Fitness to Work

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

And so, today is the last day when I’m officially unfit to work. I go back to the library on Monday, but not without some anxiety.

Mind the Gap!

There is a discrepancy. After my eye surgery, I’m now ‘fit’ to return to work, but all clinical advice says that full recovery takes a number of months, if not a year. The hospital doctor tells me I can’t even get new glasses (which I need) until after the summer, by which time the fixed eye should have settled enough to merit a new prescription. (I’ll also have retired from librarianship and will be simply a part-time researcher.) At present, vision through that eye is still blurred, although the two eyes together can manage okay. I’ve attempted to contrast what my two eyes see at the moment, by doctoring an old stereoscope image, seen above. The black bubble diminishes day by day – it might disappear by the end of next week.

Pixabay bubble, more colourful than mine!

I spent some time googling ‘return to work after macular hole surgery’, because I’m sure I’ll be asked if I need anything to support my return to work – but for myself, the only advice I’ve had is, ‘yes, you can return to work’. If you live in Blackburn, UK, you’re told not to work for three months! Three whole months? This is the only health authority suggesting such a long time off work. Otherwise, the advice sheets I’ve seen simply advise not to fly with a black gas bubble (not a problem); not to drive, ditto; not to lift anything heavy, and to take a rest if your good eye starts to ache. That’s it. It seems reasonable.

Emails? Sure, but the print on CD covers is TINY!

Just like anyone else returning to work, there will be a lot of emails to catch up on. I’m sure there will also be a backlog of cataloguing. It has to be done, small print or not. I do have a magnifying glass.

If you’re AT work, colleagues are entitled to assume you can do the work, all of the work, and no pick-and-choosing. Fit to work means, well, fit to work. The patrons you interact with similarly don’t know you’re still a little fragile, and will expect you to function normally. And if a patron is waiting for a book, they should have it catalogued – my fitness has absolutely nothing to do with it – that’s irrelevant. Similarly, a query should be dealt with timeously. I set up ‘out of office’ email messages before my operation, but one query directly to me, had been by telephone, and I wasn’t able to make contact with the enquirer before I took sick leave, despite a dozen attempts to return the call. I fear they’ll be annoyed by my silence. I’ll be as apologetic as I can!

And how do I confess if I can’t lift something, or indeed see something clearly? If I’m ‘fit to work’ as normal, I should be able to. As for taking a rest? Why should I be afforded that privilege? That would seem unfair on everyone else.

On the positive side, of course, it means I can get back to my research on Wednesdays and Thursday mornings. Heaven! And hopefully I’ll soon find out if any more needs to be done to my book draft before it can go forward into the copy-editing process.

Wish me luck.

Time to Reflect

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

My research has been on hold whilst I recover from eye surgery. Firstly, a UK ‘fit note’ says you’re unfit to work (and research is work); and secondly, my good eye soon tells me if I’ve placed too many demands on it. It’s weird to look at a computer screen when one eye  is compensating for the other one (that doesn’t fully focus and has an obstruction in the form of a black gas bubble). 

So, no research reading, though I have bought a couple of books for later.  But that doesn’t stop me thinking. I can’t help doing that.

The other evening, I started a very short list of potential research directions. I can’t proceed with any of them until (a) I am back at work, (b) I can get to various libraries and archives, and (c) I get the go-ahead to drive.

Each potential direction requires me to venture along the path to see what’s round the corner.  Not just, whether there’s enough to research, but whether there might be an interested audience for it. For example, there are two Scottish women musicians I’d like to know more about  – a Victorian and an Edwardian.  One never was a big name, except in her locality.  The other did enjoy fame, but she is virtually forgotten today.

Or, two Scottish music publishers with religious inclinations.  Does anyone care today, apart from me? I’m interested in what exactly they published; and whether they ever interacted in any way.  But is anyone else interested? (I had these hesitations about my mediaeval music research, decades ago. It was possibly one of the reasons it foundered.)

In any of these topics, I have to place the subjects into their social and cultural context, if I am to demonstrate relevance or significance in the grander scheme of things.  My motivation is to examine what these individuals and firms’ music and activities tell us about the era in which they lived and worked.

But then there’s the question of impact. I don’t have to so much as open my laptop, let alone a book, to start worrying that I haven’t yet come up with a mind-blowing angle that will knock the world’s socks off!   Moreover, there is no conceivable way I can make any of my research relate to climate change; saving the earth’s resources; social good or benefit to health.  

And so I sit, blurrily gazing into the middle distance, reflecting! I have the go-ahead to return to work on Monday. Blurrily!

