Crimea River

What can one possibly say in the face of this latest war that isn't impossibly trite or obvious? 'A plague on all your houses' is tempting, as is the old joke 'I wouldn't have started from here', because yesterday's attack on Ukraine is the result of miscalculation and cowardice on all sides for decades. 

There's a lot of chatter on the usual social media sites about useful idiots and infantile leftists, largely thanks to the Stop The War Coalition's preference for critiquing NATO rather than Russia, and the right's predilection for wilfully dumbing-down any criticism of Western governments and shouting treason. Some people are claiming that the attack on Ukraine is proof that Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union, which I think (channelling Zhou Enlai's apocryphal view of the French Revolution) is a misreading caused by a limited historical perspective. Instead, being a non-Stalinist old left-winger, I see the USSR as Tsarist Russia in modernised garb. The faces at the top changed, a few non-Russians were integrated into the leadership, but it was essentially the Russian-dominated empire under new management. While Putin is happy to appeal to the understandable ostalgie of citizens who remember not starving under the communists by downplaying the worst crimes of the Soviet regime, he's pretty consistently invoked the worldview of the Czars in all its autocratic pomp, particularly when it comes to how they viewed the near abroad (i.e. theirs). Putin isn't the General Secretary de nos jours; he's the Czar. 

While I'm embarrassed by the crudeness of the Stop the War & Cos. position, I do feel that the war, and Putin, are the creation and fault of the supposed democratic states. We've had 30-odd years of claiming that the West and democracy (not the same thing) won the cold war, but it's howlingly obvious to me at least that wasn't democracy that triumphed, it was capitalism. Other than the special case of Germany, the West made no effort to instil democracy in the former USSR. It imposed the most brutal forms of capitalism and made a tacit deal with the gangsters who emerged that the needs of their populations would come a very distant second to the energy and financial needs of the markets. The Chechens, the Georgians and a host of other democratically-inclined nations were abandoned; Russian people were left to destitution, drink and nostalgic fantasies, but oil and looted cash flowed out of Russia and into London, Frankfurt, Cyprus, the Virgin Islands, Switzerland and every other shady haven, no questions asked. No effort was made to establish states run by and for their populations. Every hungry oligarch and dictator was feted and fed to ensure that they didn't impede the flow of loot into Western banks, political parties, law firms, private schools and football clubs until one of them had the bad manners to get impatient. Doesn't Putin understand that economic violence is much more effective than the stuff with guns? Why invade a country when you can buy it piece by piece? It's embarrassing. Makes the global order look bad.  

No wonder the West's response is so compromised, embarrassing and evasive. The virtue signalling from all sides is unbearable. Here's what Steve Reed, the Labour MP posted on Twitter:

This, kids, is what we call bathos. The Kremlin's tacticians aren't recreating that scene in Downfall as news that Croydon stands with Ukraine filters through. Does Croydon really stand with Ukraine? What does that mean in practice? Still, at least Steve is just a backbench opposition MP who needs to sound tough. What of the actual British Prime Minister? Well, I took some time off work to watch his solemn address to the nation and came away pretty depressed. 7 minutes of utter vacuity no more meaningful than Steve's tweet. Nothing more than 'thoughts and prayers' - tough words without a single meaningful action attached. Cynical, in fact: rhetoric designed to persuade the voters that the UK government is actually doing something while very carefully not committing to doing anything at all. Johnson keeps saying that the UK will act in concert with other nations - perhaps being in some kind of supra-national union might have helped? What he actually means is that there's no way the other big nations will do anything so Britain won't have to either. It's not a promise, it's a loophole. Brexit has been a bonanza for the oligarchs and criminals the world over: Britain has become Europe's Macao, a lovely place with all the trappings of civilisation but without any of that pesky rule-of-law stuff, a safe haven for looted billions with no questions ever asked, thanks to state capture by a crowd of politicians who are far more interested in finance than democracy and rather envy the crude macho bluster of Trump, Putin and co. and are quite bored having to operate within the minimal guide rails of liberal democracy. 

