Life…

To paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams, it happens. And when it happens, all you can do is roll with it. If nothing else, the last almost-four years have certainly made me re-appraise how I view it.

I turned 50 just after I posted last; and then the world went mad. During the intervening time, I seem to have become a different person, and not solely due to the worldwide pandemic: I went through the menopause, moved house (again, yes!), lost people and gained people (personally and professionally). I became a Grannie in April 2022 to a lovely boy who is the centre of our universe (and really not playing to it, oh no, not at all!). For obvious reasons, I’m not posting a photo of him; the cover photo of this post is of the river at the bottom of our garden in flood earlier this month (don’t worry, we don’t need an Ark: it’s about ten feet straight up to us!).

As a result of good/bad fortune, we’ve been able to move back to the Hope Valley, where we started our journey in 2006; we’re now the other side of the valley. It is lovely to be back here, but our house is most definitely a work in progress! What with all this going on, plus recent family stuff, I laid down the Chartership banner at the last hurdle, but have now decided the time is right to pick it right back up again. However…

…in the meantime, my mentor has retired! I was really sorry I didn’t manage to complete under their guidance, and believe me it was no reflection on my mentor! So I am now trying to find a new mentor, to match this new enthusiasm I have for my progression to Chartered status.

I haven’t been resting on my laurels though, oh no! I’ve been working on upskilling using technology – didn’t really have a choice, since we were moved to fully online delivery in March 2020 and I do so much teaching. I lost a valued colleague: two, actually, but one I worked very closely with in my College. For a year (due to a necessary restructure within our team) this meant that I was not only supporting AHP as the Subject Librarian, but also the large Nursing cohort (a colleague helped by supporting Midwifery and Social Work, which was very welcome – they are smaller cohorts as said colleague has other duties).

This situation really pushed me outside my comfort zone, but made me think a little outside the box. How can one (rather small) Librarian support nearly 3k students? Hmmm… Well, let’s see. How about if I do large online lectures? Yes? Absolutely. How about if I move some content onto one of these new fan-dangled platforms that are suddenly sprouting everywhere? Yes? Absolutely. How about we look at flipped learning? Yes? Absolutely. Shall I get the academic buy-in for this? Yes? Absolutely!

So, there will be more on this, given that I have suddenly found my blogging mojo, but I did all of the above, and more. Lots of new skills learned, networks networked, new colleagues met and courses attended. Far too much for one, re-introductory blog post. I’ll be back. Watch this space…