Hello there! Howdy. I hope you’re doing well in these- to quote every media outlet and their mum- “strange and/or unprecedented times”. I’m Emily, and I’m a first year Modern and Medieval Languages Student at Cambridge University, and, as the title suggests, I’m a northerner (from the criminally under appreciated county of Cheshire!) living in a southern (read: Cambridge) world! I thought I ought to write an introductory post outlining what I’m hoping to achieve with this blog, to entice you, dear reader, to read on!
Like many humanities student, and particularly, humanities students at Cambridge, I’ve been writing for a long time, but my literary pretensions have mainly been of the fictitious variety UNTIL NOW! Having always been deeply interested in social justice issues, as well as theatre, cinema, pop culture and politics, I decided that the best place to start to write more formally about these subjects would a blog, in the hope of gaining a wider audience to discuss a broad spectrum of issues! In light of the lockdown measures implemented by the UK in response to the COVID19 pandemic at the time of writing this post (13th April 2020), I thought, perhaps rather opportunistically, that I would at last use all of this endless free time which I suddenly seem to have to follow through on my goal to start a blog and, well, start a blog!
To be honest with you , if you’d ask me about a year ago about starting up a blog, I would most likely have laughed at you. Blogs were pretentious, I would have said. It’s weird what a pandemic does to you, isn’t it? But, in all seriousness, during times of such uncertainty and with the British social fabric in turmoil, all of the subjects about which I’m so passionate ordinarily when there’s not a pandemic raging on suddenly seem to have taken on a much greater significance. So, if you do decide to join me on this journalistic-ally tinged (mis)adventure (and I would be super grateful if you did!), then expect to see a spectrum of issues, with no particular coherence to the content of my posts, aside from the fact that from each one will relate directly to theatre, cinema, pop culture, or politics (or perhaps all four! Wild). I will be aiming (maybe overoptimistically) to post on a bi-weekly basis, and my posts will typically take on an essay format and will, hopefully, give you something to have a good think about!
Thanks so much for reading, and here’s to many more posts!
Emily 🙂
A Northern Girl in a Southern World 