The reason is obvious: Ukraine has no chance of winning this war without military help from outside and no country is going to provide it. I would have a lot more respect for the UK government if they honestly explained that Ukraine isn't important enough to go to war with Russia over - it's the double-talk that I can't stand. There's no meaningful action that the West can take that will change the course of events other than war, and that's not going to happen. Admitting this isn't an option so instead you get Johnson and his crew of compromised statesman cos-players throwing Churchillian shapes while wondering how this will affect the upcoming local election results. Ukrainians and Russian conscripts will die while we ponder confiscating the odd under-achieving football club and a couple of yachts (BP's Russian holdings will remain untouched) and our leaders will hope for a swift Russian victory they can present as an unfortunate fait accompli. The Ukrainians can appeal to us via heart-rending social media - the new asymmetric warfare - but they're collateral damage that the powerful countries can easily live with. 

The last British adventure in Ukraine resulted in the Charge of the Light Brigade (spoiler: massive away loss, a mediocre poem and an iffy Doctor Who episode); Johnson, Truss, Tugendhat and the rest of this ghastly crew is more the Charge of the Shite Brigade. Lightweight, tactical, cynical and pointless. Being a product of empire myself I've never put the slightest faith in the much vaunted idea of Britain being a credible force for good in the world (where might Putin have got the idea for 'protecting' an embattled minority against anti-imperialist splitters, in the centenary year of the foundation of Northern Ireland?), but the obvious post-Brexit marginalisation of the UK would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. 

Anyway, enough of My Two Cents. While all this has been going on I've read some books, between to a funeral, bought more books, done a lot of marking, watched this government legislate to abolish universities like mine and fumed that not enough of my colleagues voted to strike alongside our counterparts in 68 other universities, and went to an online dramatisation of the life of novelist Amy Dillwyn, the Welsh Ann Lister. 

Après-moi, le deluge

I'm going to resist the temptation to comment on the benighted and depressing farce that constitutes British politics/economics/public life - you can follow me on Twitter for that. 

The big news is that I've finished my marking! In reality, this means that I still have to negotiate the complexities of our newly-secure and thus unusable VLE and inevitably discover a load of hidden essays at the last minute, but I'm going to enjoy a day or two of denial. It helps that the standard has been really high: the kids emerged from lockdown with amazing enthusiasm and have produced hugely impressive work. I've also done a couple of events for the city's literature festival - a conversation with Paul Mason on his new book How To Stop Fascism and a conversation between four crime writers (Holly Seddon, Mark Edwards, Sharon Dempsey and Brian McGilloway) on genre, craft and literary snobbery). All good fun, but between those and the thrill of the Six Nations, I was too exhausted to attend anything for fun, which was a shame. 

I did manage to sneak in a bit of reading. Top of the list was the English translation/adaptation of Manon Steffan Ros's hit post-apocalypse YA novel Llyfr Glas Nebo which follows in the tradition of Meg Rosoff's How We Live Now. The original book is beautiful, written in an idiosyncratic version of the North Welsh dialect, swapping voices between the Welsh of a mother whose Welsh was always present but tentative, and a boy whose Welsh is largely learned from books in the absence of any kind of community. Even for a learner like me it was hugely effective. One aspect that really worked was the novel's concern with other literature (much like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home): the isolated family learn their world through looted books. Rowenna largely sticks to middlebrow English literature and Welsh novels for teenagers and learners, while her son races through the Bible and a huge number of Welsh-language novels and poetry collections. The English translation, The Blue Book of Nebo  (by the author) is moving and hugely successful but the literary landscape is different: the reader can't be expected to pick up on the significance of the Welsh texts referred to (even starting with the book's title. Some of the names have been changed too, perhaps to make reading easier for people unfamiliar with Welsh names, therefore substituting one set of cultural echoes for another. The boy, Siôn, becomes Dylan while his short-lived sister Dwynwen is now Mona, for example.

Anyway, read it: it's short because it doesn't need to be long; it's an intense exploration of mother-child relationships, and it's beautifully written in either language. 

