The trip to Cambridge was frustrating but ultimately quite productive. My co-author had very little down on paper but seemed to have enough of an idea in her head about what she is going to write to go through the pile of stuff I have written and help me to reorganise it more coherently. She does seem to be making very heavy weather of it all, though. Early on in the project when it became clear that the archivist had done a lousy job, only part of the papers had been digitised and the keywords for searching the site were very limited, I arranged for the son of a friend who was at a loose end to transfer all the details from the site into a spreadsheet with direct links to the site for the digitised material. I've found this really useful because it's much more easily searchable and the direct links make it very easy to use. But she obviously hasn't used it at all and on our research trips has photocopied a great deal of material unnecessarily when she could have just downloaded it.
The library in Cambridge is very over-heated and there were too many sniffing students. The hotel was less comfortable than on previous trips - my room was on two levels with a staircase in the middle which was a bit disconcerting and although there was a very fancy coffee maker on the desk it took me some time to locate the tea making facilities, in the wardrobe...
I am very pleased to be home, in spite of the huge number of emails waiting for my attention. I've been catching up with the tweets and LinkedIn messages - some worthwhile discussions about NEDs to follow up. Some of my online pals seem to be able to read huge amounts of stuff very quickly and I really can't keep up. The Canadian professor is on sabbatical which explains why he has time for all this reading.
But I shall leave everything for now to spend some time with Freddie who has had an eye operation and is wearing a "lampshade" so keeps bumping into things because he can't feel his whiskers.
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