Name dropping

Being an alumna of Queen Mary allows me to keep in touch with events at the Mile End Campus. One such was to have been a guided tour of Bow, followed by lunch and a talk by women's historian and author, Jane Robinson. The day before my friend and I were to set off to London I was contacted to learn that the whole thing was off due to a burst water main at the Olympic site – Stratford is just up the road. This meant no running water for catering, and no loos, so no lunch. My friend and I had read Jane's book, Bluestockings, and knew she was researching another about the Women's Institute, of which I had been briefly a member: Sally still is. How could we get to meet Jane before she'd finished researching her new book? How else? - we contacted her via her website and, lo and behold, she accepted our invitation to come to Suffolk. We dug up as much as we could about our local WI history, and she charmed us for a couple of hours over coffee and chocolates until she had to depart for Cambridge to give a talk at Newnham College. You see, it never hurts to ask!