travelling adventure, eight weeks later: an update, two announcements and an invitation

In this blog - a bit of an update, two announcements and an invitation 

Thank you so much for your support and encouragement over the past months. This year has been pretty brilliant and I’m so glad I pushed myself to do my Six Months Travelling Adventure - at the end of the year I’m broke but happy!I’ve been back in the UK now for exactly eight weeks. It’s been an odd time. The main thing that has changed is that I absolutely don’t want anything to do with any of the stuff that I packed away in the storage unit before I went away. My lovely tenants and I shared a storage unit, they put their furniture in there and I put my ‘things’ in.And none of us have been quick to empty the unit!I’ve been three times and taken a handful of things like the microwave, sheets, cutlery...and have a list of about 20 other things that I’d quite like to keep.But apart from that, I’m just not interested in surrounding myself with all the books and other ‘stuff’ that I’ve been carting round for the last 40 years from house to house, etc etc. I have been fine for the last six months travelling - and the latest 8 weeks since I’ve been home - with the contents of two bike panniers and a rucksack and a few more bits and pieces ... and I don’t seem to need much more than that.So a neighbour here has said she’ll help me with getting rid of my things... I’ve waited just to make sure that this urge doesn’t disappear , but it seems to be getting stronger and stronger. So I hope I’ll be well and truly ‘downsized’ by the end of January and that the time away will lead me to a new lightness of being and some new opportunities whatever they may be.

my bookshelves

With all the promises I made to myself of less work, more ‘outside’, more animals, more recordings, more music (bikes, mics, hikes... and goats, boats and notes) I have actually done very little on the ‘working with animals’ or podcasting front, but I have been playing music a lot - going to the regular weekly Lancaster folky session on and off on Thursday nights and to a monthly Irish session in Preston.
For the animals , I’ve now nearly finished filling in the volunteer form so I can go and help with mucking out for the British Thoroughbred Retraining Centre near our village in a few weeks.
I’ve been on a few walks and tried out a new gym that I might join .... I’ve done some new yoga classes and been running .  One of my neighbours had her sister, Rachelle Dart, staying here, who happens to be an expert in Stage Fighting Choreography - so I did a fabulous Unarmed Combat afternoon with her the other week and had the most fun I've had for ages.  And I’ve met some people with boats on Windermere to go and play with in the spring.
One of my favourite things is Klezmer dancing - it makes my soul sing. We had a fab Klezmer dancing day in Lancaster in November, and in early December I went down to Hertford to call some Klezmer dancing for an Art Club Christmas Party with Marianne Dorn, a lovely fiddle player/singer I met at a Klezmer session in London in October - so I’ve had more or less enough Klezmer input this year . Here's Marianne's duo Kleztopia playing Goldene Khasene to lift YOUR soul.  

(On the trip to Hertford I stayed with my uni friend Tina and we went to a fab ‘author talk’ by Sophie Hannah, a lovely little side adventure. And I'd been to a talk by Karine Polwart the day before in Glasgow - so I had a full dose of gorgeous culture - driven by amazingly talented women - that week).

For the sound editing, so far I’ve got a lovely new (reconditioned) Apple Mac computer set up in a corner of an office at Halton Mill next to where I live ...And I have found another podcaster, and we have set up a date for a ‘Podcasting Network’ meeting (the morning of 22nd Feb) to find out who else is around and harness some motivation for ourselves.

(Luckily my fellow podcaster is a graphic designer :-) )

I’ve recorded some music sessions while I’ve been home, and I continue to meet fascinating people when I’m out and about (the chair of Deaf-Blind Scotland and Deaf-Blind UK who I met when I was on the way home from a day of Sensory Impairment training, weirdly enough, for example - and a lovely woman working in the post office today who wants to do a phd on Literary Representations of Women Addicts) but haven’t done any more interviews yet. I have loads of editing to do of the interviews I do have - but I do have a plan to catch up with all of them this year!  My aim is to clear out my life a bit so that I can pursue these random associations a lot more as well as revisit all my recordings from my travelling....

I’ve been mainly concentrating on three things in the eight weeks I’ve been back, all of which are projects which will come to an end at some point allowing me the time and space to pursue other things.   One of my two part time jobs is at Halton Mill, the coworking and event space near my house where I am now jobsharing the operations manager role.  We've taken on a new 3 day a week administrator so after spending a few more weeks  handing over all the work areas, hopefully I’ll have a lot less to do there in 2019.  There's an exciting new spring/summer programme at the Mill ... (in which you'll see Rachelle Dart is doing another Mass Battle afternoon, in February, as mentioned above. Highly recommended!)

The other two things I've been fully engaged in since I've been home are the Hannah Frank Art Project - lots to say about that below - and getting The Book of the PhD out into the world! And as I said earlier, I have two big announcements to make... and an invitation.