Unlike, I'm sad to say, the other collapse novel I read this week: Kim Stanley Robinson's cli-fi doorstop The Ministry for the Future whose cover blazons the claim 'Obama's Favourite Book of 2021'. I am a KSR fan, having enjoyed many of his previous novels and sharing his clear and heartfelt fear that nationalism and capitalism are determined to resist doing the necessary to avoid environmental disaster. This novel just didn't work for me. It alternates between following the Irish head of the UN environmental body of the title as she tries to avert disaster, the voices of multiple protagonists (farmers, victims of climate change, eco-terrorists etc.) and mini-chapters taking different discursive forms explaining the science, economics politics and so on. It puts the case for optimism without convincingly justifying it (though I liked the idea of home-made Semtex-bearing drones being employed to make private jet use suicidal), and the wide sweep made it hard to sustain the traditional person-centred novel form. It's a (much-needed) novel of ideas really, like Cory Doctorow's badly-written but fascinating work. KSR is a much better writer than Doctorow, but this novel just felt too clunky despite its good intentions and scientific accuracy. Still worth reading, but a bit of an effort. 

I'm off to my godmother's funeral early next week and have some external examine work to do, so research and reading might take a bit of a back seat, but no doubt more marking will rise from the depths like a misanthropic shark…

Some recent reading

The more work I have, the more books I read for pleasure. This doesn't alleviate any stress or help me sleep any better, but I'm not particularly inclined to do anything about it. What I must do is shelve the recently-read pile as it's currently a health-and-safety issue. 

I've mentioned the ones down in the lower strata already, but in case you're thinking of getting any of those at the top, a quick summary (click on the picture to enlarge it). 

Patricia Lockwood, Nobody Is Talking About This. I like her poetry, her cat tweets, and found her memoir Priestdaddy compelling, hilarious and horrifying. I struggled with Nobody a little though, despite being nearly as 'extremely online' as she is. At heart it's quite an old-fashioned moral tale (not that there's anything wrong with this). The protagonist, whose life closely shadows the author's, finds that being extremely online is exciting, confusing, shallow, overly-judgmental, random and disorienting, damaging her ability to establish stable or deep relationships with people IRL. Then the birth and death of her disabled niece teaches her that genuine and altruistic emotional connections are still available, and the child's brief existence gives her a sense of perspective with regards to the Twittersphere (sorry, 'the portal'). Some of it is really funny, some is moving, but I couldn't decide whether the tone was deliberately shallow and mawkish to represent the supposed discursive effect of being always online, or whether it's sincerely artless. I'm also torn between reading this as an autobiographical work and therefore respecting the author's grief and loss, and reading it as fiction in which case it's another dead-baby-for-instant-pathos piece. I know this makes me sound very callous indeed but didn't we agree after John Green that children+terminal disease = sales/awards is a cynical ploy (see also Wilde's response to the death of Little Nell, who despite being fictional is buried not far from here)? If we're meant to read Nobody as a work of fiction, the 'message' is that a child's death proves that social media are ephemeral in comparison. Well, a) we should be able to work that out anyway and b) while social media posts may individually be insubstantial, the collective whole has had a profound effect on emotion, human interaction, politics, violence and any number of areas of human behaviour. Finally: what about those of us who don't have even healthy children available to remind us of what's valuable? Are we condemned to a life of sterile frivolity? Seems a bit essentialist…

