Wednesday 16 July 2014: We fly from Manchester to Frankfurt to Jo’burg to Port Elizabeth and then drive to Grahamstown starting quite early on Saturday, with Friday hopefully a ‘quiet day’ of nothing much. And ‘we’ are me (Liz Stanley), Andrea Salter and Sue Wise. For me, the terror of forgetting the computer lead, notebook, propelling pencils, camera battery charger, phone charger, I-Pad charger, brain charger, oh my god the computer, has started. A pile of things like notebooks, propelling pencils, leads, batteries, is gathering on my study floor, and another in the hallway upstairs composed by soap, coffee plunger, shoes, diary, oh and what about…

The day has been spent mainly in tidying ends, reading a PhD chapter, gobbling a new book about the Marikana disaster, sorting out some items to be posted on the WWW webpages while we’re way, and of course the endless replying to email and never getting to the end of those left unanswered. Also, in addition to planning a few jollies with South African friends, I’ve been thinking about what a ‘migrant letter’ is and whether the collections we’ll be working on in the Cory Library will throw any additional light on this (the intention at the moment is to use the Forbes Collection letters to address this question, but who knows).

And what will we be doing in the Cory Library? The Bowker, Gold Fields Consolidated, Moffat and Price collections beckon! More on these in due course… For the moment the main thing in my mind is, does the Curves health suite in Grahamstown have a rowing machine, for the Rhodes University gym doesn’t.

Last updated: 17 July 2014