The Hannah Frank 110th Birthday Exhibition opened at Glasgow Uni on 19th November and runs till 6 February next year . It’s at the Memorial Chapel, and is open 9-5 Monday to Friday. It opens again after Christmas on Monday 7 January. It looks absolutely beautiful - it’s been curated by my great team of Glasgow Uni students and there’s a programme of free weekly tours, talks and workshops (including two Experimental Embroidery workshops, Friday lunchtime talks with fascinating speakers, weekly tours on a Monday afternoon) running till the end of the exhibition. (see www.hannahfrank.org.uk for details and please tell your Scottish friends...). The opening was a fab occasion with around 150 guests ...

Above: With Alice Strang, Senior Curator at Scottish National Galleries, who opened the exhibition with some very nice words about Auntie Hannah

Below: with Geanina, Lilith, Jess, Lisa, Sylvie and Erin, my fabulous Glasgow Uni interns - and with Hillhead MP Patrick Grady and East Kilbride MSP Linda Fabiani - and my boss at my other part time job, at the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, Ephraim Borowski.  Patrick Grady and Linda Fabiani sponsored motions in Westminster and Holyrood commending the exhibition and the work that the interns and I are doing to bring Auntie Hannah's work to new audiences. 

And (announcement no 1) I am very happy to say that I have been successful in gaining the Creative Scotland bid that I resubmitted while I was in France in October : £7200 to work with my fabulous Glasgow Uni student volunteers to bring the art of Hannah Frank to the widest possible audiences, and to catalogue and clean up her art works in order to allow future curators to have the info they will need to put on the ‘150th Birthday Exhibition’! We’ll be making a big press announcement about this in the new year and hopefully it will bring loads of people to the gallery.
Announcement no 2:After many years of procrastination , I just received 25 proof copies of the Book of my PhD and have started sending them out to reviewers! This is a looong journey which started in 2004...

(the pic below is with my neighbour who helped me open the box cos I was too overexcited to open it myself). 

 ‘Candles, Conversions and Class: five generations of a Scottish Jewish Family’ is published by the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre and will be launched at Glasgow University Chapel on the evening of Sunday 3 February at 630 pm. This coincides with the last weekend of the Hannah Frank Art Exhibition so you’ll be able to see that too if you can join me.

As it says on the blurb:

“Rabbi Zvi David Hoppenstein and his wife Sophia arrived in Edinburgh in the 1880s. For her PhD at the Scottish Oral History Centre, Strathclyde University, Fiona Frank tracked down and interviewed Zvi David and Sophia’s descendants across the UK and as far as Cape Town.”Speakers at the launch include Kenneth Collins, chair of the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre, writer/broadcaster Billy Kay and members of the Hoppenstein family : as well as a Klezmer music session led by Glasgow’s The Bunch of Klezmer and a kosher buffet sponsored by SCoJeC (the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities).

YOU are invited to join me at this event - to reserve a free place (and/or preorder a copy of the book of course, but that's not compulsory!) please go to www.trybooking.co.uk/4826 - where you’ll also see details of the launches in Lancaster (13 Feb) and London (8 April) - all welcome at all these events .

Invitation!

And an extra special invitation - I had an idea in the summer to book a big Airbnb and make a weekend of it. There are still two spare double rooms [UPDATE - NOW ONE ROOM] in a gorgeous big house that I’ve booked from 1st to 4th February - at £60/night for a double room. We’re doing a Burns Supper Friday evening meal, and the weekend coincides with the last weekend of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival so there’s loads to do all weekend apart from my book launch on the Sunday evening. Here’s a link to the Airbnb  and here’s a link to the Celtic Connections programme to whet your appetite (the Young'uns or Karine Polwart on the Saturday night both look unmissable, which is already causing me some kind of existential crisis).

(There are also optional book-launch-related activities like going to the Scottish Jewish Archives open day on the Sunday afternoon, a synagogue service at Glasgow's oldest synagogue, Garnethill, on the Saturday morning, and a tour of the places the Hoppenstein family lived in Glasgow on the Sunday morning ... )

If you fancy joining me for the weekend and taking one of the last 2 rooms please let me know ASAP. (I want to make sure they're filled and that it's a lovely house-party weekend!)

I’m spending Christmas and Boxing Day with my sister and my nieces and my mum - it’s the first Christmas without my brother in law so it will be hard and strange. Even yesterday at a Christmas gathering I went to locally, someone from the south of England was talking about their town aiming to take on the ‘Preston Model’ which Peter as leader of the council played a large part in driving forwards. He’s a hard act to follow in public life, and leaves an enormous void in his family.  We'll be thinking of him.

Wishing you all a good holiday and a good 2019 - and thanks for coming on my journey in 2018.

Love Fiona