Drinka pinta milka…week?

I was staring at the denuded milk shelves the other day, and found myself if this is how it felt to be Romano-British in the 400s. One day the flour wasn't on the shelves. The next olives were in short supply. Perhaps the price of garum had risen, or dormice weren't to be had without a trip into Camulodunum or Dorchester. A few odd things not being available now and then, or price rises in the basics turned into permanent absences; roads started to deteriorate; Saturnalia cards turned up late, then not at all. Those nice Gallic carpenters weren't to be found. The filthy habit of drinking beer returned as the locals couldn't get hold of good Roman wine and reverted to their great-grandparents' ways. All of a sudden, perhaps when you were stripping the roof off the forum to repair your villa, you realised you hadn't heard from your cousins in Hispanic for a while, or had a tax bill. And then it hit you: you weren't Roman any more, and life was going to get a lot harder. 

Not that life - now and then - wasn't already hard for many (slaves, the unemployed, the low-paid). But it's funny and depressing to notice how quickly the inmates of Brexit Island have adjusted to and found excuses for the slow degradation of our way of life (and not just standards in public life). Random shortages in the shops, the poor state of the roads (very noticeable to a cyclist like me), rapidly rising prices, dirty air and water, fewer, more expensive trains and buses, rationed healthcare and a plan to educate fewer people …all being blamed on coronavirus or dismissed for now, but all clearly the products of a society that's failed to plan, that has Whiggishly assumed that Progress means permanent improvement, and that believes Alone is somehow Better. 

I don't really know what it felt like to become a post-Roman (though I know someone who does) but I'm reminded of Hemingway on how you go bankrupt 'two ways: gradually then suddenly'. This place has cut itself off from a major trading and diplomatic bloc; the young workers who funded the old are leaving; the poor are being made poorer; a government with neither competence nor honour is retreating into nationalistic cliché while the serious money is hidden offshore. I dimly remember Gibbon noting in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that while (out of both altruism and self-preservation) the rich initially provided bread and circuses, whereas at the end they built higher walls and hired more security guards to protect their plutocratic luxuries - the Roman version of the Panama Papers, offshore shell companies and mega-mansions with underground swimming pools co-existing with full-time care staff going to food banks. I can't help thinking of Rishi Sunak, who proceeded from an expensive private school to Oxford and thence to hedge fund trading and marriage to a billionaire, before entering politics to spend the taxes he dedicated his life to avoiding, on behalf of people whose lives he has never encountered and couldn't imagine. 

I suspect neither you nor I will experience the extremes of poverty or plutocracy, and the effects of - for instance - deliberately restricting university education to fewer people (what nation has ever conceived of a less-educated populace as the answer to anything?) but it's hard not to miss the everyday signs of decay, from potholes to missing pints of milk. The question is whether we're experiencing temporary spasms or the start of a long, slow decline. 

As any casual glance at recent history tells you, the popular response is rarely progressive: if the rot really has set in, expect an extension of the cynical, cheap politics we're currently experiencing and outbreaks of bitter, violent paranoia. 

I'll stop there. I've depressed myself. Again. 

Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With

 I'm not sure which act of the Shakespearean - or Websterian - tragedy my institution is now at. There's definitely been a murder, but the corpse is still twitching and there are plenty of suspects. The murderers have departed the scene, but there are a couple of new guys around, professing friendship ('I'm all about people…I can't rule out compulsory redundancies') but insisting that we go hiking in the woods where - completely coincidentally - some of their former colleagues went missing. Let's call them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

But of course those of you who work in HE know how this one ends. Tolstoy was wrong when he said that 'happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. More fool him for writing in a period before liquid modernity and liquid capitalism. Contemporary higher education management is - if you can bear an overused metaphor - infectious and therefore unhappy in just the same way, even if panelling, finials and wince cellars disguise, for example, the vicious pension reductions in more favoured institutions. Its agents latch onto a host, suck it dry, then move on to the next victim, overwhelming its exhausted phages with a disarming smile and some slick words. Guildenstern lasted just two years in charge of a similar institution; Rosencrantz made Goldsmiths what it is today.

