However, one of the few things that people take into consideration when buying such a book is the hours, days and years of research that go into the preparation of the manuscript, along with the painstaking hours of writing. So, for this book I used archival evidence from Switzerland (where many of the world’s sports governing bodies are based, such as FIFA and the IOC); the United States of America (where I was a guest of the National Sporting Library in Middleburg for three weeks and a guest of the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York for a week); the Adidas archive in Germany and many UK-based collections. Increasingly, outputs that aspire to be ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally-excellent’ as measured by the REF, need to have this originality and to distil large and ambitious sets of source material to impress peer reviewers. Thankfully, reviews of the book in Europe and North America have been very kind and generous.

​But the really exciting aspect of research that I wanted to share with jjheritage clients and collaborators was the processes that publishing can begin, rather than end. To date, several family members of Olympians I have written about have contacted me to tell their stories, many of which have lain in scrapbooks in lofts or basements and hardly thought about for several years. Suddenly an online search, or a mention in the media about the family member I have written about gives a focal point to these memories and new information comes to light. This has recently happened in relation to Leicester’s Olympic gold medal winning swimmer in 1912, Jennie Fletcher, and in the case of Margaret Wellington, ‘The Mermaid in the City’ who swam in the 1948 London Olympic Games and then toured New Zealand and the US with her competitive career. Having written about both women before, I now know much more detail about their lives and careers and this family information has been invaluable in revisiting my earlier published articles and books. 

Competitive Cooking In Front of the Cameras
My biggest influence, in terms of cooking was my Mum, since she was one of a family of nine children, and learned a lot of her skills from her mother and father. Growing up, my family was also large, there were seven of us, including Mum and Dad, plus we lived on a farm, so there was the extended family of Grandma and Grandad, Uncles, Aunts and cousins. Not only did Mum cook from scratch for three square meals a day, but, being based on a 200 acre mixed arable and livestock farm, we would grow, pick and harvest the fruit and vegetables, milk the cows, feed the chickens and all the rest of it. So the provenance of food has always been important to me.
Similarly, I have always loved animals and became a vegetarian aged fifteen, as my job before school each morning was to feed the calves.  Needless to say, my Grandad, who owned the farm, thought being a vegetarian was an odd choice. Although I am now pescatarian and find that this helps with my lean protein intake for sporting challenges, I am pretty relaxed about people’s food choices because it is such a personal matter of conscience.
My abiding memory, apart from how freezing cold potato picking was in the October half-terms, was that Mum would begin making the Christmas puddings and cakes just before Halloween and then would let the fruit mix mature until December. We’d make at least twelve Christmas puddings and Christmas Day itself was always about twenty people, or more, sitting around on that odd assortment of high and low chairs that only happens at that time of year, working their way through the feast provided by Mum over several hours. So cooking has always meant friends and family and hasn’t been competitive. Until now.
 
I guess I applied for Yes Chef! Because 1. I watch all the cookery shows 2. the format was a bit warmer and friendlier than the high pressure shows and 3. I think I am a reasonable home cook 4. cooking is an important life skill that should get more attention in school and these programmes help popularize ‘cooking from scratch’ even though viewers cant taste the food and 5. The format interests me professionally.  Academics who write about sport have theorized that many television shows have become ‘sportised’. What they mean by this is that the jeopardy introduced to the format by turning everyday activities into competitions make them more compelling viewing. So on Yes Chef! there is the rivalry of competing against other ‘home cooks’ and then against other teams, the race of trying to complete your task against limited time and in front of cameras, catching your every mistake, the struggle to improvise with unseen ingredients, trying to match and exceed the skill of other contestants and the award of an eventual winner, with the benefits that this might bring after the competition.  Just like the sporting contests I like to challenge myself with, this was both a physical challenge (it seemed to take 20 minutes to skin, peel, de-seed and chop one tomato), a challenge of skill, managing nerves and emotions under a totally new environment and reacting to new situations.

Introduction
Since the launch of the National Lottery and the Heritage Lottery Fund in 1994 20% of good cause money has been invested in Heritage. That’s around £7.1 billion into 40,000 heritage projects over the last twenty three years, including large infrastructure projects and small educational visits. Over that time, Jean has worked with multi-disciplinary teams to obtain Heritage Lottery Fund grants as large as £9.1 million. Jean has worked with museums and archives to obtain grants as large as £330,000 and consulted for community groups on small projects worth £45,000, amongst many other bids. She has also obtained funding from the world governing body of football, FIFA and the European football confederation UEFA, on large international comparative projects. This advice comes from expertise of bidding across a range of funding schemes. Most recently, Jean has obtained funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a Collaborative Doctoral Award, worth over £60,000 to supervise a PhD student who will be working with The Hockey Museum and its archive to develop oral histories of leading female international players from the 1950s onwards. So it is safe to say that Jean will have at least one ‘active’ bid developing at any one time.
However, if you are new to the process, there are much smaller Heritage Lottery Funding projects too, that have taught young people about history and heritage in innovative ways or developed their skills and employability.
 
Bidding advice
Generally, Heritage Lottery Fund projects tend to fall into the following categories: 1. land and natural heritage 2. museums, libraries and archives 3. buildings and monuments 4. cultures and memories 5. industrial, maritime and transport 6.community heritage.
So, what do you need to know to shape your bid? These are the key questions to ask yourself and your team:
 
Is it a project?
Does the project have a clear heritage focus?
Is there a need or demand for it?
What people and audiences will it reach?
Can you include volunteering, such as groups or project partners?
Is the planning and management financially realistic?
What difference will it make?
Why now? What is the urgency? An anniversary or match funding might help here!
What is the benefit to the public and communities?
Your project outputs need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound (think of the acronym SMART).