Have just written a piece for Construction News about construction (surprisingly) in New Zealand, Canada and Australia. I love trade journals. Geeky I know but I do. You get a privileged lense through which to examine things. New Zealand is all about rebuilding Christchurch, devastated by three earthquakes in 2010-11. It is the chance to construct a brand new city centre - pretty damn unusual. Australia is all about huge, vast, glitzy projects like the Barangaroo waterfront development with a floating hotel - their economy is booming. In Canada it's much more rugged and austere - mining the oil sands, building hospitals for their lovely free healthcare system.
I'm interviewing academics at the University of East London for a research brochure. The other day I met someone called Barbara Taylor. "So what's the real world impact of your book going to be?" I asked chirpily. "Well, it's going to be published by Penguin," she replies. "It's about mental health, a mixture of historical study and memoir as I've spent three years researching the asylum system, and I was in Friern Barnet hospital in the 1980s. Books like that tend to attract a lot of attention." She's only The Barbara Taylor - world famous historian of feminism! Actually I've never heard of her, but one has a way of noticing when one is the presence of brilliance and a quick google afterwards confirmed I had been. The book is about how we look after each other - everyone needs looking after, mental health is just one example of that. She says that question is nothing new, it's always been a preoccupation of feminism. But th...
Comments
Post a Comment