Curiosity

Himself has cleared out the man cave and it has turned into the home cinema room! This involved sorting through a ton of folders/files etc which dated back centuries. He had a huge clear out and as some of the material was potentially sensitive, hired a mobile shredder! I thought I ought to do the same and came across a bulging folder containing all my MA notes. In 2000 I made the rash decision to give up my enjoyable but exhausting job as a primary school teacher. I wanted to see if I could do anything else. Whilst waiting to see, Himself suggested I do an MA. I wanted to study something wonderfully obscure such as the Mycenaeans or Iron Age Britain ( holy wells had not then hit the radar), neither leading to potentially fruitful job openings. Instead I opted for Museum & Gallery Education at London Uni. Part-time and a mixed experience but the brain did get a good work out. This was my dissertation. The topic was interesting. I don't know if you know the Pitt Rivers Museum - it's a treasure trove of ethnographical and anthropological treasures. What's especially interesting is that everything is still displayed in Victorian cases complete with handwritten labels, and all artefacts are grouped according to subjects rather than chronologically. I decided it would be interesting to see why people went and what they actually did in there. Basically I found (you did want to know didn't you) that they do all sorts of strange stuff - some dart in to see something specific(the shrunken heads were notorious) others wander around randomly and some come in to shelter from the rain. 
The course was two years and during that time I discovered I could do quite a lot of things other than teaching. The  MA on top of that was pretty stressful, made more so by our deciding to move house and country just as the final dissertation was due in!  Arriving in Ireland, the computer didn't arrive until the second week, we had no printer and really I couldn't be arsed but somehow the end result was achieved. 
So here you have some artful shredding, and a host of memories! I suspect the research was less than earth shattering but looking through all that work, all those notes, all that jargon - has given me a laugh and a shudder!
PS the mobile shredder was amazing, a huge lorry thing and they were even prepared to come all the way down here.