Today we have a guest: Bob (Helen) Bushell-Thornalley. Her specialism is physical education and sport and her approach to academic writing is similar to her approach to physical activity: being in the moment, considering it a long game. It all started with her involvement in the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Looking back to the origin of the modern Olympic movement in Victorian times, which was stimulated by a concern about sedentariness, and a lack of military fitness. Bob’s doctorate involved spending a lot of time in the archives, not conversing with people (despite her supervisor saying she should) – or should we say ‘conversing with dead people’? She focused on the meetings and correspondence between Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French educator and philosopher, and Dr William Penny Brookes, a GP in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, England, who was concerned with what would now be called ‘public health’ and (again, the newly-discovered) ‘social prescribing’.

Working in the archives, Bob had to isolate herself – not her usual way of being – and read the documents, especially the correspondence between these two key figures in the development of the modern Olympics. Not only reading the text, but reading between the lines, the white spaces telling her what had not been said. Bob became a better writer by becoming a better reader, listening to missing or excluded voices. Even so, academic writing still seems to Bob as indulgent, as is reading and thinking – and yet she, like all of us on this podcast, works in a university. How strange.

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