As if last week’s announcement about recording selected sessions weren’t enough excitement for one month,* here I am again with yet more news!

*[Thank you so much for all of your feedback on our imminent recording experiment. All I’ve got to do now is make sure it works… (gulp). For more on recording, please see towards the end of this post.]

Several of you have said you’d find it useful to know what we’re running in the longer term, to help you choose which courses to book now. Those who were with us last term will know that this is something we’ve been doing verbally, but it transpired to be more complicated to do in a useful way here than I anticipated when I first announced here that we’d work on it - primarily because we’re doing all we can to respond to your suggestions and preferences, which are, of course, evolving along the way as we all get to know each other still better (and hurrah for that!).

But hey. More on the practicalities in a bit. For now, cue fanfare…

Voila - where we’re currently at with regard to After This Term.

Caveat lector: This is not cast in stone. It’s an indication of our current plans, which are responding directly to your requests and suggestions, and what we’ve noticed has made your eyes twinkle when we’ve mentioned things along the way.

Inevitably, therefore, things are less fixed as we get further into the future. I’ll post full details of our summer offerings once we’ve got the new term rolling.

For now, it’s safe to say that the Short & Sweet courses will be at the beginning of August and September respectively (we’re making the first two weekends of July time to recharge). Great Archaeological Discoveries will run in the evening over 7 weeks - dates still to be fixed - and every session of these three courses will be recorded.

September’s courses are fixed in terms of content (mostly. Read on for the exception), but may end up being in different diary slots. We’ll firm up the final timings and let you know very soon.

And in further breaking news… (good grief. Aren’t I the news-breaker that keeps on breaking new news…?!), as I not-in-the-least-bit-subtly hinted a little while back, we’ve kept a slot for September for a new innovation, namely (drum-roll, please)…

Denizens’ Choice!

“Denizens’ Choice? Qu'est-ce que c'est?”, I hear you say. Allow me to elaborate, O Denizens of Wright History.

You can, should you wish, vote for what the remaining slot in our September schedule will be.

• Really wanted to do a particular course last term, but couldn’t do it when it was scheduled?

• Didn’t book it because it wasn’t until your friend told you how awesome it was by which point it was too late to sign up?

Well here’s your chance to choose which course you’d like to be resurrected!

NB If your requested choices aren’t here or on any of the “post-its” above, don’t worry - I’ll have a record of them. Scheduling new and resurrected courses is a delicate balancing act, which entails considering likely demand, feasibility with concurrent courses, time required for new research, and Robertian sanity within each term. To be honest, we’ve not quite nailed it so far, but here’s hoping that September is when we do!!

So here’s how voting works:

• One vote each

• First course to get 6 votes gets scheduled

I tried to find a way of doing a more nuanced voting system than FPTP, but alas it’s far too complicated. Think of it, if you will, as a mash-up of a requests slot on a radio programme, a Blue Peter milk bottle top-o-meter, and a fairground test-your-strength hammer.

Let the voting commence!

Next up, an addendum to last week’s news in the light of several comments about recording sessions, which I suspect will be coming up often over the coming weeks…

It is, of course, not always possible to know at the point of booking when one will not be able to make a particular session - especially as appointments and spontaneous plans are now more likely than they were during lockdown - and we know that it would be useful for many of you to be able to catch up on sessions which end up clashing with new commitments.

In an ideal world, we'd be able to record every session just in case. In a still-ideal-but-less-pie-in-the-sky-for-us world, we may indeed be able to record specific sessions requested in these circumstances.

Initially I'd hoped we could offer this as a standard, but soon found out that it could end up swamping our current tech and storage provision so much that normal services couldn't be delivered. It’s a not-very-secret open secret that we’ve been on a financial knife-edge for all of Wright History’s existence thus far, and paying for more storage or equipment is simply not an option. Would that it were!

All that having been said, however, I'm not ruling out recording sessions on an ad hoc request basis. If you know before a particular session that you’d like it to be recorded, I shall happily do it if I can. It's just that we won't necessarily be able to do it every time we're asked. We decided that we'd prefer to offer what we can, on the grounds that we may be able to do more when it's possible, rather than promise the world and not be able to deliver. Worst case scenario is that nobody's worse off than they were while we were not able to offer any recording at all.

Finally, an 11th-hour reminder that it’s not too late to sign up for any of our courses which start this week. For a reminder of the delights which could await you over the coming weeks, please click this link.

Phew! I think that that’s enough news for now! I’ll keep you posted with developments. In the meantime, we’re very much looking forward to seeing those of you who are joining us this term, and hope that those whom we’re not seeing before have a super summer!