A Potted History of Una with info about the places I love: Cambridge
and New Zealand
Some links to things I like including stuff about:
Politics: the stuff of life itself (under construction)So who am I? My name's Una McCormack, I'm 26 years old, and I live in the gorgeous University town of Cambridge (that's in England, folks, not Massachusetts). I was brought up in St. Helen's, Merseyside; a town of little note apart from being the place from which hailed both conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and 80s pop idol Rick Astley. Oh yeah, and there's a rugby team and they used to make glass there, but not since the general collapse of the British manufacturing industry. Despite being the ultimate town of no real interest, those who have escaped St. Helen's remain bizarrely fond of it. It is also the urban equivalent of the 'Seven Degrees from Kevin Bacon' game. You are unlikely to be as many as 7 degrees from someone who has lived in St. Helen's...
I come from an absolutely HUGE family. OK, there are six of us, but
that's pretty big. Although you can e-mail very nearly all of my siblings
(and why not? It keeps me happy) there's only one sib with a presence,
so if you get bored with this McCormack, visit Niall's
page instead. Niall does interesting things, like live in New Zealand
and speak Chinese.
Back to me. Eighteen years of Tory rule were nothing compared to the 18 years of my youth trapped in a grim Northern town. Battling against all odds, I sat four A-levels and in 1990 went up to Newnham College, Cambridge to study History. Part way through I switched to study Social and Political Science, and achieved an outstanding 2:1 like every one else in the world.
Newnham is the older of the 2 remaining all female undergraduate colleges of the University of Cambridge. The older colleges round here are a bit snooty about Newnham, but that's simply the last gasp of patriarchy in the face of female domination and about time too. So don't pay any attention to them. Newnham is very pretty and has lots of nice flowers.
Whilst at college I met my partner Matthew. He was a student at Gonville and Caius College and is the brainiest person in the world.
I liked being an undergraduate a lot, so actually having to get a job
constituted a culture shock. Particularly when the company I went to work
for was as rubbish as The
Technology Broker. Don't know if that constitutes libel and don't care.
It would be fun testing it in court. Hey, Mr Lawyer! Only joking! I loved
working there!
11 months was quite enough for me to realize that I just wasn't all that interested in an international business career, and as I didn't have one and one wasn't imminent, I moved to Reading instead. Here I enrolled at the University of Reading where I took a Master's degree in Research Methods in Psychology. Psychology would have proved a great disappointment where it not for the unique presence of Rex Stainton Rogers and his course on critical psychology, which all made a great deal of sense. Despite Rex's best efforts! Rex's course gave me an interest in Q methodology, which formed the basis of my Master's thesis on first-time voting in the 1997 UK General Election, and which I find increasingly interesting from all sorts of philosophical and research viewpoints.
I am currently running a small study linking my academic obssession with my TV obsession. Visit the Blake's 7 Q-study here.
After leaving Reading I shimmied off abroad for a month to visit my
brother with a presence and his lovely fiancée Rachel in Wellington,
New
Zealand. New Zealand is the most beautiful place on Earth. I
spent most of my trip going round the North
Island. The North Island is astounding for its range of scenery: one
day you're in the capital or the green pastureland around it; next day
you're passing a volcano and the burnt fields at its feet; next you're
on the shores of the South Pacific. Particular highlights include:
Wellington:
this is a capital city where you don't appear to get traffic jams. An extremely
sensible way to run one's capital city, as far as I'm concerned. Cosmopolitan,
clean, and set in the most fantastic bay - who cares if it's a bit windy?
They do terrific tours of the NZ Parliament buildings, and outside said
buildings is a statue of early 1900s NZ Premier Richard Seddon, who came
to NZ from, you guessed it - St. Helen's. So everyone in NZ is only 1 degree
from St. Helen's!! And chances are they've met my brother anyway...Napier: the world's most beautiful Art Deco
city.Rotorua: geysers, mudpools, an overwhelming
stench of sulphur - and the impressive Maori cultural centre.Mt Taranaki: a bloody great volcano for God's
sake!!Oh yeah! I also went to Sydney and Hong Kong on the same trip!! They were great too!