Image by nateen08650 from Pixabay

Endurance, by Alfred Lansing – the Bitingly Harsh Reality of the Antarctic

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

After my last Audible adventure – well, its dreamlike quality felt more like sleepwalking than an adventure – I needed something a bit more gritty for my next audio book. There can be nothing more ‘real’, or in the moment, than the story of the remarkable Ernest Shackleton’s abortive trip to the South Pole aboard The Endurance in 1915.

Alfred Lansing, Endurance. Abridged audio book (Blackstone Audio, Inc., 2000)

I don’t often read books in the ‘Adventures, Explorers & Survival’ or ‘Expeditions & Discoveries’ categories.  However, I found this book gripping, and even terrifying, as challenge after seemingly impossible challenge had to be surmounted.  To rescue the entire crew from two icy and inaccessible islands was more than remarkable.

For myself, I’d like to know what happened to them all after they got home! Do I need to look for another book …?

Everything in Moderation

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

‘You can read, use your laptop and phone’, says the post-op leaflet.  What it SHOULD say, in my opinion, is ‘You can read, use your laptop and phone for short spells, but don’t overdo it.’ 

I did a musicological blog post last night, web-links and all.  By the end of it, my good eye was protesting, and I had a headache for much of today. And I’m shattered!

So … back to the original plan! I will finish my next Audible book, then review it.  Bear with me, dear reader!

Flashbacks no.14, Thomas Nelson and Sons

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Picture of book cover

‘Audible’ books are great for someone who is trying to rest their eyes. But the problem starts when the book you want to read isn’t on Audible! Only being able to read a few pages at a time made reading this book a bit more of an endurance test than it needed to be. It wasn’t difficult reading in terms of comprehension – just a bit of an effort for my left eye without the assistance of the right one, which will take a few more weeks to catch up!

Thomas Nelson & Sons: Memories of an Edinburgh Publishing House, ed. Heather Holmes and David Finkelstein (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001) ; Flashbacks series no.14 (Book cover shown above)

In the final pages of the book I’ve recently submitted to my publisher, I have referred to Thomas Nelson and Sons, the Edinburgh publisher. In connection with the research behind that book, I had acquired a copy of the paperback edited by Heather Holmes and David Finkelstein some months ago, but I didn’t read it at the time – because it was clearly not going to inform me about editorial decisions of the sort I was writing about. Nonetheless, I did want to read it at some stage, and I made a start last weekend.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I learned a lot more about what it was like working in the print works, as recalled by four different individuals who were time-served printers – but I didn’t learn a huge amount more about publishing decisions in general, and there was nothing at all about publishing music. Nonetheless, it was useful; I’ve got a lot more background, and a few more facts and figures. Moreover, it was helpful to read about the demise of Thomas Nelson and Sons in the 1960s, the same decade that saw the decline of Scotland’s music publishing industry.

The ‘Flashbacks’ series is (or was) published by Tuckwell Press in association with SAPPHIRE (the Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records) and The European Ethnological Research Centre. The latter sponsored the series, c/o the Royal Museums of Scotland. I think the National Museums of Scotland publishing page may be out of date, since it says there are six Flashbacks publications to date, yet the book I’ve just read is no.14, and was published in 2001. So far as I can make out, the series ended around 2004, and I think the SAPPHIRE oral history project ended about five years after that. (There are articles by Finkelstein, Sarah Bromage and Alistair McCleery dating from 2002 and 2009.)

As it happens, this was exactly the kind of book that I needed right now. Whilst I’m temporarily out of action, it’s useful to read around a subject without the pressure of needing to take notes. I can do the detailed scholarly work later!

No Audible Book Review?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Yesterday, I intended to start another audio-book. But somehow, nothing pleased me. I tried a book by a renowned TV presenter, but after a few minutes, one of the characters was standing gushing blood – and I just didn’t fancy it. No problem, I thought to myself, and started a twenty-first century pastoral narrative. Somehow, that didn’t catch my interest either. Finally, I read a few actual, paper pages of a book about the Edinburgh publisher Thomas Nelson – before my healthy eye got tired. Reading with one eye works fine for a wee while, but there’s no point in straining it.

I had yet another cuppa, and wrote a quick note to a friend, and that was all I managed. An attempt to go out for coffee failed at the first hurdle – my inability to see what I was doing was too annoying for my companion, who simply wanted me to pass a slice of cake. I couldn’t coordinate my hand with the different versions of what each eye was seeing.

I haven’t been in a reading frame of mind since then. Maybe tomorrow …

For folk with a Macular Hole
Our treatment has only one goal:
By careful incision,
To better our vision,
Then rest up and do as we’re tol’

Image by No-longer-here from Pixabay

Shhh! What Granny Didn’t Want Them to Know

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
The closed lock of an old suitcase

Tracking Irish Emigrants from Cork to USA and London

My third audio book just came up as a new publication when I logged onto Audible. Its title appealed to me. Additionally, since my own [in-the-pipeline] monograph touches upon emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then if Clair Wills’ book touched upon that, I was definitely interested.

