Alex Wakelam

Like everyone else, I'm fleeing despite my algorithm managing to remain pretty untoxic somehow awakelam.bsky.social

@sophie_gadd I would pay an unspeakable amount of money to own such a thing

Not the Princess Anne divorce mug

I see the Tories have gone for actually mad over pretending to be mad to fit in

... disappointed to announce it gets good about 150 pages in as long as you are super in to Victorian local government fiscal policy which, unfortunately, I am

I've read a lot of boring old books in my years as a historian that I have no idea why they were ever written let alone published but this one from 1901 might take the cake

Absolutely infuriating to read about unanimous political support for opposing water supply monopolies and trying to take it out of private hands IN EIGHTEEN FIFTY

Currently sat in a cafe under a church waiting for a delayed meeting to begin and there is a group of old women loudly debating whether one of them need to see a therapist, a psychic, or a chiropractor to sort out an unspecified issue. I HAVE QUESTIONS

@starryantiquary I mean that is a bit like worrying when your plucky small team which just managed to secure promotion to League Two fails to beat Man City to win the Champions League. They are *the* most competitive posts in academia

Made it two days into the new academic term before resorting to complete email honesty

@HallieRubenhold This is why they’re recommending you message beforehand to check whether it’s on site or in Yorkshire bl.libanswers.com/form?queue_id=…

Question for my fellow British Library users - post cyber attack we’re still ordering books up by paper slips. Does that mean I have to go into the BL, order up the book and then discover it’s kept at Boston Spa and won’t be available that day, or is there an easier way?

@starryantiquary I did one from Poland. Five minutes beforehand I accidentally blew all the fuses in the hotel while trying to plug in my laptop; the power came back 20 seconds before the interview. I hope yours either goes better or you acquire an even better disaster tale

@SarahABendall Oh sorry, I just copied in my old bookmark without checking properly. It does appear to be completely broken for me as well. It does seem to work occasionally but without any consistency. Sorry about that

@A_Wakelam Unfortunately I can't get this website to work (I can't seem to enter or select locations)

Extremely random: does anyone know how I could calculate how long it took to get to places by carriage in the 17th century? Specifically, I'm interested in how long it would take to get from St Albans to St James by the Marlboroughs in the 1690s...

@HortenseDAlton @SarahABendall It can be a bit buggy but if you're just looking for a quick "a to b" answer its certainly helpful

@A_Wakelam @SarahABendall That is so useful

@ellegist @Astroclassicist No idea if she’d still be available but Any was incredible (particularly if you’re looking for genuine photos of the day rather than staged ones). Really patient, funny, and non-intrusive but also crucially a phenomenal photographer amytaylorimagingphotography.com

@danwaterfield The week after I submitted my PhD I felt constantly ill and really struggled to do anything. I was worried I might be struggling with the end of the thesis but quickly realised this was due to not drinking 6-8 cups of black coffee a day from the ancient office coffee machine

Before I was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, I drank 2 8 cup cafetières of coffee per day. I followed the doctor’s instruction to cut back, but couldn’t get it down below 2 cups per day and apologised when I next saw her. ‘Oh that’s fine, most people don’t cut back’

@nicole_maceira Absolutely not. If it was that important I would have cited it somewhere in the footnotes even if I didn’t quote it directly. To do so otherwise screams to me of source stuffing and where would you possibly stop listing potentially tangentially relevant texts

Looking for some thoughts from those who have done a history (or related) PhD: did you include sources in your bibliography which you read but did not cite? Seeing a lot of both and wondered what the rationale is. Thanks 😊

@ProfDaveAndress Its the endless repetition that has driven it from a normal phrase to something that sets my teeth on edge - its making "levelling up" sound like a normal thing to say

Will they for the love of god stop saying "party before country". I have no problem with the sentiment but the election is over and as a set of words it just sounds weird - it sounds like it came from a focus group of aliens who learned English by google translating French poetry

@danwaterfield I went in the mid 2000s and there were lots of kids of academics, public servants etc. regardless of bursaries. Impossible to imagine they'd be there now - fees look like they've gone up 120% since 2010 let alone 2005. VAT will make that worse but the ship has already sailed

@A_Wakelam Yup, people still consider ‘70s > ‘10s as a comedown from the postwar boom &c, time of oil shocks &c, but compared to the post crash economy…

I went to a private school which was ‘affordable’ only because my grandfather was rich.