Then I came home again. And started my new job. This is on a research project at The Judge Institute of Management Studies at Cambridge on a project looking at inter-organizational networking; basically, why and how companies get together to do business - in our case, to develop new products collaboratively. I get paid to read stuff and hang around a University! It's brill!
Simultaneously, I'm trying to get my arse in gear to put in an application to the Open University to start my PhD. Wish me luck, people. I'm desperate for those magic 2 letters in front of my name...
Okay, okay!! So I like Blake's 7! That doesn't make me some sort of weird saddo! Well, it does, actually. Never mind, here are the best links I've found so far.
Judith
Proctor's pages: all round very good egg type pages, pretty exhaustive.
The
Aquitar Files: does this page contain some of the finest fanfiction
written for the B7 universe? Yes, and there's stuff by me too!
Visit the Redemption
convention home page. This event is going to be a lot of fun.Basically, I like television science-fiction or telefantasy. B7 is the
main one, but there's other programmes that I like too. Here's some other
good TVSF links:
The
Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 is astoundingly impressive. It's got everything
from listings to analysis. Just great. Reading back over JMS's comments
from the earlier seasons is particularly entertaining.
The
Pretender is a show that only Matthew and I appear to have heard about.
But it's really extremely good. There's an episode
guide here as well.
The Ultimate
TV listings page. So that you can search for your own programmes.
What else do I do? I read a lot. I like selected amounts of fantasy and science-fiction, but I don't go crazy about most of it. Here's the best of the bunch.
JRR Tolkien
I've loved since I was 4 and my brother read me 'The Hobbit'. Then I turned
9 and read 'The Lord of the Rings'. Then I turned 11 and read 'The Silmarillion'.
Then I got a bit older, read them all again, and understood them this time
round. 'The Lord of the Rings' deserved to win the title of 'Best Book
of the Twentieth Century' and I'll deck anyone who doesn't agree. Sylvia
Engdahl is an out-of-print SF children's author who wrote 2 books that
had a real formative effect on my imagination: 'Enchantress from the Stars'
and 'The Far Side of Evil'. If you manage to trace copies of these, grab
them. They are wonderful, intelligent, wise modern fables. If you're a
publisher - REPRINT HER BOOKS!!! Stephen
King. Well, 'The Stand', predominantly. I love this book, this 'tale
of dark Christianity'. I also like contemporary fiction: here's a link
to Booker Prize Winners
to give you a taste of the sort of thing. You've gotta feel sorry for Beryl
Bainbridge, who should have won for 'The Birthday Boys', which is a
phenomenal novel about the five men who died on Scott's disastrous expedition
to the South Pole. Which leads me to one of my other little obsessions... Beryl Bainbridge, 'The Birthday Boys'.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 'The Worst Journey
in the World'.
Cherry-Garrard was 22 when he went South with Scott. Despite appalling
eyesight he became one of the central figures of 1912 Expedition, and was
only narrowly excluded from the polar journey. 'The Worst Journey in the
World' recounts an eight week journey undertaken by Cherry-Garrard, Edward
Wilson and 'Birdie' Bowers (who both died on the polar journey) to Cape
Crozier, in pitch darkness, to collect Emperor penguin eggs. Cherry never
forgave himself his survival when his friends had died. This is one of
the most moving books ever written.
Sarah Wheeler, 'Terra Incognita'.
Sarah Wheeler is a contemporary travel writer who recently spent several
months in the Antarctic. She explains far better than I ever could the
attraction of the Southland, and the tragedies of its short history.
Hoped you've liked this little foray into my psyche. I'll update this
page again eventually, and try and add some pretty stuff next time. There's
a nice picture of Peter Mandelson just waiting to appear...