Some of my readers might be expecting this blog post to be about Brexit. I certainly intend to write about it, but I feel that there are many people in the Remain camp who have articulated their concerns surrounding the result far better than I could. There is certainly a lot for me to think about, as someone who has taught the subject of the EU to French students and whose research will be based around what would today be seen as a ‘foreign’ language in England. As my own thoughts on this take time to develop, I hope you can excuse me continuing with the blogging adventure in as positive a spirit as possible.
In a sense, last Wednesday saw me taking the first proper ‘steps’ on the PhD journey. A bright-and-early, 5:30am start saw me catching the early train from Reading to Exeter, ready to spend a day visiting potential accommodation and – more excitingly – meeting my supervisors for the first time. The day turned out to be every bit as inspiring as I had hoped it would be, and really does deserve a blog post of its own (before we return next week to my lecteur series).
As a self-proclaimed enormous fan of learning things, and someone who reads a few too many Buzzfeed articles, I’ve decided to structure this particular blog post in a ‘listicle’ format, albeit with somewhat-stronger links between each item; comments on my structure will be read with interest. With that in mind, and with one eye ‘below the line’, please enjoy a list of Things I Didn’t Know About Exeter Before Visiting™.
(1) Exeter has hills
It had been a while since I’d last visited Exeter: although we’ve had family there for a while, in recent years my studies and jobs have kept me firmly inside the somewhat-reductive Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle. It felt very strange indeed to be at Reading Station early in the morning, getting the train in what seemed to be the wrong direction and heading – gasp! – away from Paddington. That said, it also felt oddly relaxing: as soon as the stations on the line were read out – among them Tiverton Parkway, where my Gran used to live – it dawned on me that for the first time in my life (barring time spent in France), I was going to live outside of the south-east, away from the cauldron of pressure that it can sometimes be. Once I arrived in Exeter, of course, I soon realised that this meant one other thing: I could no longer rely on everything being flat. As someone used to cycling pretty much everywhere, it came as something of a shock to appreciate that some of the hills I was confronting, both from the station to the University and from the University to some of the potential accommodation, were too steep to cycle up without at least taking a towel to mop up all the sweat. The advantage, of course, is that the views are just lovely: I was able to look down from the summit of one such hill and admire the mist. Later in the day, I was told that the hills had their own microclimate, which I could certainly believe.
(2) It also has great French medievalists (medieval Frenchists?)
Of course, the highlight of the day was meeting my supervisors for the first time. PhD students are nowadays typically assigned two ‘supervisors’, who – as the name suggests – act as mentors throughout the process. After a few years spent at universities, it’s become apparent that the onus will be firmly on me here: from what I can gather so far, it’s the PhD student who sets the agenda for meetings, and who is, of course, ultimately responsible for the success or failure of their project. This is in some ways a new dynamic for me, and while I have had ‘supervisions’ as part of my undergraduate and Master’s courses, the PhD will likely require from me a much greater degree of autonomy in organising my study in between meetings and in deciding the matters for discussion. At this early stage, I’m inclined to think of my supervisors as resources; veins of knowledge and insight that can’t be mined infinitely, but that can be the source of a burst of inspiration or vital guidance when used with respect for how busy they are.
It’s a good thing, then, that my supervisors are so lovely. I don’t want to name my supervisors here (although it probably won’t be all that hard to find out!), but in spite of their relatively wide range of publications I’d never met either of them before today. They very kindly offered to take me out to lunch, where we discussed everything from how the University works to their own distinctive-yet-overlapping research specialisms. As someone with an interest in teaching (à voir the posts below), I was happy to discover that there would be opportunities to get involved with aspects of the medieval French course taught to undergraduates. One suggestion that was raised was that of a Châtelaine de Vergy reading group, which might be run in order to encourage students to engage with the text in its original form, rather than translation; I’ll keep you posted on developments on that front!
(3) Medieval gems aren’t always in plain view
This positive impression of my supervisors was swiftly reinforced later in the afternoon, when one of my supervisors, seizing the opportunity to get out of the office for a little while, took me on a tour of medieval Exeter. As she explained, the bombing of Exeter during the Second World War leveled a significant part of the old medieval town, and so the full variety of what remains is usually missed by the (many) tourists that congregate around the cathedral. As I soon learned, the city was home to an enormous number of smaller parish churches and almshouses surrounding the cathedral, which now sit side-by-side with retail developments; this did, at one point, lead to a slightly odd juxtaposition of ‘House of God, House of Alms, House of Fraser’. We did of course visit the cathedral, home of the Exeter Book that has inspired some significant pieces of sculpture around the city (which I, at times, struggled to decipher!). The dominant impression was one of ‘hidden gems’, which I can’t wait to discover over the next three years.
Had a lovely day @ExeterModLangs meeting my future supervisors! Hopefully I won’t look this puzzled six months in. pic.twitter.com/A9P0TJMGCN
— Edward Mills (@edward_mills) 22 juin 2016
Between housing and hills, meetings and monuments, then, pretty much everything about my first visit to Exeter has left me almost ridiculously excited to start in September. With respect to more immediate matters, though, I’d like to thank everyone who’s been reading this blog so far, and I hope that you’ve been enjoying these first few posts. Next week, I’ll be returning to my series on working as a lecteur, with perhaps the post that I myself have been most looking forward to writing: how one can combine medieval and modern English, teaching syntax using Robin Hood.
Edward Mills 
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