bookandswordblog (@bookandswordblog.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy)

The big ‘what’s going on’ The time has come (the blogger said) to talk of big things. I have flown flags enough, over the last few posts, sporadic as they have been, to give the impression that change was afoot in my life as well as maybe in the blog, and so here at last is the announcement. These are the headlines. 1. For reasons which the blog more or less makes clear, if you read back over the doldrums, hiatuses, shortage of news and posts about industrial action, despite having had a secure academic appointment in a top UK university I have been looking for other work, academic and non-academic, for a few years now. 2. Until recently, neither of those searches had been very successful; I got no academic interviews, a couple of museum ones and two real-world professional ones but no offers, and I made a few extra grand over a couple of years buying and selling stuff over eBay and evaluating grant applications, but no life-changing options opened up. 3. Then, in March this year, a prospect emerged at a private liberal arts university in India (and forgive my paranoia or superstition or whatever it is, but I’ll identify them once I’m actually _there_). This very quickly became the exit plan; they offered both me and my partner jobs in April and we accepted immediately. I start there in January 2026. 4. Therefore, in May I handed in my notice at the University of Leeds—and about that I shall say only that the response was to offer to allow me to go sooner—and on 31st August this year I ceased work for them and became a gentleman of leisure. 5. However, in the meantime, my brilliant partner, already on unpaid leave from our employers, had obtained a fellowship – in fact she obtained two, but had to choose between them – in İstanbul for nine months, and the relevant institution were and are happy to have me there as a trailing spouse, albeit unpaid, which is really extremely good of them. 6. However again, because it transpires that in my current situation Turkish residence is basically not possible for me to get, as I post this I am taking a couple of weeks solo in Catalonia, which I intend pretty much entirely to spend reading, writing and visiting monuments. (I will only be passing through Barcelona, sorry folks.) 7. Oh yeah, also in there, on completely unrelated schedules and plans, this year has involved getting my mother into care and then out of it into independent sheltered accommodation with two new knees (and moving and housing her cat and a load of her belongings from the wrong end of the country and back as a result), and also my oft-mentioned partner becoming my legally wedded wife. That latter has made emigration a lot simpler, but we’d been engaged with a date in mind since before the job offers came in, so that’s not why we did it! More traditional motives like wanting to be together forever came in first there. 8. But as a result of all this, I drafted this on a train through the Austrian Alps, which I followed with a night bus to Sofia and then a night train to the Second Rome, where I have taken up residence as an independent scholar for most of three months except for the current Pyrenean interlude. Then next year I light out to India, where after a term of initial teaching I return to İstanbul for a further two months’ respite. Then follows a brief return to the UK to see family and coordinate getting our cat shipped to India; and after that we’re both there with him for the foreseeable, except for probably-yearly trips back to Europe. (A resignedly trusting cat on his unwitting way to a long stay in a cattery. Poor little fella. But no-one we knew could take him in.) So I’m out of it, but I hope this is actually going to mean being more into it.1 My teaching load, once I have one again, is contractually fixed at 2:2 and confined to six months of the year, variously split, including marking. The gamble is that, with that in play, so much scholarship now being online, my new employers being willing to buy most books and a literal container currently containing our shared private academic library distributed about our offices and dwelling, I’ll actually be better placed to do research and contribute to things than I have been at the supposed heart of UK medieval studies. You will hopefully all be seeing more of me before long, in person or online, than has been possible these last few years. And even if not, I hope I’ll be happier. However, none of this is simple. Until the end of August I was still responsible in my job, mainly for marking and e-mail although there were a few days in which there was literally nothing else I could do for my wage than historical research. Unfortunately I was also taking some part of the arrangements for the move—though my wife took much more—and then I was fairly frantically packing down, using up, and digitising stuff, and relocating our own cat to the other end of the country as well, until reaching the point now where my, our, belongings, are divided between three storage locations, one of which is being held for shipping to India, and then four suitcases and two rucksacks which we brought, slow-travel-wise, to İstanbul. Reducing a pretty comfortable material life, in which I had allowed myself to collect several sorts of things, to that level was a hard slog. And I really need to catch up on many months, probably years, of short sleep, which I have only really just started on. But I’m doing things, I’m reading again, I’ve sent off some delayed work (and had no acknowledgement, I guess because the relevant editor has also left UK academia and his colleagues are too swamped with term starting to check the relevant email address), and rest is possible again. And I think, before too long, things will be better. (The Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Camii and the Galata Tower as seen from the Golden Horn on my previous trip to İstanbul in 2016.) Nonetheless, times of change. My domestic and natal homes have both gone this year, as have my wife’s; I’m unemployed for the first time in two decades, having given up what was supposed to be the job for life; I have left the only country in which I have ever lived with no immediate plans to return there except as visitor; and there are also some bigger changes going on in the world order which you’ve probably noticed yourselves but do nothing to add fixity to my sense of things. All I can say is that in a few months’ time everything will be pretty different, and that sadly in some ways, but excitingly in others, hopefully more, it needed to be. Here goes. * * * 1. And after all, did not the great sage Harvey Bainbridge long ago point out that, “If you wanna get into it, you gotta get out of it”? (Hawkwind, “Utopia”, on _Choose Your Masques_ (Charisma 1982).) He didn’t mean this, I’m pretty sure, but I also doubt he would disagree even now. ### Share this: * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Click to print (Opens in new window) Print * More * * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket * Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest * Like Loading... ### _Related_ https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2025/10/21/the-big-whats-going-on/