Clair Wills, Missing Persons, or, My Grandmother’s Secrets (Penguin Audible, 2024)

The book describes the author’s extensive efforts to find out more about illegitimate births in her own Irish family; the adults involved, and the secrecy surrounding what had happened. The scandal of the Irish mother-and-baby homes during the twentieth century is naturally a significant focus, but the author also examines the part of the Irish Catholic Church; the local authorities; adoption; single mothers; questions of respectability and inheritance; of shame; of emigration (to America, and to England); of stigma and suicide; along with changing attitudes towards the end of the twentieth century. Since I’m neither Irish nor Roman Catholic, I was sure it would be informative – and it was.

It’s a moving, and multi-faceted narrative. Just when I was beginning to ask myself, ‘So, if the mother-and-baby homes were a twentieth century scandal, what happened before that?’, Wills explains how things gradually changed from the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, along with the political changes. The unbearable tragedies for the mothers and babies were too many to enumerate, but we’re reminded that the outcome for a young Irishman fleeing to life as an itinerant labourer in England was hardly what any young adult man would have hoped for, either.

Did any of this have any bearing on my own research? Not really, except to provide me with some statistics about emigration from Ireland that were far higher than I had imagined – and I already knew they were high. Moreover, my own musicological research really only requires me to say, ‘There was a lot of emigration from the Highlands and Ireland, usually for work.’ After all, I write about national songbooks, and their appeal to emigrants. If I was going to give more detail, I could, I suppose, add, ‘and sometimes, especially in Ireland, to make a fresh start where an illegitimate pregnancy made it expedient for either party.’ But to be honest, songs about missing your homeland – or even your sweetheart back in the old country – aren’t likely to go into specifics about babies born in inconvenient circumstances.

However, reading Audible books during a period of forced inactivity, doesn’t mean they have to be connected with research. It’s an unaccustomed luxury to listen to books for hours on end, and I’d recommend this one. I have six more titles lined up, but I don’t think I’ll start them today. I like to let the memory of one sink in, before beginning another.

From Glasgow to New York with my next Audible Book

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m being kind to my eyes this month. I challenge myself to review every audio-book I listen to in February. But – they’ll be the briefest of reviews!

David Wilkerson – The Cross and the Switchblade

This book was famous in the ‘Sixties, when I was far too young to read and understand it – and it later became a film. I had heard of it, probably in my undergraduate days, but I’d never read it. Wilkerson was an American pastor who felt a calling to minister to gang members, drug addicts and others on the edge of society. He set up a whole chain of rehabilitation centres under the name of Teen Challenge. There was much to marvel at, as I listened to his narrative. He was fearless, and 101% committed to his cause. What he achieved was remarkable – and to add to that, the funds were achieved by devout, purposeful prayer. I have Christian faith myself, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered faith in action on the scale that Wilkerson, his team and his new converts practised. 

I don’t know how this book would come across to readers without faith. It in no sense preaches to the reader, but is just a straight, sincere narrative. I found it both moving and inspiring.

Vision for the Future

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Friends, a word of explanation. An eye problem had to be sorted out.  (Some pharmaceutical company somewhere had a sense of humour, calling their eyedrops a compound name beginning with ‘Cyclop’ ….)

So, whilst I convalesce, I have the use of one good eye.  I can type a few lines quite comfortably, but I realised yesterday that sitting at my laptop for any longer, only strains the good eye.  (I tried to set up a new spreadsheet – but I won’t try that again this month: I just got myself a headache which lasted much of today.)

Frustrating as it is, I can’t do anything research-related for a few weeks. I have new headphones and a new Audible subscription to help pass the time. 

I recommend Poor Things, by Alasdair Gray – a great discovery. There’s a film out now, too, but I don’t thinking I’ll be watching anything on the big screen in the immediate future.  (Ironically, the title –  which reminded me of an early 20th century London charitable organisation that I encountered in my research a year or so ago – has nothing whatsoever to do with that organisation, but I had worked that out before I bought the Audible book.)  I loved the fact that much of it is set in Glasgow, and also the way the reader’s expectations are confounded at the end.

I’m on a third book now.  After that, maybe I’ll see if I can find Walter Scott or James Hogg …

‘Reading’ a commercial audio book is wholly absorbing, but it makes me realise how hard it must be for a partially-sighted reader to skim a book. A recording is linear – there is no ‘Find’ function as in an e-text, and neither can you flick through,  hoping to find something you spotted first time round.  If chapter headings are meaningful, at least that gives the reader an indication of the book’s structure.

I wanted to post an explanation as to why there will be less activity on this blog in February, so there it is.  I’m taking care of my sight, as an investment for the future. Watch this space!

Image by …♡… from Pixabay