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30/5/2016 0 Comments

The history of pets

Pets are cultural artefacts, aren’t they?
Every now and then I like to nip into the shop ‘Pets at Home’ to browse the animals for half an hour or so. It’s like a miniature zoo with it’s assortment of furry, aquatic and reptilian creatures. At one point I was considering getting a rat. I’d heard they make good pets: that they were intelligent and could be trained to do things. Plus, I liked that Michael Jackson song Ben, which is a boy’s affectionate homage to a rat of the same name: ‘You’ve got a friend in me.’ Having a rat sounded like having a dog, but less trouble. So I did some research into rats. I spent a while observing them in the pet shop, being careful not to loiter too long in one place as the staff start to look at you suspiciously, and then the look turns to indignation as if you should be paying for the privilege. It turned out that I didn’t find rats very appealing. Looks aren’t everything, I know, but I didn’t find them particularly attractive with their weird hand-claw feet, their wormy long tails, their yellow daggery front incisors and their sharp twitchy faces. I found them a bit intimidating. They’d probably end up being the boss in our relationship, and I’d probably have nightmares about them escaping. Then there’s the stigma of the Black Death. Then I found out that ‘Ben’ was actually a killer rat from the horror film of the same name. That put the lid on it really: I definitely wasn’t getting a rat.    


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    I recently completed an academic research project (MPhil) about working-class women’s autobiographies. Now I’m writing my own...

    To cut a long story short:

    My dad and both my grandads were coal miners. I was born in Coalville. I belong on this website. 
    I returned to education as a mature student: got a couple of A-levels, went to university; got a BA, an MA, a PhD, and an MPhil. It was not as easy as that. It was not as quick as that. But I did.
    I have spent most of my adult-life studying something. Generally something to do with English literature: mainly something to do with working-class women. My MA is about Women and God – inspired by and emotively written through my experiences as a pupil at Catholic primary and secondary schools. My PhD and MPhil projects are about working-class women writers – inspired and emotively written through my experiences as a working-class woman in a materialistic and class-ridden society. When I was an undergraduate at university, there wasn’t a module about working-class writing. There just wasn't. I didn’t study any working-class texts. I just didn’t. I once gave a research paper about my PhD (ie: talking about my work) and I remember someone laughingly said, ‘Was there a recession in the 1980s? I must have missed that.’ That just about sums it up.
    I have had no working-class peers. I found them in my reading and writing. In my reading and writing I found myself.

    Welcome to my blog.
    It's basically about me.It’s called ‘My Travel Blog’ (because I’m time travelling through my memories of the past). See what I did there?


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