Clair-in-the-community

Clair in the Community is a blog that I have set up as part of my 40th year on this planet. It is my creative thinking space and also a source of data for deconstructing the beautifully mundane about me, my life and my everything
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Now at a virtual rabbit hole near you….
. …Come join me on my virtual adventures…

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Well, this is it. My first blog. This is part of my list [not appropriate to call it a bucket one] of things I want to do in my 40th year. Yep I was born in 1975 (if you are from ancient Rome MCMLXXV will make sense). This was the year that the British Conservative Party selected Margaret Thatcher as the first woman leader and the Dutch Elm Disease wiped out more than three million Elm Trees in the United Kingdom. Along with my birth, it was an interesting year Queen got to UK no.1 with Bohemian Rhapsody, which kinda makes things better. A little.

So I am a Management and Organisation researcher at Bangor Business School (all thoughts, musings and words are of course my own on this site, and do not represent anyone else’s) I also have a PhD which sounds really clever cause you can call me Doctor; but actually means that as a student I reached a state of academic writing fatigue that has sent me mentally crazy; once certifiable – a student gets the doctorate.

I want to start this blog; and to continue it as a little space to record my thoughts, things that have appealed to me, things that have evoked a positive or possibly negative emotion in me – and I’m doing this for my science, my research, my love which is Autoethnography. I do have other loves; my beautiful children, my hubby, and my guilty pleasure

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I was deliberating about calling this blog Clair in the Academy because of why I wanted it for, and what I wanted it for; but those who know me best will know that Clair in the Community is a rather apt yet tounge-in-cheek take on who I am, and how I am, as the Mad Hatter once asked Alice:

“Have I gone Mad?” [Mad Hatter]
[Alice} “I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers.
But I’ll tell you a secret.
All the best people are”
Carroll, L., (1865) Alice in Wonderland
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They did break the mould when they made me (they also shut the hospital just after I was born… I kid you not) but I do like to tease and provoke what are typically mainstream assumptions of reality. The posh word for that is epistemology and I’ll chat to you about that again.

For now, and to begin with my collage of messy, contradictorary beautiful, yet arguably narcissistic thoughts and musings,

let me quote for a second time (and not for the last), dear Alice:

“Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”
The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?”
(ibid).

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So come with me

                               for a magic

                         adventure…

                     Down

                           a virtual

                                rabbit hole..

                            To who

                                      knows

                                            where……..