let's try something else. What was the name of your first grade teacher? Read this gobbledegook standing on your head and if you can't read it, then you can listen to this incomprehensible BLAH BLAH

I do wonder when technology will finally catch up and resolve these access agonies....or have they fixed it and I haven't yet found out.  I carry an address book full of passwords. I have to update it almost every week. Every site has different rules....how come one password is strong when they suggest it and weak when I choose it? My brain won't keep generating them.  If I change computers the cache gets confused. Now I am confused. I wanted this to be my sea of creativity but it has become a private morass of terrors...will they let me in today? Why are they locking me out?

Do walk on the grass

Every day on my way to the Cambridge University Library I walk through Kings College - that's Kings in the background with the spires - and it took me a while to recognise what was so odd about this lawn. It is the absence of litter.

You see, having worked at universities for the past decade I had learned to associate a sea of litter with student spaces.

Not only is there no litter, but there is no graffiti, no abandoned mattresses, no beer glasses, no bottles, not even a Macca's wrapper in sight. The other surprise was that no one walks on the grass....although I did see a little woman deliberately cut diagonally across in full sight of everyone. I then heard a porter explaining to some tourists that she had the right. I suppose that if you have to earn the right, it should be a lawn worth walking on.

 Clues
Box 5 arrived at my reading table in the manuscripts room and the librarian gave a little gasp of delight as I lifted the heavy brown cardboard lid. The steel grey woman in a wheelchair working nearby on a pile of delicious  correspondence - black copperplate on dense parchment - glanced over at my box with that almost greedy expression that researchers develop. What had I got?  There were dozens of tiny black, blue and red leather appointment diaries,  most bearing the ancient symbols of Cambridge University. Bits of paper, stamps, drawings, receipts, fragments of poetry and translations had been folded into the pockets and elastic safe-keeps of the diaries.

In pursuit of Esther


What precisely am I researching in Cambridge? In short, researching female academics who were born too soon to achieve recognition.


I am focused for now on the Salaman women who were extraordinary Jewish intellectuals in their age.It's an ethnographic study: these women were linked by their science and religion. The women included a Hebrew scholar and theologian, an anthropologist, a musician who developed a theory for teaching Bel Canto methods, writers, artists, academics, and my current favourite, Esther, who gave up physics to study memory, starting with her own.

LOST BLOGS

Trying to cross polinate my blogs lost due to technological ignorance.
Try here http://eleanorroosevelt-annie.blogspot.com/

Sleepless in Cambridge

I am sleepless because I went to bed at about 4pm and after six hours, my body clock just said Get Up! 


There has to be some suffering for the privilege of flying across the world to spend three weeks in Cambridge at someone else's expense.

 Years ago in Sweden I stayed in a tiny en-suite hotel room right in the middle of Stockholm for about $100 US... super cheap. It was all stainless steel and pine, white linen that crackled with cleanliness.  It had a view of a solid brick wall that eliminated all natural light. Yet there were many well-designed creature comforts crammed into that immaculate little space. There were places for everything, mostly well hidden....which is in contrast to the room I am now staying in which has no room to hide anything It just lacks all the niceties of Swedish design. 

Unfinished projects - collaborations

This week I am selling my house, buying another, and collaborating with a colleague to complete an 80 page report.

All of my half finished projects lead into greater creativity, even a better project if the collaborations are constructive.

I work well with my colleague. I am verbose and obtuse, and she is short to the point of bluntness....she edits my extremities and I soften her edges. We know when to
relinquish the writing and become the editor. It works.

The house I am leaving represents 14 years of hard toil...it was just a compacted unfenced field when I came, and now

Hyperbolic

Bricolage is what women do. It is about creating the links between people, institutions, history and time, and it is about making something wonderful from nothing and reclaiming things. It is also a word used in relation to research, which is both my work and my joy. So Bricolage is creativity and art and it is entirely female.

Hyperbolic crochet was something visualised and created by Margaret Wertheim,the science writer, and her sister and friends. http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-news/when-art-meets-science-hyberbolic-crochet-coral-reef?gclid=CKqf84ib2KoCFYpMpgodqzNC7w

It has something to do with maths and space and coral reefs. Suddenly crochet is about maths. Knitting has become cultic.