One of my dog-walking routes. It might be cold out there, but it’s warm in here and there’s work to be done.
Welcome from the kitchen table, home to the weird and wonderful world of a stay-at-home historian. I do have an office downstairs where all my books crowd around me and my dad’s desk expects great thoughts (which is strange, because he worked in figures, not words). At first glance, it’s a small world – I get up, manoeuvre my son out of bed and onto the school bus via a cursory nibble at two pieces of toast, walk the dog along (very lovely) routes I have taken hundreds if not thousands of times over the past twenty years. And then I come home, make a pot of coffee to last all morning and get to work.
In the old days, when I was a lass and there was no such thing as t’internet (though we did have computers), I had to go places to do my research. The reading rooms of the Public Record Office in London (now The National Archives) and the Scottish Record Office in Edinburgh (now … em … oh yes, the National Records of Scotland – the standing joke is that it changes its name so often, if I just keep calling it the Scottish Record Office, one day I’ll be right again) are quiet, monastic places where old men gently snooze among old documents and ancient tomes while eager young people creep around in awe as they are inducted into the hallowed portals of the past. Or swallow their rising panic as they only manage to read and translate one short document in the whole of the first day (yes, that was me, but I did get a lot quicker).
But now, though there are still documents to be found and read in record offices, so many old books – including those containing transcriptions of old documents or chronicles – have been digitised that I rarely have any excuse to go to London or even Edinburgh. It would be nice to get out more, but then again, I don’t need to leave the kitchen table to travel through time and space. Whatever I’m doing – whether it’s pinning down Robert Bruce, planning my first novel or writing something here – I’m off on a journey to a foreign country where the people are different and whose differences must be respected even if there is much that is recognisable about them.
I don’t know why I love guddling around in the past, but I do. And though there’s not much money in it, I’m so lucky to be able to sit here and just write. But I’d better take the dog out first …
Fiona Watson's ups and downs of an everyday historian 