About

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”.
I enjoy rambling through the very long-nineteenth century, though I have been known to saunter into more contemporary times and have made occasional excursions further back into the byroads of the eighteenth century. The sites I frequent are, more often than not, found in Europe, with a particular attraction to the island of Ireland.
On my expeditions into the past, I dwell on curiosities and attempt to decipher their political, cultural and social significance. Manifestations of vernacular history, echoed in folklore traditions and oral narratives, are a source of continuing fascination. Finding my way through Mnemosyne’s labyrinths of social remembrance has provided stimulating challenges and, in recent years, I have navigated the river Lethe, trying to fathom the puzzles of social forgetting.
The road goes ever on.