This is what it said, hasn’t helped me telling my partner we should have a go back and cat carry case to hand in the hall (we’re surrounded by a nature reserve and farmland)!

Jumped out of my skin. Shit a brick to return to my roots! Me and the cat were snoozing peacefully.

Re-reading Karen Ordahl Kupperman's 'Providence Island' for a post-PhD freelance job, stumbling across a key figure from my undergrad dissertation. Full circle times, and a reminder that all these colonial puritans knew each other in some way!

My review of Lauren Working's 'A Golden World' will be in August's BBC History Extra. It's a brilliant book, and the review is the first time in print that I've called myself a historian (I've only been thinking and writing about the 'English' Atlantic and EIC for 13+ years pre-PhD).

Was down in Kent this week for a Refugee Week event. My need to mention Matoaka, Tsenacommacah, and the Virginia Company when passing through Gravesend remains undefeated.

Got to meet a late seventeenth-century celebrity this week at the V&A Storehouse.

My thesis is in. My time on the trail of ‘India’ goods - the products of China, Japan, India, and the Americas - at Restoration Ham House and the broader court is coming to an end. I don’t think my phone camera roll will be so full of gorgeous things again.

If you like your historic interiors with a globally-focused twist, on April 27 I will be giving a lecture for the Society of Court Studies on the interiors of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale at Ham House. It's in person in London, or online!

Heffers in Cambridge saw me coming putting this in the shop window.

Oxford and my adopted second home of Cambridge (South London forever) looked gorgeous in some much appreciated blue sky in these past few days.

Amsterdam, where the global/colonial connections are *everywhere* Tobacco jar, Antique Shop Kraak porcelain laid out with Dutch-made silverware, At Home in the C17th Exhibition Lacquer charger, Rijksmuseum Miniature apothecary, Rijksmuseum

Christmas 2025 shall henceforth be remembered as thesis-mas. All thesis for this meeses. Feb full draft, April final hand in.

Y2K Marie Antoinette is real, and she can hurt you. The final boss of jeans and a nice top.

No hidden document, but a thrill to see in person bills for making of a suite of furniture to be sent as a diplomatic gift from Charles II to Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif (r.1672-1727). Gerrit Jensen was a likely supplier of japanned furnishings to Ham House from 1672+ and features heavily in my thesis.

Christmassy snaps from my visit to Ham House yesterday. I was on site (no burden!) to share my PhD work/tour my OU colleagues. A lovely, festive (kind of) break from the final stages of thesis writing.

The stationer's advert in front of the Duchess of Lauderdale's Domestic Book.

First draft of my final chapter? Sent to my supervisors. When I close my eyes, I see the words calico, Persian carpet, and lacquer/lacquer/Indian cabinet in secretary hand.

The author photo.

I think if I could find a way to remain in this 1819 attic room forever, I could write the next Frankenstein.

Seventeenth-century Dukes 🤝 a conscientious student's GCSE/A-Level History answer book TURN OVER.

The National Archives could never 😬

Very happy to be finishing my final (!!) chapter of my PhD this week, which includes the V&A's glorious Lady Clapham as illustrative material. Images: Lady Clapham, V&A The Duchess of Lauderdale, NGS

I don't want to say that my PhD is impacting me in odd ways, but I have bought myself a fruit bowl that I've gathered is genuine Delft this week.

Pip's six years in South London have not prepared her for the back garden fireworks arms race that is October to November in a well-to-do village on the Cambridgeshire/Essex border.

Some people played Pokémon Go, I play collect the dodgy 1920s memorials to the Pilgrims/early American settlers. Image: Begijnhof, Amsterdam.

The feminine urge to install a box bed. Images: Museum Ons‘ Lieve Heer Op Solder/Our Lord in the Attic

Had the pleasure this past week of my partner indulging my seventeenth-century monomania on a birthday break. Photos: my first time seeing Petronella O’s doll’s house (which I’ve studied from afar as a deeply global object) in the flesh. Look at the ceramics, the spittoons, the japanned cabinet.

Our hotel room in Amsterdam has bathrooms papered in documents from the former City Archives. We won Rembrandt’s marriage certificate. I am trying to be on a break from seventeenth century handwriting. 😅

This includes close-up images of the embroidered textiles that once adorned Queen Catherine of Braganza's state bed.

Do you like seventeenth century stuff? Then my Instagram (@kerrylouiseapps), which has zero engagement, but so many pictures of Ham House in empty periods might be for you. 🫠