You know you’re obsessed when....

 I’m working with a group to transcribe the court records for our local Moot Hall. I’m currently working on 1898 and the writing is terrible. I feel as though I’m making half of it up. I’m so embedded in the time period that I walk along the main road to town and I can see the ditch and fear falling into it just in case I get covered in leeches. I walk along the old railway tracks, spot a deer in the distance and look round for Young Woskett, with his gun, greyhound and extra deep pockets.

I think I’m slow and should work faster but the proper historians in the group say this is thorough.

There is one case that I have been obsessed with. I think I mentioned it before. Ebenezer and Thirza Finch took the headmaster of the National School, Mr Charles S Barker, to court because he had thrashed their son, also Ebenezer. The headteacher, obviously, got away with it and it didn’t do much damage to his reputation. I became a little obsessed with the boy. I wanted to know everything that happened in his life after that.  I walked past the house where he lived and tried to imagine what it was like. I became fond of him. I don’t think he was a bad lad and wonder if this injustice affected him for the rest of his life. 

However, I have been trying to put it behind me and continue with the tussles of lads who fight over a pail of whelks for 3/6, the drunk and disorderly cases and the man who refused to show his paperwork when moving his pigs.

Yesterday, however, I was in school and I came out of the toilet and tripped over a box. Literally. At the top of the box was this picture.

“My boy is in here somewhere,” I thought. The date in pencil on the back confirmed the possibility. The headteacher certainly was there. The evil looking man in the moustache caused the hairs on the back of my neck to bristle. “That’s him,” Ebby whispered in my ear. “Next to poor Jim, with the shiner and look at  Alfred with his hand on his head. It was Alfred’s testimony that let Basher get away with it, you know.”

I was telling the rest of the group about my find on a zoom call (don’t mention the wet cat) and said, “I’m so obsessed that you can’t believe how happy I was to trip over that box.”

“You didn’t trip. It jumped out in front of you. That’s what happens d with historical research.”

You know you’re obsessed when inanimate objects leap into your path.

Oh yes, that’s how you know you are obsessed. It’s not when you have conversations in your head with someone who died the year you were born or when you get up at 3.30 to do a bit more research on Mr Basher, I mean Barker.