When my daughter was a baby I didn’t have a fancy phone. Just three years ago, I survived with a brick that had limited internet access. Back then, my time was devoured by a beautiful baby who cried for milk on-demand and constant entertainment. My phone just lived on the kitchen counter, occasionally ringing when someone wanted to talk to me. Some days I didn’t even answer it.

But then, in 2012, I got a new iPhone. It was a revelation. Finally, I could check my emails on the go! Log into Facebook whenever I pleased! I even joined Instagram, eagerly taking snaps of cups of tea and putting trendy filters on them before sharing them with the world. I started to see my phone as a lifeline to the outside world, wondering how I had never lived without it before.

Fast-forward two years and I’m starting to loathe my phone. It’s like having a newborn baby in the colic phase, forever. The baby needs supervision, reassurance, attention. Lots and lots of attention. I even find myself taking my baby phone to the toilet, lest it gets lonely without me. 

Time was, I would sit down at my computer, log into my emails and work would begin. When I finished, I was safe in the knowledge no one could reach me unless it really was an emergency and they needed to call. And you know what? They rarely called.

These days things are a bit different. The thing I used to love about having that instant connection has become the very reason I sometimes dread looking at my phone. Facebook groups and emails and tweets… constantly.

I love my job. I’m lucky enough that I get to mainly work from home around my daughter. But there are times when work (and that blasted phone) butts its way into those moments with my daughter. A notification on Facebook that I need to respond to. Or perhaps an email that needs to be replied to. And even if it doesn’t need to be replied to asap, I still know it’s there, waiting for me.

Just like that, whatever conversation I’m having in real life, whatever task I’m trying to do, is instantly derailed. I need to see to my demanding phone and put everything else on hold. The newborn baby is crying again, but this time it’s not even cute or cuddly.

I wrote about Phubbing over at The Motherhood recently. While my argument for that piece still stands – I’m sick of being made to feel guilty by experts saying mums who pick up their phone in front of their kids are BAD – I do recognise that maintaining the right balance is a tricky one.

For example, I still like the fact I can check my emails on the go. It makes working as a freelancer that bit easier, juggling motherhood with paying the bills. But it’s oh-so-easy to lose sight of what’s important when you’re checking your phone – those things that need an immediate response and the bits that can wait until later.

When was the last time you picked up your phone to check your inbox, only to find you’d been tagged in a conversation on Facebook?

The scenario goes like this: tootling over to Facebook to see what’s being said, an interesting article catches your eye, shared by one of your Facebook friends. You read the article and watch the accompanying video – something promising to be The Best Thing You’ll See All Day! and BOOM. You’ve just lost ten minutes of your life. That’s ten minutes that could have been spent unloading the washing machine, cooking tea or – *gasp* – playing with your child. I’m not pointing the finger here, I am more than guilty of falling into this trap myself.

Recently I’ve started leaving my phone downstairs when I go to bed. It’s just a little act of rebellion against the phone dictatorship, but it feels kind of liberating. Instead of letting my demanding phone sleep beside me, waking me for night feeds with its angry flashing, I now turn it off and put it in a drawer. If I wake up at 3am I don’t have the urge to check my phone. I just go back to sleep. Simple.

I’m not sure what the answer is to the rest of the day though. I try to stay away from my phone as much as possible at the weekend, although that’s not always easy – especially if I’m expecting an email. I sometimes wish I could have two phones, one for work and one for real life. But then, I know I’d end up just having them both on all of the time and it would be like having newborn baby twins, rather than just the one.

Do you ever feel like you’re being ruled by your phone? How do you manage the balance?

[Photo credit: Caroline Gue at CP Photography]

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When I was little I had a friend. We used to write stories together, make up plays, create magazines and draw pictures. Play times at my friend’s house were always fun, creative affairs.

As well as dressing up and bossing around our siblings, we would play make-believe games with my friend’s huge dolls’ house. She also had a Sylvanian Families collection that beat anything I’ve ever seen since.

We drifted apart as we grew up, going to different schools and hanging out with different people. But I’ve always kind of kept in touch with her through our mums, who still remain very good mates. So it was with a huge sense of excitement when I discovered my old friend on Twitter, later getting in touch with each other via email and, eventually over the phone.

