My first blog. 50 years of teaching  African literature, then children’s literature, then 18th century literature, and writing all the time, but nothing has prepared me for blogging. i look it up and learn it demands daily musings. But who reads it?  the same might be said for most academic books, not read just exploited for other books. But there the purpose is  REF and a reasonable salary for life. So this blogging is mysterious. It is perhaps a kind of diary that only the writer reads–and one that if not nourished would not, like my 5-year diary from the 1950s, hang around and around. Yes, the evanescence is attractive. i see it demands the present tense. is this why so many novelists now write in bursts in the present tense? How little I know of this time….

Enough: I am cleaning out my office of 7 years, moving house, coping with a vanishing plumber, writing a paper on men memorialising women, organising a memorial service for a distinguished predecessor, so what have I to do with this particular form of narcissism? At least today.