Next book down is Connie Willis's Crosstalk, a romantic speculative fiction comedy which also expresses concern with the emotional impact of excessive social media. Our heroine works in a Silicon Valley phone company which is developing the future of communication: emotional and eventually conversational telepathy. The point of the novel is that our thoughts and feelings are much less coherent and pleasant than what we choose to convey, and that unfiltered access even to one's lovers' thoughts might be a Bad Idea. Absolutely fine, totally agree. But. But but but but but. The mechanism by which we arrive at this revelation is that genuine telepathy is a gift retained only by the pure Irish: those who haven't interbred with all and sundry. Obviously the idea of unadulterated peoples is historical and scientific nonsense that shouldn't be entertained even in a light-hearted rom-com. Then there's the literary effect: terrible. Our heroine is Bridget because of course it is (today is Lá Fhéile Bride btw) and of course she has red hair. She is Irish-American and her entire family are garrulous, Catholic, interfering, speak in the worst cod-Irish nonsense ('ould sod, 'children'), eat soda bread and potatoes all day and Bridget is constantly called Briddey which never happens. Bridey maybe, Bríd definitely but not Briddey. I think most of Connie Willis's novels are absolutely wonderful but this one just didn't work. Maybe, as an African-American author, her dreadful version of Irishness is a satirical comment on white authors' embarrassing representations of African-Americans, but maybe it's just bad, bad writing. 

Underneath Crosstalk is volume 2 of Ngaio Marsh's 1930s-40s Inspector Alleyn novels - I'm buying one volume every few months until I've worked my way through them. Alleyn himself, sidekick Sergeant Fox and Watson journalist Nigel Bathgate aren't that interesting - identikit gentleman policeman, working-class subordinate and slumming hack, but the plots are compelling and darker than many of her peers. Marsh also has a gift for brief, piercing description and metaphor which makes me pause and admire. The settings may sometimes be the country house but even when it is, she does something different with it, and she ranges further and wider than most, though theatres seem to be her favourite venue for murder. There's also a sense that she moves with the times more readily than some of the more formulaic detective writers: her crimes emerge from the depths of damaged groups and societies responding to war, hardship or simply change. 

I'm sure I've mentioned the other books in the pile before, so I won't bore you further other than to list them, and to mention Lindsay Clarke's The Chemical Wedding which I borrowed - I'd never heard of him or this 1987 Whitbread Prize-winning novel, but it's a fascinating cocktail of Cold War fear, Possession-style switching between present-day characters and mystical ancestors with a dash of magical realism. Absolutely entrancing. 

Mary Gentle, Ash: magnificent feminist medieval fantasy with echoes of Byatt's Possession. Maybe 300 pages too long. 

Tove Jansson's Art and Pictures: obviously wonderful. 

Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts - good history of British fascism, the treason of the Nazi-loving aristocracy and of course the Daily Mail's role in promoting fascism, which it hasn't yet given up on. 

Simon Ings, The Smoke - well-written SF with some pointed political ideas. 

G Compton, Farewell Earth's Bliss: good old-fashioned SF. 

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and other works: one of the earliest novels, by a woman and addressing the slave trade. Pioneering and troubling. 

Nina Allan, The Race: enjoyable speculative fiction set in a degraded, declining Britain. So not very speculative really. 

Jo Walton, Lent: I'm a huge fan of Walton's work: she's interested in philosophy, knows her history and writes beautifully across a range of genres. This one shares territory with Adam Roberts' recent literary explorations of philosophical positions with monsters, though his thing is Kant and her's is neo-Platonism.

Michael Arlen, These Charming People: a collection of 1930s short stories by a nearly-forgotten author. The best ones remind me of Katherine Mansfield in tone and quality, but too many of them are slight or rely on a single point or gag. 

Anita Brookner, Providence: reminded me why even though she writes pretty much the same novel every time, they're all worth reading. A single sentence of Brookner is worth a whole novel of other authors. 

Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings at Large: a curiosity, a real time warp of a comic boarding-school novel, but charming throughout. 

Ariosto, Orlando Furioso: utterly bonkers 16th-century epic but also thrilling and wonderful, even in prose translation. My favourite bit was when St John takes one of our heroes to the moon to retrieve Orlando's brain from the pile stored up there.  

Thurber and White, Is Sex Necessary?: some good though dated gags but ultimately a little wearing. I don't think it will stand up to much re-reading. 

Mantel, The Mirror and the Light: admirable for the scale, which gives her the space for the minutest subtle characterisation and implication. We all know what's going to happen - the art is in the way she depicts the sudden reversals experienced by and the self-deception practised by pretty much every character. 

