Dear Diary - I'm back

So, I entirely failed to keep up my daily diary covering my later days in Abilene and the return to the UK....which all happened over a fortnight ago.

The main reason was, as has happened on previous research trips, the final couple of days assumed a new level of intensity. I had more specific information to find - and indeed found much of what I was looking for.

Suddenly seven hours in an archive wasn't enough, and my evenings were spent reading around my subject and trying to pull all my thoughts into order.

I headed home on a high - only to have my wings filled with flak at the Brunel Research Presentation event on my return.

My head was still filled with the connections from Bikini Atoll through the U2 and Corona to NASA - but I didn't articulate those linkages particularly well, and was rather forensically pulled apart by the great and good of my department.

I'm confident the hypothesis works and that I have the evidence to support it. The next few months will be a matter of unpicking all that evidence from the documents i collected and beginning to develop a coherent narrative.

Still plugging away

Okay, it's an hour until I deliver my third lecture/second seminar of the term - today we're moving from the Civil War into Reconstruction - and so far, so good.

Work's picking up too on the PhD. I've been refocusing the research somewhat so that it's a lot less about Kennedy - a path well and truly trodden when it comes to space research - and a lot more about Eisenhower and how his reach towards new policy in a wholly new area built on experience and relationships that had proved successful for him already in his Presidency. The likes of Jim Killian and Jim Hagerty are my current heroes - policy influencers from slightly unexpected sources.  The diaries/memoirs of both have proved good sources to mine in the past few weeks.

There was good news too that a paper of mine - 'The Helping Hands to the Hidden Hand' - has been accepted by the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association's biennial conference in Brisbane next July. All fantastic in theory, but I now need to get well north of £1500 together to get myself over there to present . The paper covers a significant chunk of my PhD chronology - so it will be great to get it both written and shared with other researchers.

With a return trip to Abilene planned for the New Year, it's good to have some goals to aim for over the next nine months.