Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Jonty Stern, who works at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Jonty ran the Doctor Who Society at Lampeter and we learn about his encyclopaedic knowledge of the series and the impact it has had on him over the years. Jonty did Welsh Studies at Lampeter and focused on Celtic languages. He was the only student in the UK doing Middle Breton at the time, and we find out how he became interested in languages. His ‘A’ levels didn’t work out for him – and we learn how Lampeter beckoned. Jonty is obsessed with diaries and history and has been keeping a diary since 1986. He even brought along his 1990-93 Lampeter diaries to our interview which took place at the O2 in Greenwich on one of the hottest days of the year in July 2022. Jonty explains how some of his entries were written up many years later and we have a discussion about who his diaries are written for, and how some of the topics on which he writes only exist in his diary – there is no other, say, internet reference to the events de