More, Bacon, Neville, Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More's is the most substantial and well-known, but Bacon and Neville's are fascinating too, though lacking More's mordant humour. 

Lethem, The Arrest: post-modern SF humour. Good fun but I wondered in the end what it was for. 

Tom Gauld, The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess: aimed at 5 year-olds so the plot is simple and affecting, and the illustration is as always beautiful. 

Sally Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel - a fine addition to the English-in-Venice and emotional-scales-falling-away-late-in-life subgenres

Chips Channon's diaries vol. 1: a monster. All-too-familiar tale in his own unapologetic, unreflective words of the dark heart of the ruling classes. 

Ben Aaronovitch's False Value is the latest in his weird-police series, which I enjoy enormously though it's showing signs of wear. The same goes for Jasper Fforde's latest (not pictured), The Constant Rabbit - highly enjoyable and politically urgent, but it feels like the last gasp of the comic novel. 

I reviewed Stevie Davies' The Party Wall and Angela Graham's A City Burning in Planet a few months ago. I liked Graham's book immediately but felt that Davies - one of my absolute favourite authors - had come a cropper trying genre fiction with The Party Wall. I feel the need to revise that somewhat: months later I'm still thinking about her central protagonist, the ultimate in toxic masculinity. I'm still not convinced by the plotting, but her description of banal male evil is genuinely haunting. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Dorian Grey and Moll Flanders were on a module I taught recently - all worth revisiting, obviously. 

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! 

We Who Are About To Die Salute You

It's one thing to know that your entire existence and purpose means nothing to those in charge: it's another to hear it articulated explicitly by your employer as though this was entirely natural, a fact of life to which the only possible response is rueful acceptance. 

I went along to the faculty online staff meeting today. It was - as usual - mostly bad news, but the big item was the university's response to the government directive that schools, colleges and universities must carry on doing face-to-face teaching this week. The guidance was posted on-screen, and some nugatory advice around mask-wearing was added. This was a continuation of a pattern: management points at what the government says, explains with a shrug that we're not allowed to do anything more than that, and leaves students and staff to their fates. All very regrettable. 

The difference this time is that several universities have ignored the government, including (as the Dean pointed out), Manchester University. So universities do have a degree of autonomy remaining. It's just that some institutions are more autonomous than others. I don't want to put words in the mouth of my Dean: he's a humane, reflective and enormously intelligent individual, but the clear implication is that only the prestigious universities can afford to do the right thing by their students and staff. He's right. This government doesn't like intellectuals anywhere, but it does like the idea of the institutions its members attended. It is seeking multiple ways to shut down places like mine: unfashionable, architecturally unappealing and stuffed with poor, black and mature students and staffed with, they think, bearded Corbynite subversives - the latest wheeze is to deny fee loans to entrants with lower previous educational achievements, while shutting courses attended by people who then enter low-paid jobs of no obvious benefit to society (nursing, teaching, social work, anything in a depressed post-industrial area like mine) rather than joining one of those industries which genuinely adds to the public good and is famously open to all-comers (hedge-fund trading, journalism, mergers and acquisitions law). There are multiple motivations for this kind of vandalism. Some of it is self-preservation: they've noticed that increased educational attainment leads to voting for liberal or leftwing parties, so suppressing critical thinking maintains their supremacy. Then there's the economic model they favour: having become the party of international capital rather than business - you all remember what Boris wants to do to that - or, heaven forfend, actual people, it's in their interest to stoke their donors' share prices by screwing down wages, exporting jobs and keeping the majority of the population poor and needy. They're much better behaved that way. Keep blaming boat people and the turkeys will continue voting for Christmas. 