Turns out my friend has written a book. She also has a rather interesting day job as a costumed interpreter.

And that’s why I wanted to invite her on here for a rare guest post – if your kids love to act and have an interest in history, then maybe this is a career path that they too will follow one day.

Over to my friend, Lauren Johnson…

Today when we meet, I’m Lauren Johnson, historian, writer, and twenty-first century scruffbag. Tomorrow I might meet you while I wearily clean dishes in the scullery at Audley End House. Or perhaps you’ll be kneeling before me, your queen, at Hampton Court Palace. If you’re really unlucky I might be shooting a siege engine in your direction at the Tower of London.

These are just some of the multiple identities I inhabit in my weird working life as a costumed interpreter. For the past five years I have worked at some of the most beautiful heritage sites in Britain, pretending to be people from the past. From the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, I’ve worn a lot of uncomfortable clothing, an enormous array of unflattering headgear and I now have very defined calves thanks to half a decade of stamping about on cobbles in completely flat shoes.

If you’re still not sure what I do for a living, you’re not alone. Costumed, sometimes called live or historical, interpretation is still relatively unknown, despite there being a daily costumed presence at both the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace since the early 1990s. Costumed interpretation sits somewhere between re-enactment and theatre. The simplest way to explain it is to say that I dress in the costume of a particular era and engage visitors to a heritage site by, basically, pretending to be a historical character. For instance, I’ve quite often played Katherine Parr at Hampton Court Palace. As Katherine, I’ll do a mixture of timed performances with other interpreters – which all adapt to the audience we have – and wandering the Tudor route in ‘freeflow’, inhabiting the spaces and talking to visitors as if it’s still the 1540s.

Working as a kitchen maid at Audley End

However, my job is even a little stranger than that. I am the research manager for Past Pleasures, one of the oldest costumed interpretation companies in the UK. So I spend half my time in costume and half of it researching for the team. It’s a bit of a bipolar existence. One day I might be a princess holding court at Dover Castle in front of a packed great hall, standing to attention and cheering what I say. The next I’m all alone in a silent library, huddled over a pile of books. As Research Manager I produce research packs for the whole interpretation team at Past Pleasures, which gives them a way into an era or event that we are interpreting. That’s over 80 people, and during the four years I’ve done the job I’ve produced 60 packs, which is not a bad output compared with the number of essays I did during my degree!

You might be wondering how I got into a job like this. And certainly I would have done a few years back. I studied History at Oxford University, and during my whole time there I never knew that such a career existed. I had rather assumed I would go down the academic route of immersing myself in dusty tomes and hushed reading rooms, channeling all my desire to perform into the improvised comedy group I was part of, The Oxford Imps. However, while studying for my Masters I realised I didn’t necessarily want to just keep focusing more and more intently on one single era, or sit in silence for the rest of my working life. I wanted to communicate with others about History and explore all the periods I had never really looked into during my degree. It was after my Masters, while I was working as a classroom assistant in Bristol, that I heard on the improv grapevine about this job where you dressed up like a Tudor at Hampton Court Palace and I thought, ‘I have to do that!’ ‘That’, I learnt, was working for Past Pleasures, and after sending in a CV and essay, going for interview, and having training I finally started as a costumed interpreter in early 2008.

I still enjoy attending conferences – it’s great to dip back into academia and meet world experts in their chosen field – but I think I have the best of both worlds now. I undertake research – sometimes quite intense, and always rigorous, combing through primary sources or historiography of different eras – but I also get to educate, perform and debate with the public about history more generally.

You do butt up against some strange preconceptions in this job. I once had a woman insist I could not be a real medieval person because I had eyebrows. On another occasion, my colleague – who was dressed as the seventeenth-century Duke of Monmouth – was asked, over the course of a single day, if he was Henry VIII, Robin Hood or Jesus. However, those peculiar moments are massively outweighed by the rewarding interactions you have, however briefly, with members of the public.

