Back to School

This week has been all about getting ready for the new academic year while enjoying the autumn sunshine. Anxious emails from my new students are already filling my inbox and we start in earnest tomorrow. But I love this time of year; it's a time of fresh starts, high hopes, a new uniform and sharp pencils.

In high hopes for the new year I visited A Squash and a Squeeze: Sharing Stories with Julia Donaldson at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which was great fun. I particularly liked the way the exhibits were displayed at child height. But there was a lot to interest adults too - Donaldson's notebooks and the correspondence between editors and illustrators gave a useful insight into the process of producing a picturebook. Alex Scheffler's doodle of the gruffalo crouched ominously on his back, made during the stressful process of producing the illustrations for Donaldson's best-selling book, was particularly poignant.

I also rediscovered this Taylor Mali performance, which I have used to introduce my Linguistics students to the blur between everyday and literary language. I'm starting to get excited about this year!

For back-to-school cool, I finished this addition to my autumn uniform. The pattern is buttonbox from Knitty.com. It goes really well with the tweed trousers I bought at the charity shop with Naomi on Monday.

And Naomi too starts a new academic year this weekend and a whole new life at university. I made this owl cushion to keep her company in her room. The pattern is from The Eternal Thread

We love you Naomi - have a wonderful time!

The Library of my Dreams

I went to the opening of the new Library of Birmingham yesterday and came home feeling full of inspiration. Malala Yousafzai gave the opening speech and the whole event felt very emotional. I kept thinking about past openings of Birmingham's public buildings - buildings that are so much part of the city's landscape and culture - and felt really proud to be there.  

Once inside, we were completely bowled over. It is an incredible building - stimulating and fun and, in Jo's words, 'the library of my dreams'. I was especially pleased to see so many of the library's collections of eighteenth and nineteenth-century journals out on the shelves. The building is both futuristic and reminiscent of the past and the materials used feel beautiful and solid - there's a lot of wood and stone. The outdoor areas are green and calm; there's a huge music library and film-viewing pods; the children's library is colourful and comfy. Around every corner and curve is something new and quirky. We spent about three hours just walking around yesterday and still didn't get to see everything. I'm really looking forward to spending lots of time there discovering new stuff.