What is my life?

This piece starts with a question.  What is my life?  Well I hope that you don't expect any juicy gossip or the opening up to the world of my deepest private thoughts.  This is about me, the me that people see or maybe what I perceive that they see.  I am not sure if that is the same thing.  I suppose not.

I have always wanted to do as many things as possible.  I think that is why I am writing this.  I want to write a book and any practice is good practice.  I work in a museum and art gallery in Derby.  That's the Derby in England not the one in Kentucky, Australia or anywhere else.  Derby's not a bad city.  Not London, Rome or Paris but still full of pride for what it has produced in the past. This is not a history of Derby so I will move on.

I have worked for about 20 years in museums and on archaeological sites in England.  To you it may sound boring, but for someone who at a very young age (8ish) catalogued all sorts of collections in a private museum in their bedroom and kept a nature diary every time I left the house it is my dream job.  To get a job in a museum you have to be committed.  There are two reasons for this commitment - firstly without commitment you have no chance of getting a job in a museum.  Hours and hours of voluntary work and evenings working in pubs to pay for it.  I volunteered, weekends, at the Nene Valley Railway for a couple of years from about the age of 15 and in my summer holiday (for about half of it with the other half working for money) on an archaeological excavation.  The other reason is a financial one - you will never earn a fortune working n a museum unless you have some sort of lucky break.  Often the more that you earn the less of the work that you really enjoy that you do.  Now I am a museum manager who hardly ever has time to look at museum objects or to talk to visitors.  It all seems to be forms, balance sheets and reports.  I would like to think that what I do helps others to enjoy museum visits and to relate to the objects that they see and handle, even if I don't do any of it myself.

I seem to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.  I can hold an intellegent conversation about all sorts of subjects - art history, social history politics, trees ancient crafts, ecology, gardening - but I dont really know that much about any of them.  I give lectures on American History in the 18th Century, Bronze Age Logboats, the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, the museums art collection, conservation in museums, museum ethics, how artists can use museum collections, you name it and I will talk about it!  I have published articles about museum conservation, iron age weaving combs, Bronze Age axes and other metalwork, museum architecture, the digitisation of museum collections, you name it and I will write about it!  I am on lots of committees and museum groups to help museums formulate local, regional and national strategy.  I like getting qualifications, especially if I can do it with out having to pay for it.  Oxfordshire County Council payed for my MA in 1996, Derby City Council paid for me to do a post graduate certificate in management last year - I wonder what I can do next?

I know what I want to do - not much.  I know that this is a contradiction from what I said at the beginning of this page, but I am allowed to change my mind.  I would like to not have to work at all.  Nothing unusual there I suppose, lots of people probably feel the same.  I would like to own a house without a loan.  I would like to grow as much of my own food as possible, be as self sufficient as possible.  I would like to have the lowest impact on the environment as possible.  I would miss my bottle of wine or occasional trip to Italy, but I would not miss the stress of people management, budget balancing and visitor expectation.  My be if I had the right skills to write a book I could earn myself enough money so that I would not need to work too hard to help me with some of the luxuries that I want.  I have also got to persuade my family that they want to live in a house without all of the modcons that everyone else seems to spend their time working to purchase.

Watch this space and I will let you know how I get on.  One day I might just find the right compromise.