Decided not to take camera to barbecue on south beach yesterday, which was a mistake. One can never have enough photos of the beach on a beautiful June afternoon. So instead here’s a photo from August 2004, taken from the castle – I’m quite surprised I never posted this one at the time, because it’s one of my favourites.
South Beach from the castle mound (facing roughly south west I think)
Well, as I’ve said, I’m taking a summer holiday from blogging. I might post some photos (or put them up on my Flickr page), and there’ll be a notice about this month’s Carnivalesque to come before long, but don’t expect any real posts here for a couple of months. (Update: Well, there might be some occasional action in the miniblog…)
Two people generously offered to take over the History Carnival in my absence, and so they get to take turns. Both will be well known to some of you: Laura James of Clews will be deputising through to the 1 July issue and Another Damned Medievalist of Blogenspiel will take over from 15 July to 15 August. We have a fine line-up of hosts. Announcements about upcoming editions will be posted in various places, but if at any time you’re not sure where the next edition will be, just use the submission form to send nominations and they’ll get to the right place.
And… I have a newly acquired good reason for taking some time off blogging for a couple of months: I’m starting a new job in August. I’ll be managing two online primary source projects at the University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute: The Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court 1834-1913 (a continuation of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, of which I’m a great fan, as you may recall) and Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London 1690-1800. It’s going to be utterly cool. But the next two months will be more than a bit frantic.
So, have a good summer everyone, and I’ll be back in late August or September.
Some of you will have heard of David Cameron’s A-list, part of his unstinting and useless selfless efforts to modernise his party, specifically in this case to get more women and ethnic minority candidates selected for safe Tory seats.
Some of you may also know that there will shortly be a by-election in the ultra-safe and ultra-Little-England Tory seat of Bromley & Chislehurst following the sudden death of the last incumbent Eric Forth (who was not exactly one of David’s buddies). David would like (but won’t force) the constituency party to select one of his A-listers. In truth, the best he can probably hope for is that they might select Forth’s widow, even though she’s not exactly one of his buddies either.
So Channel 4 is reporting the story from the constituency and interviews an old friend of the dead bloke, who comes out with the line (update: edited now I’ve been able to check the video clip, about 4 minutes in):
“I think they’ll be looking for a candidate who’s quite normal rather than a candidate who’s exotic”.
David really does have his work cut out with this bunch…
Amy Stevens has posted the latest History Carnival in two segments: part one and part two. (She’s also posted the raw list of submissions via Blog Carnival for tagging purposes, which reveals over 45 submissions – many of which look pretty good – were made using the submission form. It’s clearly become an essential tool for the carnival.)
… For the nth time recently, I’ve forgotten to tell the current host who will be the next host. (This is one of many pieces of evidence I’d present to demonstrate why I need a bit of a break.) It will be, of course, on 15 June and will be hosted by Jenni Weber at American Presidents Blog (email coppertop67[AT]hotmail.com).
The other news of the day is that I have not one but two worthy people to run the joint for the next couple of months – you’ll learn more soon when we’ve ironed out the details. So this will probably be my last edition in charge until August. (But I’ll be here for the upcoming early modern Carnivalesque, of which there’ll also be more news shortly.)