In the midst of all this, one little detail caught my eye at the end of the cheery email that announced we'd gone from having no debt and healthy reserves to a £20m deficit (can't think why the previous VC brought his departure forward a few months): the bit no-one really reads about an Employee Assistance Programme. Has anyone ever tried it? I imagine the conversation goes a little like this: 

Voice: 'Hello and Don't Panic. Megadodo Employee Assistance Programme. How can I help you?'

Employee: 'Hello. I'm Marvin. I'm not really sure how this works. I'm not actually an employee of yours'. 

Voice: 'That's alright sir/madam. Nor am I: we're all sub-contractors. We're here because your employer realised that institutions literally can't care about their employees and some managers couldn't handle brutalising people whose children's names they know. Also, helping people being happy and fulfilled doesn't really show up on an outputs spreadsheet. Meanwhile my company realised that while it too literally can't care either, it can make money paying less money to people like me who can pretend to care.* We can do care metrics: the more of you I talk to, the more I can bill your employer. Talking of which, could we hurry this up a bit?' 

Marvin: 'Wouldn't it be cheaper just to care about your colleagues enough to not make them need to beg for help in the first place? Capitalist managerialism is making me want to end it all'. 

Voice: 'Oh no'. 

Marvin: 'yes, it's terrible'. 

Voice: 'I know. If we don't keep under three deaths per month I lose my commission and the contract gets reviewed'. 

Marvin: 'That must be very stressful'. 

Voice: 'yes, but luckily my company has an Employee Assistance Programme with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation'. 

Marvin: 'I know. That's who I work for'. 

According to the Guide, the inventors of outsourcing are 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes'. Fortunately, a copy of the Encyclopædia Galactica from a thousand years in the future fell through a time warp in which it describes the outsourcing division as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first up against the wall when the revolution came'.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Well this has been a marvellous new year. Christmas was relatively good: a few days off and catching up with siblings and their children I hadn't seen for over two years, and none of us caught the 'Rona. 

Normal service then resumed: the death of my godmother and the funeral of former boss, Paul. The latter was a complex man. He'd attended Cambridge with a bunch of the Cameronite generation of Tories, and was a confirmed Labour supporter because of it. He gave up a PhD when he realised that he'd been spending more time on his Mastermind appearances (making the semi-finals). A career in BBC local radio presenting followed, then he made the move to academia, teaching radio production and broadcast journalism while writing books on news values and 19th-century government media management. He was a terrible manager mostly because the important bits bored him and the majority of the job aroused his keen sense of the absurd. He was a brilliant teacher and highly amusing colleague. He had a voracious and catholic appetite for reading and a photographic memory. He had a penchant for first ladies' autobiographies and celebrity memoirs: I remember the day he read Chantelle's supposed autobiography one evening and next day recounting entire chapters of it verbatim in an uncanny imitation of her voice and style. I was even amused by his habit of intercepting my post, taking the book parcels home, reading them overnight then sneaking them back into my pigeonhole. Less amusing was the enjoyment he took in finding rare books I collected that he didn't, buying them for himself then sending me pictures of them. 

Paul had a massive stroke at the age of 56, the same age his father died instantly of the same thing. He remained in hospital for over 6 years, occasionally appearing to recover a little, but he died just before Christmas, having seen hardly anyone except the excellent nurses for the entire lockdown period, his mother having died a couple of years previously. 

My godmother was an old friend of my mother. I hadn't seen her for several years but I was looking forward to visiting her, especially as she'd recently been widowed after a short, late-life marriage. She never offered me any spiritual guidance but I admired her an awful lot. Her Catholicism led her to a quiet but firm adherence to a number of principles I came to share from a socialist perspective - a commitment to social justice, a horror of nuclear weapons and support for the campaign against the arms trade. 

The good news just keeps coming. Following the departure of an awful lot of senior management rats in precipitate haste, our interim VC has announced a 'full review' of all university activities, courses and departments to cover the £20m hole in the accounts that are absolutely and solely the result of coronavirus and certainly not any of the farcical and incompetent schemes hatched recently. We all know how this ends: administrative and academic jobs lost, courses closed, students denied access to the education and opportunities they want, while the consequences for the architects of our downfall will be invisible to the naked eye.

Happy new year!