Hello everyone! A practical sort of update, intended really for those people who mostly follow me on twitter. As I wrote in my last post, I’m locked out of twitter, and now I am getting an error message like the one above. Emails to twitter support have gone unanswered, and I’m not feeling terribly optimistic I’ll get back in.

So, what to do? I could start a new account, and try to manually follow a bunch of you. I could actually use the mastodon account I set up when everyone was scared twitter was melting (feel free to follow me there, in case I do). Or I could accept that this tweeting bit of my life is closed for now. I’m undecided. I have got a great deal of fellowship, friendship, scholarship out of twitter. I’ve also got lots of headaches I didn’t want. And I have been struck by how, out of the 11.4k people who follow me on twitter, only a small number have followed up with me outside of that environment. I’m not saying this to guilt trip anyone. I know what life is like! But it does make me think: it’s easy to give too much of myself to a site like that, when it can’t really love you back. So, I shall reflect on that and maybe come to a decision in the new year.

There’s lots of you I do like and want to keep in touch with, though! Lots of you have found me over on Instagram and I’m happy to have you follow my public profile there. If we know each other well, I’m willing to be facebook friends (which I keep for friends and family, as I post a lot of family pictures etc there). And for scholarly related things you can always drop my institutional email a line!

Since I’ve been off twitter, I’ve had a couple of articles come out.

“Let Him Walk with You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, and the Women they Left Behind, in Medieval Feminist Forum

NotAllMen: In Conversation with Lucia Akard and Samantha Katz Seal in Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Both are in paywalled journals but I’m happy to share my file – get in touch.

Wishing you all good things for Christmas, if you celebrate it, and I hope whatever your views of the festive season, that you get some time to unwind and recharge before 2023 starts. See you soon!

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

If you’ve enjoyed my work on the blog this year, you can leave a tip on kofi. Thank you!