Paint me in oils, don't take a photo.
A Room of One’s Own and Middlebrow Entertainment
Debating the dead: Virginia Woolf edition Virginia Woolf, famously and with great perspicacity, imagined Shakespeare's sister. Without A Room of [Her] Own in which to write, Woolf argues, she is "washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed". Woolf recognised the powerful pull of labour, income, and duty over the less practical creative... Continue Reading →
Five ways to build community as an introvert.
The club sucks but so does staying in forever. As a teenager, one of my friends threw a murder mystery party annually for her birthday. We’d be assigned characters and all get together in costume, eat food, and play pretend. Those days were always delightful, and I’m gratified to see that halfway across the world... Continue Reading →
Scotland: A Digest
Travelogues from the UK.
What’s In My Pencil Case?
EDC - stationery edition THE CASE I am not a huge believer in pencil cases: I love things that come in cute tins, boxes, pouches etc, and so typically I reappropriate those types of things whenever I need to store anything. My old pencil case was a box that some Taylor Swift merch came in,... Continue Reading →
Faceless does not mean AI
The purpose of this article is only to tell you I'm not a robot, but it's maybe made me feel worse? I write this on behalf of my secretive account, to let you know I am not AI and do not use AI for so much as prompts or punch-ups for articles. If anything, my... Continue Reading →
Three Stories From Folklore
My job is strange. For World Book Week, I encouraged several of our staff[1] to read out stories rooted in their own heritage to my students. All my colleagues, however, are incredibly busy, so I agreed to source the stories. I am not the kind of librarian to do things by half, so what follows... Continue Reading →
Fandom is the reason I can’t give up the internet
I can't be the only one stuck in this loop... Oh god, do I want off the internet. The list of things I need a phone to do is so small that I am seriously considering going back to a 2013 Blackberry. My ability and desire to read, write, and communicate have been improved by... Continue Reading →
“What Are My Words Worth”: the role of academia’s ivory tower in cultural transmission
my talk given at the Creative Industries Festival 2026 “What is left, what is remembered and what is still fit for use in the heritage of classical bourgeois culture?” It is with these words that Eric Hobsbawm opens his 2012 essay ‘Heritage’. Hobsbawm, a historian in his 95th year when this was written, is concerned... Continue Reading →
How to be an It Girl
What, like it's hard? Everyone glamorous is pretending. For sure. It's easy to look good if everyone wants you to: when the designer fits the dress to you, when somebody is paid to make sure your shoes match your look, when the photographs of you will sell, then it becomes an industry to get you... Continue Reading →
Late Romantic 