Yma o hyd…

Well, here we are at the end of a second week of term. We've been teaching in person and by video, and my colleagues and I are exhausted: it's a lot of extra work turning loosely scripted lectures designed to be dialogues into lengthy monologues and recording them in time for the students to watch them before in-person and online seminars and fora. The light relief has been the subtitling: any complex or foreign words, and any delivery in a less than Californian accent is instantly garbled into a beautiful form of poetry. Not great for students who need subtitles, admittedly, but editing the nonsense generated by inadequate software would triple the time spent on any task. The various apps employed have all crashed in various and baroque ways, but we're muddling through. I am looking forward to the end of lockdown though, when academics from across the university can gather round a pyre made of Ed-Tech evangelists and party like it's Oxford, 1555. 

We're pretty much sitting round speculating how much longer in-person classes will continue. I'm enjoying them, despite the weirdness. Both our new first-years are sparky, engaged and interesting, and management assures us that our student body is sufficiently different from students at all the institutions that are suffering outbreaks that we can relax and carry on. In fact, the students' mental health depends on it! How convenient – especially for an institution which sacked most of the mental health staff – that the perfect outcome is the one that management, in their spacious individual offices, most wanted. What a coincidence.  I'm also enjoying the way we're being thanked for our work, warned of the dangers of burnout, and simultaneously told that something called 'carousel assessment' is coming. That's right, kids: ALL MARKING, ALL OF THE TIME. Again, something that sounds great if you're drawing a massive salary not to teach. However, while I'm convinced that the paramilitary wing of HE executives are determined not to let a good crisis go to waste, I have some sympathy for the VCs and their acolytes: they've been left to twist in the wind by a government that is itching to shut down a few of the more unfashionable institutions (like mine) and spoiling for a fight with the non-existent Forces of Wokeness that they imagine have turned Britain into such a nation of snowflakes that it has (checks notes) elected Conservative governments for a full decade and opted to leave the European Union. No doubt some macho VC's are beating their chests because their campus is still open, but others are holding out because there's no money left. Why there's no money left is another question: a hopeless addiction to ripping off the children gilded élites from various shady countries isn't a particularly ethical or sustainable business model enormous bonus-fuelled exec salaries, insane bond issues and shiny Ozymandiac buildings are part of the reason but it's also true that the £9250 fee hasn't kept pace with inflation and education does cost money. Not every HEI has a small county or decent little Rembrandt to take down to Cash Converters when things get tight. 

Anyway, it's nice to meet some students and my new colleagues, even if it's from 2 metres (I assume that anti-metric types think coronaviruses are hoaxes anyway), behind a mask. I do miss sitting around chatting: a surprising amount of my research and teaching ideas come from idle conversations. I miss conversations per se: a video meeting or class is a series of monologues punctuated by awkward clashes as we all miss the non-verbal cues that tell us so much. When I'm not on-campus my conversations tend to be with the bin, or the laundry basket until they get bored and wander off. I used to shout at Radio 4 a lot too until I gave up the whole channel as a bad job. Higher life forms (flies, mice) have learned to avoid the place, especially if they spot the Twitter app open: they know there's another explosion of impotent fury coming. Perhaps it's better just not to know anything: I've friends who are living proof that ignorance is bliss. Or one could just assume the worst and be very occasionally pleasantly surprised: as a long-term Stoke City fan, I can recommend this option. 

Enough of this. Have some photos, this time from the 2015 Stoke Ceramics Biennial in the abandoned Spode works and Minton Library. Whenever anyone tells me I have a big head I agree and show them the pictures.