Dispatches from the bunker

I'm still in the office, though the atmosphere is increasingly weird. I'm actually used to the solitude – I tend to come in during the holidays unless physically locked out, so the emptiness and silence is fine, but the palpable jitteriness is novel. Some people are simply worried about the illness itself, or about infecting older or unwell people. Others are worried about their jobs and finances, especially those on part-time, short-term or zero-hours contracts. Mostly, in the corporatised university, these are teaching staff, security guards, cleaners and caterers. Thankfully, management (despite their very revealing adoption of military strategy terminology like Gold Command) is making all the right noises about this, though the tunes aren't reaching all ears: communication is still a problem. There is also the long term issue. So many universities are on very thin financial ice, and long ago ran their reserves down to the legal minimum. The immediate financial hit will be enormous, and recruitment next year is likely to be apocalyptic for many departments or entire universities. One institution has already warned staff that their jobs are threatened, which seems callous and opportunistic.

The people I'm most worried about are the students with mental health issues, especially those with anxiety-related illnesses, of which there are a lot. Late capitalism has deliberately produced a population which is financially insecure, precariously-employed, unsupported by the state and dumped out of the minimal obligations which used to exist between employers and their staff. To that we've added exciting new ways to stress people out via social media, privatised schools, fiddled constantly with educational policy until it resembles a game show where the losers are taken out and shot, binned a lot of the healthcare system, literally set the world on fire, fled Europe's international association of grown-up countries, then announced that anyone who can't deal with the above is a snowflake. My students are drawn from the general population and share all these worries, plus they'll graduate with £50,000+ of debt. Now they're terrified of a rampaging disease and many aren't coping well. It makes me ill just watching them trying to cope with it.

As for me, I'll be OK in the short-term. I'm naturally quite solitary and have an entire room of unread books, though sadly they're mostly ones I bought to make myself look much more high-minded than I really am (past me had some pretty optimistic and inaccurate ideas about my intellectual and moral development). I may not be entertained, but I'll get through this more educated. By next week I'll have the entire works of Henry James, Skelton and Dunbar committed to memory. Then you'll be sorry. It might be difficult work-wise though. While I have a collection of antiquated computers at home, I don't actually have an internet connection. My natural idleness and slight obsessiveness means that I've always done long hours at work because home-working would pretty much immediately become weeks without sleep while I followed the internet crumbs down every available rabbit hole. I do 1-12 hours at work most days, come home and don't want to look at another screen, so I chose not to install it at home: that may have to change. In the meantime, online teaching will require breaking in to work or war-driving until I find an insecure connection outside someone's house. I'm spending the next couple of days shuttling back and forth between home and work on my bike, moving books, computers and papers around until I know I've got enough to get on with. I'll be able to finally turn my PhD into a book, and then – oh joy – 500 politicians' novels to read. Oliver Letwin's just published a truly horrendous hybrid in which interweaving chapters of fiction and analysis come together to form one big Jeremiad about disaster planning. Timely, except it doesn't consider pandemics and demonstrates literally not one iota of understanding about how actual real people think or behave either individually or collectively. It's like he's never actually met a human being. The only thing worse than his lack of psychological insight is his grasp of the rudiments of fiction. (Yes, Dr Letwin's the Old Etonian who championed the poll tax, suggested that only black poor people riot, and was filmed dumping his constituents' letters in a park bin).

I've been on a bit of a tear in terms of reading recently - the more stressful or busy things are, the more I read. Yesterday I read a couple more children's books with a view to adding them to the eponymous module: the last two in Lucy Boston's largely wonderful Green Knowe series, and Jenn Swann Downey's romp (with philosophical and moral depth) The Ninja Librarians: The Sword in the Stacks. Books plus swords: consider me satisfied. I also enjoyed over the last few days Bella Bathurst's Special, Eric Ambler's Cause For Alarm and Uncommon Danger, Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Francis Beckett's The Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. Despite the claims of some people featured in Beckett's book (some of whom I know), it's a thoughtful and kind-hearted history. Despite the absolutely monstrous behaviour of the Party and/or some of its members at times, he finds the best in them, while not forbearing to identify the ideological, social and strategic howlers they committed. For my part, while I have a huge amount of affection for the hard left, I've always been saddened by the CP's failure to distance itself from so-called Communist regimes that clearly behaved appallingly (I've always seen the Soviet Union as a thinly-disguised Russian Nationalist enterprise), and by the serious left's preference for sectarian ideological purity over, you know, doing something. Monty Python's 'People's Front of Judaea' sketch might have been posh public school types laughing at the serious kids, but there's a lot of truth in it.



