Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
If you want to know how someone sees the world, give them a pencil. Right from an early age, we have a love of drawing. It's true that sometimes children's drawings can be a bit peculiar, but they are exactly how they view the world around them and there is something rather special about that. A few years ago, we bought a job-lot of books and bits-and-bobs at our local auction. There were some rather lovely things amongst them and, since they only cost a couple of pounds, they were better than bargainous! In them was a collector copy of a biography of the sculptor Alfred Gilbert, who famously created the statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus. As part of the book, there is a hand drawn sketch of one of his designs. It is somehow both messy and precise, giving an idea of how he worked through his ideas until the reached the desired conclusion. But this was not the greatest treasure in the collection - at least not for us! Buried in amongst the rest of the published and printed book...