Last week I had a day haunted by my mother. It started with an unexpected email from a very old friend of hers with good wishes for the new year. Then there were the references to Jim Kitten’s work for Lyons’ catering arm in Matt Houlbrook’s The Song of Seven Dials which I am currently reading, prompting me to think about how the histories of migration and social integration my mother was mapping through her family history research in the final years of her life can engage with those Matt exposes in his excellent book. And finally my husband suggested that we watch Ben Stiller’s documentary about his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. My brother had recommended it to us over the holidays, on the basis that there were a lot of shots of the apartment building where we grew. The Stillers were our neighbours, quite literally next door, occupying 5AB while we were in 5D, sharing a back hallway for the bins and the emergency exit stairway.

The emotional gut-punch of the film for me, however, wasn’t so much the images of the distinctive awning at the corner of 84^th and Riverside, and Riverside Park, or even the Proustian emotions evoked by pictures of the Stillers from the 1980s, familiar from regular encounters in the lobby of a building Ben refers to accurately as its own eco-system. Rather it came from the framing of the documentary not only around the hours of home video and tape recording that Jerry Stiller made and preserved, but the clearing of the apartment and its subsequent ‘staging’ by realtors for sale. Because, about a year before, the same thing had happened in my mother’s apartment following her death from pancreatic cancer in 2018. (I say my mother’s apartment because it was the place she lived for nearly forty years, raised her children and died. It was also my father’s apartment throughout my childhood, but he gave her full ownership when they divorced at the turn of the 21^st century, after which she redecorated, making it very much her own.)

The number of ways in which my mother’s memory was evoked that day may have been rather more intense than usual, but the fact is that, that I am reminded of her  on an almost daily basis, even nearly seven and a half years after her death. I use her sewing scissors and cooking equipment. Some of her (many, many) books are now displayed on my bookshelves. I wear her earrings when I dress for professional speaking engagements in the hopes they will endow me with some of her skill in holding a classroom.

Her memory shapes other aspects of my professional life as well. Matt’s book is not the only work of history that I have read through the prism of my mother’s research into the complexities of the Gluckstein family, of which we are descendants. My responses to Laura King’s and Michael Roper’s books on the methodological importance of family histories have also been informed by her interest and the archive that she left me. Even more, my sense of myself as an academic has been shaped by the fact that my mother was, for many years, a teacher, and a very good one. Of the three main roles that 21^st century academics are expected to undertake – research, administration and teaching – the last has always been the one I have had most difficulty embracing. While for many it is the primary role of a university lecturers, one which energises them and inspires their scholarship, for me it often feels like a duty that I will never be able to bear lightly or with grace. As a result, I don’t believe that I will ever have the skill, the creativity or the passion to inspire students as a truly great teacher (and I have had a few in my time) can. In short, I will never be as good at it as my mother was.

Why am I posting this now? Because, as of today, for the next eighteen months, I am in a position to be able to slough off the anxiety of never quite living up to my mother as a teacher as I attempt to fulfil the other ambition that we shared, to write full time. I am taking a sabbatical from Leeds to finish writing my next two books, a history of masculinity and warfare from 1750 to 2000 in global perspective, under contract with Polity Press, and a history of the social and cultural impact of First World War ex-servicemen on 20^th century Britain, the book I have been trying to complete since the Men, Women and Care project ended in 2020. (It really is almost there; I have a central thesis and, I think, the right tone for a project that will be something more than an academic monograph).

But what I have realised in the past week, picking through the emotions arising from the reminders of my mother and her loss, as well as the fears that have surfaced as this change in circumstances grew ever closer, is that there are lots of other things I want to write as well – the history of Golden Age detective fiction and the world wars that has haunted me since I wrote my Phd thesis, a work of fiction that has been coming together, in fits and starts for nearly as long and, it turns out to my surprise, my take as a social and cultural historian of early twentieth century Britain on my family history. This last has been sparked in part by The Song of Seven Dials, which places Lyon’s in the context of the modernisation of London in ways which suggest further exploration of its creation as the family business of a complex family of Jewish immigrants could prove worthwhile, as well as by a request for information from my playwright cousin which prompted speculative questions about name changes by my ancestors. So yes, I might be ready to unpack the boxes in the office that are my mother’s archive and pick up the task of writing about her family which she never managed to complete herself.

I plan to reflect on my writing to some extent on social media (these days Bluesky rather than the site formerly known as Twitter), but not everything, particularly the family history, is suitable either for traditional publication or dissemination as a social media thread. All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that I will, once again, be reviving this blog as a space of record and reflection both on subject and process. Having tried to lay the groundwork for some effective writing habits through the semester of research leave I enjoyed at the end of 2025, I will use this space to keep me disciplined about writing something every day, as well as for exploring ideas as they emerge.

I hope you will join me as I shift gears and possibly course in this latest stage in my career as a historian and in the life of this blog.