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| Monograph on the move again. |
I’m spending this afternoon packing up my
books and monograph papers, housed since May in a rather nice Victorian set in Somerville
In my grumpier moments, I suspect that it’s
not a good use of my time, in a monograph writing year, to have had to vacate
my Wolfson office twice (once for 3 days, once for 9 months) as a result of noisy and
overrunning building works in the college.
But being a bit nomadic these past 13
months has had its advantages. Over summer, I got to share a work space with my
History colleague Benjamin Thompson, which meant that the monograph-writing
began to feel a bit more like a mainstream office job, with someone to chat to
during tea breaks etc, rather than the default, splendid monastic isolation of
the Oxford don on research leave. I’ve also been forced to sort out my papers at
regular intervals, which has kept in check the tendency of my photocopied
sources to migrate all over the carpet, like an ominous sludge. Above all,
however, I find I write much better with regular changes of scene, and view.
There’s something mentally stimulating about new surroundings and, conversely,
a sense of staleness if you sit in front of the same window, at the same desk,
most days for over a year. The sheer over-familiarity of the physical
environment can dull the intellectual senses, which are already struggling to
stay fresh from thinking about the same material, intensely, for a long period
of time. So I’m hoping that all this upheaval will unleash some extra energy in
the coming weeks…
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