This is another one of those posts that I am writing a week late but backdating so as to preserve (in a certain sense of the word) a sense of regular progression with my research leave blogging.

This time last week I was travelling down to London, ready to run some pilot workshops for a project around actor training. I want to ask for research funding to support this project, so had signed myself up for a university-wide two-day training session entitled ‘Getting those Grants’. I admit that I was suspicious of the training when I started, but found it overall very useful, as well as a peculiar mix of the inspiring and dispiriting.

This inspiration came from the way in which certain things our teachers told us resonated with my own ideas. A mention of a funder’s priorities made me think about how my own project could meet such priorities; an idea about how to present my proposed calendar of work gave the project a shape it did not previously have; and so on.

The dispiriting side of the event concerned two things. First, the sheer lack of funding available; second, my own nagging questioning of whether I and my work deserved such funding. Colleagues at my table were working on measuring glacier decline, on purifying water, on caring for those suffering with dementia, on helping children acquire language skills – what did my work offer to society?

Of course, I know all the answers, all the arguments to justify literary research (or even just a degree in English), and I still believe them. But I think what really helped convince me that what I was asking for was worth funding was the response of other participants when I told them about my research. One colleague – the one working on the purification of water – said she wished that she had a project like mine, where she could work with people and see immediate effects, rather than solving one problem out of a million that required solutions before any tangible benefit would manifest itself, and that, long after her and her work was forgotten. Another called my work exciting and his boring, and another admired how little money mine needed to contribute to the nation’s culture.

There’s a simple lesson here about research. I can’t quite say it clearly yet, but part of it involves the absolute importance of seeing your work through others’ eyes. And you can be certain that I told the woman purifying water why I thought her work so important too.