I am writing a ghost story. 

It isn't a fictional story.  (Well, at least it isn't in that it's for a journal.)  But it is about me and an experience I had a couple of years ago now. 

I got lost in the woods (this was in West Yorks), and it got dark, and I fell over cobbles and tree roots, and I panicked.  I panicked not just because I was lost, but because every ghost story anyone in the area had ever told me (and people told lots) came flooding into my head.  I was absolutely terrified that, at any moment, a spectre would loom up ahead of me.  I really believed, right then, that it could happen. 

But it didn't and I made it home. 

So it isn't really a ghost story, because there isn't really a ghost.  There's just me, lost and panicking in the woods. 

I'm writing about it because I'm interested in the relationship between the supernatural, history and place.  It was that experience which made me think about how those pieces might be connected.  I'm also rather enamoured of the idea of a historical anthropology that looks at how people in the present experience the past, especially the past beyond memory.  (I will periodically talk about that on this blog because, in my PhD, it's What I Do.) 

Problem is, every time I open the file with the half-finished article in it, I bottle it.  Can't write.  Nothing to say.  (I'm in good company since Tracey's got nothing to say either!)

Although it's less about having nothing to say than being uncomfortable with the whole saying it bit. 

At our Ethnography Forum on Friday, we had a speaker on autoethnography (that is, using yourself and your experiences as data).  I get it, and I get that in this article I'm flirting with autoethnography.  And it gives me the jitters. 

It gives me the jitters because I've been trained to study other people, not to study myself.  It's OK to say how my background or attributes might impact on that study (as a woman I'm not likely to get to the heart of a men-only morris dancing group, for example) but not OK to actually be the study.  It seems my internal what-is-anthropology boundaries have been so well constructed (thanks ANTHRO 721 Method & Theory) that it's proving difficult to hop over them. 

I worry too about my 'right' to speak.  After all, I'm not from West Yorkshire, I'm from New Zealand.  Can I say that from my experience I learnt something about West Yorkshire?  Am I claiming more than I should? 

Lastly I have niggles about it only being one story.  I'm only one person; I'm not a pattern or a generalisation.  I'm used to the idea of talking to a bunch of people.  Talking to one - and myelf at that - can I say anything meaningful? 

I have been hesitating throughout this week about writing a post on the comprehensive spending review.  Since most of the posts and articles I've been reading have been CSR-related, I haven't posted any of them here whilst I contemplate.  So, this handful of links is a bit of a CSR black hole. 

Having said that, the Inequalities blog have a good article on how the coalition has 'found it so easy to cut benefits for the poor'.  This is more about social attitudes than the CSR itself and it's very much worth a look. 

The North-South divide has been cropping up in the news with concerns the CSR cuts will aggravate it.  So it must be John Bulmer time.  Still, oldies but goodies: John Bulmer's North.  (Vaguely related note: I've just started reading Helen Jewell's book about the North-South divide, and I had never before twigged that Northumbria = North of the Humber.)

The Heritage Crafts Association are reporting that skills minister John Hayes has highlighted support for craft skills in a recent speech at the RSA.  This is good news for the HCA, but 1) how seriously do we take this as an indication of potential government policy? and 2) if we do, and we read it alongside the Browne report on higher ed (and do read Stefan Collini's article in the LRB on that front), should we be worried about it as a vision for education which isn't really doing any favours for the social status of traditional crafts? 

Completely unrelated to any of the above (unless we get into spectral ethnography; but that's only my new favourite thing on Tuesdays), Peter Ackroyd has a new book out about the English ghost.  Related to the spectres of English Catholicism, apparently.

And speaking of ... the CofE blogosphere has been firing busily over news not only of the ordinariate but of every women-back-in-the-kitchen brigade charging out to form their own non-secret society.  As I imagine it, a Society of St Teatowel and St Nappy meeting would consist of a chorus of "more tea, vicar?" from 1950s housewives.  It could all go horribly wrong when the housewives turn out to actually be Sharon's Dita Von Teese-themed hen night.