Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

  During the last week, I watched all three episodes of the BBC/Open University documentary Empire , presented by my favourite historian, David Olusoga (pictured above, with me at Bradford Literature Festival). Those of you who have read some of my earlier blogs will know that I've been grappling with issues of Empire for some time. But watching this series, I feel I have finally made my peace with the history of Empire and my family's part in it - the good, the bad and the ugly. Empire affects us all, even those ancestors who never left the shores of Britian. So many movements of people around the globe, so many interrelationships. So much impact on societies, language, folklore, music, agriculture, industry, the environment... And it's complex. You can't just split it into "good" and "bad". We find different "sides" of it within our own family history. With that in mind, I'd like to walk you through some of my family's history wit...

  I recently read Ell Huang's excellent essay  Interview with the Vampire and Asexual Loneliness  In it, Ell does an asexual reading of all versions of Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice - the book, film and recent TV series - talking about how the loneliness of Rice's vampires speaks to the asexual experience.  I don't intend to reiterate all the points Ell makes (you can read the essay yourself). But there were many aspects that resonated with me, even though Ell is aromantic, single and childfree, and I am heteroromantic, married and a mother. Some of the points that grabbed me most stongly were: Queer Time. The idea that queer folk typically discover themselves and come of age later in life than non-queers. Or maybe we feel ourselves in a perpetual coming-of-age, a perpetual adolescence. Feeling like a child ("girl" always seems more fitting a word for myself than "woman" although I an currently 51) but not wanting to be infantalised. The vampir...