Blog

As alluded to recently in my last post I am coming back to history! Soon I will be starting to post biographies on several people. The early Kings of England and the early Bishops of Rome (Popes) will be my first topics.

Also I have applied to study Military History at Bishop Grosseteste University. I have a two pronged application for this. One is the application to the university itself which is a straightforward through UCAS application. However my application to Student Finance England is more complicated as I’ve had previous funding. I hope that because I left the courses due to illness they’;; accept me under the Compelling Personal Reasons scheme. Here’s hoping to a start in September 2024!

Have you ever received news that rocked your world? I did on Thursday 7th March. It was not good news and has really made me revaluate what I want from life. So from now on, this website will mainly be focused on my passion for history!

You’ll see plenty of changes to the site coming up (though not immediately) and many areas of History will be covered. “What are those areas?” I hear in the distance. Well find them below! Expect no great historical insights as I am an enthusiastic amateur, but expect plenty of passion.

Posts will focus on;

Monarchy of England from Alfred the Great to Elizabeth I
History of Bishops of Rome (The Pope), from Saint Peter to Francis I (though there will be more emphasis on Popes in the Italian Renaissance)
The Norman Conquest 1066-1072
The Angevin Empire 1154-1259
The Crusades 1095-1192
Warfare and Strategy of England and Western Europe 1066-1485
The Knights Templar 1119-1312
Politics and Warfare of the Papal States and Wider Italy 1450-1600
Early Ottoman Empire 1453-1566
The Western and Ottoman fronts of the First World War 1914-1918
The Western Front 1944-1945
The Italian Campaign 1943-1945
The RAF since the Second World War 1945-2012

This is not an exhaustive list of what I will post about but covers most of it. I have a passing interest in the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars. I also have a more detailed interest in espionage and Special Forces, but those topics are obviously harder to research. But these are the main topics I will be writing about.

I hope everyone is well and in good health!

Hi everybody! This is just a quick post on my current plans.

I’m currently taking several courses. One course is on WordPress development, with the hope of improving this website and building more. I’m also doing a course on Search Engine Optimisation to benefit, again, both this site and others I build. The final course I’m doing is one on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Although I’ve had experience with these languages, that was several years ago and I feel a refresher is needed.

You may be forgiven for thinking with this I’m aiming for a front end developer job sooner or later. Indeed that is amongst my thoughts. But I’m also thinking of going down the route of my own e-commerce business selling collectables from various fandoms (I am a huge geek). Indeed I’m not sure which path I will go down yet, but I feel it will be one of those two.

Health wise things are up and down right now. My physical health is improving with medication, but my mental health is still variable. Indeed I’ve come to the conclusion that my mental health will be variable for a long time, perhaps forever. It seems its all about controlling those variations rather than getting rid of them.

I hope you’re all well and hope to write another post soon!

My last post I spoke about the reasons I regretted quitting my degree. This one I will speak about the reasons I don’t regret quitting.

During my whole degree I was purely focused on one goal. Getting into Cyber Security by getting a Computer Science degree and then a job afterwards. Since quitting my degree I’ve flirted with other opportunities. WordPress Development, .Net development with C# and even moving away from tech all together. I think if I’d have stayed at my degree, I would have still been focused on getting into Cyber Security, which looking back was too narrow minded of me.

Another reason I don’t regret quitting my degree is if I had stayed with my degree, I don’t think I would be doing the voluntary work I am currently doing. Working in the voluntary sector is hugely rewarding and something I would encourage anyone with the time to do, even if its just an hour a week. I doubt I would have bothered looking at volunteering opportunities if I was still in education.

The final reason I don’t regret quitting my degree is the fact that at the end of the day, I had little choice. I suffer with some health issues and for the last year of my degree they were hell to deal with. I tried to power through, but I just couldn’t do it. Ultimately it was to protect my health I quit, and my health has to come first. For this reason, I don’t regret quitting my degree.

So on balance do I regret quitting my degree, taking these last two posts into account? The answer is no. I regret missing out on some opportunities and miss the relationship with my lecturers but all in all it was the right decision, when all factors were taken into consideration.

Bear with me as this will be a slightly rambling style post.

In March 2022 I left my Computer Science Degree at Lincoln College. It was a decision I agonised over for a long time, but I eventually decided it was the right decision. But did I make the right choice? Over this and my next post I will discuss what I regret about quitting, and what I don’t regret abut quitting.

First off, I was near the end. I was in March of my third year. That might sound stupid to quit that late, but I did have another yet to go. You see I’d split my final year into two part time years, mostly to help juggle my workload along with some health difficulties I had. But still, I’d completed one module that year (Mobile Application Development) and had started another (Cloud Computing) and halfway through my final module that year (Artificial Intelligence). Relatively speaking I was so close to the end. And I quit.

Secondly, I miss the people. My lecturers were great (special shout out to Dan Rogers, Stephen Smith, Stephen Trevor, Jeremy Davis and John Rogers). And the other people on the course were so friendly and helpful (special shout out to Ben here, who I’m still in touch with). I got on well with virtually everyone on the course and miss them all.

The final reason I regret quitting my degree is I personally put a lot of stock in my own academic achievements. Other peoples? Not so much, I accept academics aren’t for everyone. But for my own? I place great value on them. I was always one of the smarter kids in school and put all my worth in my academic achievements. So to not have a degree (especially when I once had dreams of doing a PhD) is something I’ve had a lot of difficulty coming to terms with.

Do I overall regret quitting my degree? Sometimes. But not all the time, and the next blog post will discuss the reasons I DON’T regret quitting my degree.

Hello! As said in my intro page my name is Peter. I’m a former Computer Science student based in Lincolnshire. This blog will be used to document my learning, as well as my personal life. I hope you will enjoy reading it!