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!
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