All this is so familiar, so predictable. What was shocking, today, was to hear highly intelligent and caring people openly accept that the threats to universities are so real and so irresistible that we just have to accept it: that there will be collateral damage in terms of lives and social/cultural damage. That some of our colleagues and students will die or get sick because they're at the wrong institution. I don't blame my managers for one moment. We boycotted the league tables for years because they were distorted and damaging: not a single other university joined us and so we eventually fell back into line. Coronavirus is the same. Manchester, Imperial and the others can afford to ignore government guidance because they have money, prestige and influence. Places like mine - places that specialise in welcoming the marginalised and dispossessed while being judged on the same criteria ruthlessly selective and moneyed HEIs are assessed on - have to rely on crossed fingers. Should the worst happen, neither the government nor other universities will lift a finger to help: the universities minister spends her time encouraging students to sue for breaches of the consumer marketing act while inventing fantasies about woke mobs; other HEIs' marketing teams will behave like sharks scenting blood. Solidarity never existed, while university autonomy is one of those comforting myths that vanishes into the air the moment it's tested. 

The immediate situation doesn't affect me: I taught face-to-face on Monday and all day Tuesday, but remaining classes were already scheduled to be online. As a union rep though, I'm getting calls from colleagues with health issues and caring responsibilities who feel abandoned by a management that has given up doing anything more than pointing at the Office for Students guidance and shrugging 'not me guv'. The government hates us; recruitment has collapsed; why stick our heads in the wasp's nest for the sake of a few points on the infection scale? This is where a culture of fear leads to: a senior management that has internalised the market logic and culture war rhetoric, is understandably very tired physically and spiritually, and lacks the self-confidence to individually or collectively do the right thing: their only response is to get out and they're doing that in droves to the extent that the Marie Celeste would seem livelier than the executive suite. We've got a new interim VC whose former field was spinal injuries and sport. Let's see if he can restore some backbone.

You may be unsurprised to learn that my morning alarm features a range of songs that Eyeore might consider a little on the gloomy side: Bonnie Prince Billy's 'Another Day of Dread', Smog's 'No Dancing', Lambchop's 'The Man Who Loved Beer' and Mazzy Star's 'Into Dust'. 

Weirdly though, if I ignore all the above and the relentless misery of this dreadful country, I'm having a great time. Teaching has been absolutely fantastic this year. I'm teaching first and second year modules and in every class there's a critical mass of intellectuals who've stretched me more than usual, a return of mature students who always add something special, a smattering of ever-welcome European students, and even more likeable, interested, talkative and funny people than usual, plus my wonderful colleagues. Despite the presence of the grim reaper at one of the desks towards the back, I've looked forward to every session. It feels a bit weird with the second-years though: I taught them online throughout their first year, only met them this semester, and because of the way my teaching load has worked out, I'll never see them again other than the few whose dissertation I'll supervise. It's a shame that their younger siblings and children won't have the chances they've taken such enthusiastic advantage of. Still, I'm sure delivering burgers on a gig-economy non-contract will feel just as liberating and fulfilling. 

Happy Christmas!

Droning on again…

Maybe I am dead after all. I certainly haven't been blogging at all: too busy teaching (every day) and preparing classes in multiple formats. I'm only typing this because I'm in the office resolutely not marking. Not that I resent the teaching schedule too much - the students are a joy at the moment: present, engaged and enthusiastic. Even the online classes which were a chore for all concerned last year are going well. No doubt the atmosphere will change next week when the first essays are returned - there's always a notable froideur in the room when my misanthropic bile manifests itself in stark percentages (as an aside, I hate percentage marking: there's no meaningful way to differentiate between a 63% understanding of a sonnet and a 64% - it's misleading pseudoscience). Until then though, cheeriness abounds, with only the awareness of research undone nagging at the edge of my consciousness. 

