‘[L]ife must be understood backwards. But…it must be lived forwards.’ Søren Kierkegaard*
A bit about me
I knew I wanted to be a historian when I was still in primary school. My seven-year-old self’s ambition was to go to university to study History and then share my interest with as many other people as possible.
That ambition led me to the University of Reading to read History. Whilst there I also made life-long friends, met my husband, played cricket and graduated with my precious History degree. But my studies didn’t stop there and I now also hold two Master of Arts degrees and a doctorate! That’s a lot of time and effort spent learning and honing my craft as a historian.
For more than 25 years I have had the joy and pleasure to work with historical material in various fields: academia, museums, heritage and education; and in roles as a writer, teacher, speaker, editor, curator and consultant. That rich professional and personal journey now continues through my freelance work.
My seven-year-old self’s fascination with history is still with me, and so too my passion to encourage others to make history part of their active life. I’m driven by wanting to share the pleasure of glimpsing the past and how that awareness helps us to see ourself afresh.
History to me is the very world we live in everyday, the here and now, inherited from our ancestors near and far. The objects we own, the streets we travel along, the buildings we inhabit, the words we use, the songs we sing are all riches given to us from the past. Curiosity helps to see them deeply and to understand ourselves more clearly.
Every step towards the past builds confidence for our walk into the future. Why not come with me on an adventure into history …
*Søren Kierkegaard’s extended passage of 1843, from which the well-known phrase is extracted, reads (in translation): “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.”
The shortened form reads, in Danish, ‘Livet må forstås baglæns. Men … det må leves forlæns.’