A genuinely democratic Communist Party free to criticise the Soviet Union in 1936, 1956 or 1968 and adapt its programme to local conditions might have been the salvation of this country. Instead, it and its splinter groups became squabbling sects of interest only to a security state which bolstered its own power and funding by inventing a threat that never really existed.

Why Be Happy…? wasn't exactly a joyful read, but it was moving and so hugely intelligent. I've read and taught the 'original' or fictional version of Winterson's story, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and must now teach the two novels in tandem. The later autobiography is a lot shorter on laughs and witty evasions, and feels much less shaped in literary terms, which is probably not true: Winterson is an expert on form and expression, so every word will be deliberately chosen for literary effect. I'm not one for memoir usually, but Winterson is an exception: brutally honest about the way her damaged behaviour led to dreadful treatment of herself and others, and a depth of wisdom and empathy – even for those who treated her most badly – that most of us could never aspire to. In contrast, Bella Bathurst's Special had no light in it at all. That's not to say it's a bad book: it isn't - well-structured, purposeful, and very persuasive characterisation. It's just emotionally so raw. Special is about a group of boarding school girls trapped together in a hostel at the fag-end of term, barely cared for by a pair of disillusioned, exhausted teachers. Every one of them is screwed up in some way, and their relationships are brutally exploitative. Empathy, care, concern, love and friendship are fleeting – these girls are too damaged in various ways to cope with their own concerns, let alone those of others. I read it pretty compulsively, but did breathe a sigh of relief when I got to the end. For a more emotionally-rounded tale of girls on the loose, try Alan Warner's The Sopranos. Finally, the Ambler's. He's an interesting author - very much on the left in the 1930s (and embarrassed later by his naivety about Stalin), he introduced a new seriousness to the crime thriller genre: his plots often feature decent, naive young people being caught up in the darkening political weather of that period. In that sense, they're good reads for now: ordinary people doing extraordinary things for the public good, sometimes against their instincts. Not sure what to tackle next. I've read too much apocalyptic fiction, from The Decameron to Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to Station Eleven to want to go back to it immediately. I think I'll alternate light fiction with history, plus of course the politicians' excrescences.

Despite my misanthropic aspect, I will miss my colleagues and students, and like many people, my friends are essentially workmates, aside from those dispersed around the country. I'm hoping we'll be allowed to meet up for walks and things so we don't lose touch entirely. My life is gradually closing down - no more fencing, my poor cousin's wedding is postponed, family is out of reach in several countries (perhaps a good thing), concerts are off, and even meetings are cancelled. Meetings! The lifeblood of the modern university! My closest relationships depend on public transport, so if that shuts down things will be unutterably worse. I've still got my bikes though, so hopefully I'll be able to get out and about for shopping and leisure.

The other problem with home working is that my house is a dump. I spent every penny on a place I could afford and have studiously avoided getting a new kitchen, bathroom, carpets, furniture etc, and diverted the money into books, records, bicycles, cholesterol and tweed. Now I'll have to stare at the consequences of my idiocy for weeks, and perhaps months. Still, I've got it so easy compared with pretty much everyone else.

So there we are. We've had floods, fires, Brexit, a Tory government, locusts, Trump and now a pandemic. I'll try to whistle in the dark here and on Twitter, but I can't tell when or how often I'll want or be able to post. What a relief, some of you might say. Twitter isn't just a binfire of anxiety to me: I'm enjoying the (sometimes) black humour and the cameraderie of my little corner of it. Academics With Cats is a joy, and the teasing as people post pictures of their home-working spaces. We're all discovering the joys and otherwise of online learning too, while wary that the Edtech Commandos will stage a coup. I wonder what popular/ephemeral culture did during the Spanish Flu of 1918. Presumably plenty of them ironised their way to the grave as well.