Five times 15.
Thank you so much for having me and good evening everyone.
So I was a very nostalgic child, blending fairy tales with horrible histories.
I'd spend hours luxuriating and imagined and rose tinted view of a past I'd never experienced.
I was a huge Enid Blyton fan and I spent so much of my time wishing and demanding almost my parents would send me away from my 1990s like local primary to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall so I could live out those fantasies.
They refused and so instead I spent every day going to my otherwise uniform free state school in a little button down shirt and pleated skirt.
As I grew older,
I cut some of these emotional ties to the past and developed a much more cynical relationship with history.
I did the history degree and then another and another,
turning into a much more steely academic that tried to avoid the kind of sentimentality I'd indulged in the past.
And the reason for this is that academic historians have a pretty low opinion of nostalgia.
They see it as the preserve,
or rather they tend to see it as the preserve of amateurs, reenactors, hobbyists, popularisers.
You know, they can be snobs sometimes,
but really the point of being an academic historian, after all,
is to turn a much more critical lens at the past,
a critical lens at history, and see it for what it is, warts and all.
Nostalgia and that kind of vision of the past don't really meld very well.
And also, nostalgia is supposed to be at odds with some other aspects of my personality or identity.
I suppose I see myself as politically progressive and personally an optimist.