I remember doing a scenario about Catherine Howard’s arrest at Hampton Court, and it ended with me as one of her ladies in waiting being dismissed from Court. I had to explain what that meant to the crowd, and ultimately what would happen to Catherine, a character they had just seen escorted away to the Tower. As we stood in the very rooms that the real Catherine would once have passed through you could see a ripple of grim understanding pass over the crowd’s faces – there was one woman in particular, who went from grinning and playing along, seeing it all as a bit of fun, to realising that this really had happened, a matter of yards from where we were now standing, and it ended with a young woman being killed. By the end she had tears in her eyes. She had come face to face with the past, and it really affected her.

I have also had moments where the driest of historical topics have utterly fascinated visitors, in a way that I think only costumed interpretation – and the human interaction it engenders – can achieve. Most children visiting the Tower of London want to know where the executions took place, where people were tortured and imprisoned, but one ten year old I met became absolutely entranced by a reconstructed document we had. It was the household account of a fourteenth century noblewoman, listing the number of herring being moved from one of her estates to another. Not exactly ‘ghoulish tales from the Tower’. But this boy sat with me at a table in the Medieval Palace for a good quarter of an hour, just reading through the clerical script, getting excited when he recognised words and asking where the herring ended up. His parents looked completely bewildered. I really hope that one day he becomes the leading academic on fish transportation of the high Middle Ages, and dates his interest back to that juvenile encounter with a lady in costume at the Tower.

I am incredibly fortunate to be doing this job. It combines things I am absolutely passionate about – History, teaching – with activities I love doing – researching, reading History books, and performing. But probably one of the most amazing things is simply working in the spaces that I do. Our breakroom at Hampton Court is in the old queens’ apartments. So Jane Seymour gave birth and died somewhere in that complex of rooms. Anne Boleyn lived there, and Catherine of Aragon.

At the Tower of London I’ve been in Thomas More’s cell and on the roof of the White Tower, which for 800 years was the highest point in all of London. The men’s changing room at the Tower is next to a portcullis and medieval painted beams.

It is just the most incredible place to work. Sometimes when you leave after a rehearsal at night you’re walking through these totally deserted, ancient spaces and you can feel that you’re a part of the history of that building. Which, for a historian, is pretty much the best feeling in the world.

***

Told you she was interesting didn’t I?

To find out more about Lauren check out her fascinating blog, follow her on Twitter, @History_Lauren and – please, please, please – check out her brilliant new book The Arrow of Sherwood. (If you don’t like Amazon, you can also get a copy of the book here.)

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It’s a question I’ve had quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. It’s always asked in a completely innocent way, but when I’m faced with that question I can’t help but feel my heckles rising slightly.

A couple of weeks ago I did my last radio show and hung up my headphones for a while. During the 18 months I presented a breakfast show I also worked as a freelance journalist and copywriter. It meant that some weeks I crammed in 75 hours of work. Juggled around the fact I had my toddler home every afternoon, you can see I was pretty busy.

Since I finished my radio contract things have been a bit odd. I’ve been back and forth across the country sorting out a huge relocation to Devon, 200 miles from where we currently live. So it’s fair to say I haven’t settled into our new way of life quite yet. But I have still been working – it’s just that this working has been from home.

You see, I am now a Work At Home Mum. This is often referred to in inner circles as WAHM. Despite what someone said to me recently, this doesn’t mean I spend my days drinking cups of tea and sorting my sock drawer. It means I work. At home. And am a mum. Simple?

Not simple.

The thing is, it’s been a while since I last held this title, so I’d forgotten how some people fail to grasp the concept of freelance working. For many, the idea that someone can work from a computer in an office in their home, rather than an office in a building with other workers, is a bit of an odd one.

My daughter still goes to nursery, I still have a pick-up and collect run to do at either sides of the day. I still have clients to please and deadlines to meet. I still spin plates and have various projects on the go at once. Sometimes I have to go out for meetings – and in the future I’ll probably do more days in the office again as I go back to combining my radio work with my writing / editing / copywriting work.

I’m not complaining. I love my life and am very excited about our move to a more family-friendly pace of living in south Devon. But don’t assume that I’m going to be on a permanent holiday.

Because, you know, work at home mums still work.

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