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Decolonisation and 'the Servants' Toilet'!

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  It all starts out in the grand age of trade under colonial rule by European maritime and trade powers. Along the southwestern coastal belt of Ceylon, Portuguese-Indian folk settled for centuries there, grasping at the opportunities of international trade in the early 1900s. This is how by virtue of being the sixth child, I happen to own ten perches of land, give or take a perch here or there, in the back garden of my home. It is not an ancestral home as we did not descend from generations living in that location. It was shamelessly acquired by the spoils of the British Empire. A tale of many colonial millionaires, my grandfather, a carpentry person, acquired and diversified, losing sight of wood for trees and getting fingers in many investment pies.  An unworldly middle-class gent of a simpler countenance - if my father's recollection of his father is to be accepted - on account of being the largest shareholder was appointed as the unlikely Chairman of Bonaz, a Dutch shipp...
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The Borrowers

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So what of the collections, the repositories, boxes and catalogues of archival data languishing in British and other former imperial locations? Should not these historical collections be made note of, sifted through and employed in enriching the knowledge and learning of scholars, students and other groups in the former colonised territories?  If historical artefacts are moving back to the territories from whence they were rudely plucked and in some instances, plundered by imperial powers, what should be the rightful and equitable deployment of the collections? While these depositions were in all probability initiated and collated in more formal and dignified practices through structures of colonial rule, yet admittedly informed by the power and access granted to agents of imperial rule operating from positions including that of curator, museum assistant, writer, expert and civil servant.  Sir Norman Boyd Kinnear ordered a survey of Ceylon's mammals as the Curator (circa 1907)...
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To dig one’s own spade into one’s own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?” [Beverley Nichols]

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   Thesising, getting one's hands dirty digging up research, weeding, pruning, growing, seeding, watering and prancing about in one's own post-doc project sandbox and real gardening out there in the open air has a lot in common.  I dallied with the idea of applying for a real-life job as a consultant writer at a railway 'Firm' as my dear departed mother would have called it. He has a 'post' at a 'Firm' all allusions to fixed stable structures. Well, I think perhaps I will dabble in the spading my own earth bit, first. The point is, that it is an awfully difficult decision to make and at the same time a frightfully easy one. Well, first you have to have a friend called Neil. Some years ago when I treated Neil of the glen who had a fresh air observation on most things, to a treatise on the postcolonial misery of Lankan history and utter charm of its characters, he stated in utter faith that I would always work on something extraordinary. Now this compass h...
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When there was a time for each thing

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    "From the position of the bed, my side recalled the place where the crucifix used to be, the breath of the recess in the bedroom in my grandparents' house, in the days when there were still bedrooms and parents, a time for each thing, when you loved your parents not because you found them intelligent but because they were your parents, when you went to bed not because you wanted to but because it was time, and when you marked the desire, the acceptance and the whole ceremony of sleeping by going up two steps to the big bed, where you closed the blue rep curtains with their raised-velvet bands, and where, when you were ill, the old remedies kept you for several days on end, with a nightlight on the Sienna marble mantelpiece, without any of the immoral medicines that allow you to get up and imagine you can lead the life of a healthy man when you are ill, sweating under the blankets thanks to perfectly harmless infusions, which for two thousand years have contained the flower...
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