Our first in-person meeting for a year and a half! Moira Ackers and Elizabeth Blood have done an amazing job keeping things going with Zoom lectures, but it was wonderful to be actually in the same room again. Formal minutes will be uploaded to the Governance page once we have them, but meanwhile here are the points. Our President spoke briefly but movingly about the challenges of the past year. We recorded our thanks to all those who had kept things going – notably to Moira Ackers and Elizabeth Blood, and to David Carrington for his work as our Conservation Officer.

The officers were all re-elected (surprise, surprise) and we welcome two new committee members. Dr Susan Jenkins  is currently working on a catalogue of Westminster Abbey’s monuments. Dr Holly Trusted is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum and is a founder and co-chair of the Public Statues and Sculpture Association.

It was a great pleasure to award the Essay Prize to Dr Christina Faraday, who is a Research Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, and AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2019. Dr Faraday was also one of the lecturers after the AGM. She shared with us some of her work on the impressive series of Elizabethan and Jacobean monuments in the College chapel at Gonville and Caius. Unfortunately, technical problems prevented Dr Helen Frisby from giving her lecture on gravedigging: we hope we may be able to return to the topic, possibly with an online lecture. Finally, your publicity officer gave some examples of gruesome medieval Welsh poetry which may suggest that there was more enthusiasm for the art of the macabre in medieval Wales than the surviving visual evidence suggests.

We are already planning a winter series of online lectures which will include the lectures from the AGM for those who were unable to be there on the day. Watch this space.