Other than that, I've been to Exeter with colleagues to do a Being Human festival gig as part of our Novel Perceptions project: please please please please take our survey and make the data significant. We're interested in a refreshed canon, peoples' memories and emotional responses to texts, their ideas of what constitutes literary quality and the qualities of books people rate highly (which our colleagues at the University of Amsterdam are analysing computationally. One of the interesting aspects is identifying regional preferences: Exonians rate Stella Gibbons' gleeful parody of pastoralism Cold Comfort Farm, Pride and Prejudice and Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander more highly than readers in other areas. Some of this is regional loyalty of course, but I think there are probably other reasons: appreciation of the harshness of rural life in Gibbons' satire, and also echoes of the long-gone period when cities like Exeter were centres of real political and cultural power. Before mass communications and mass transport the south coast was where Austen's characters went for a bit of sun, sea and sin (Torquay and Lyme Regis as the Magaluf of their day) and abroad started just outside the harbour when naval, slaving, trading and emigration ships departed from ports all round the country rather than everyone heading off to Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted (though Caergybi/Holyhead has always been my only port of departure). One of the high points of the day was sharing a panel with two fascinating artists: established novelist Virginia Baily and emerging poet Zakiya McKenzie, whose work on place, culture and environment in the English south-west and Jamaica really bowled me over. 

I'm back fencing after breaking a rib or two in late summer - perfectly timed to be regularly humiliated by visiting international fencers at the club, though I was delighted to get a few points off an Italian women's foil squad member - it's the equivalent of San Marino at least forcing a save during a match against France or Germany. Reading has mostly been course texts (Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home this week), but I've also got through Simon Ings' interesting The Smoke, some of Josephine Tey's golden age detective novels and Martin Pugh's Hurrah for the Blackshirts recently. The latter is a comprehensive history of British fascism from the Edwardian period into WW2. The Daily Mail's enthusiastic support for anyone with an extermination plan and a uniform isn't exactly news to me, but the sheer volume – and familiar arguments – are shocking. It really hasn't changed at all. 

Musically, I'm enjoying Metallica's Metallica (great for marking to), the new album by Low, Hey What, the latest one by The War On Drugs - the only bit of 80s revivalism I can bear. I'm teaching American Psycho next week, and realise that because the students are all fully into the rehabilitation of one of civilisation's worst decades, they just won't get why sociopathic murdered Patrick Bateman is so obsessed with Phil Collins. Trust me kids: Uncle Phil is the child-catcher of yacht-rock. Just say no. Other than that I've been listening to some contemporary choral releases fairly obsessively. I bought Pembroke College choir's collection of work by women composers All Things Are Quite Silent and Ars Nova Copenhagen's collection …And at the same time. Both of them include composer and Kanye West collaborator Caroline Shaw's '…and the swallow', which I love, plus the latter includes badass post-minimalist Julia Wolfe's 'Guard My Tongue'. Much as I love authentic ancient polyphony, I'm really enjoying these composers' use of familiar sounds and modern techniques to unsettle expectations. Here are the two Shaw recordings I have, and a different one of the Wolfe. 

Coincidentally, I also bought a Caroline Shaw EP, Roomful of Teeth - it's a bit 70s tape experimentalism, a bit Boo Radley's Giant Steps, a bit Tubular Bells, a bit Laurie Anderson and all wonderful. It also reminds me of the stunningly repetitive, meditational Phil Niblock piece 'AYU' that kept me from going on a murder spree during yesterday's interminably-delayed train trip.  

If you really hate all that, here's a palate cleanser: 'Enter Sandman'. Don't have nightmares…

 

I Aten't Dead

 'I Aten't Dead' is the sign the ultimate brommager  Granny Weatherwax leaves next to her body while she hitches a ride in animals' consciousnesses in Terry Pratchett's novels. Whether we're all consciousnesses hitching a ride in our personal meat-vehicles is a questions I'll leave to the philosophers, but it's how I've been feeling for the past couple of weeks. 

Not in a bad way (for a change): we're getting to the end of the third week of teaching, a blend of face-to-face and online. I'm teaching every day, which is exciting but leaves little time for preparation or research activities. The drawback of in-class teaching is the lack of a mute function, but on the whole it's been a joy despite my reservations about the way the government and the university has abandoned all health precautions. Both the new and returning cohorts of students are much more engaged and talkative than I remember in the before-times: the majority are reading the texts and bringing informed opinions. I've more male and more mature students than in recent years, so there's a wider range of opinions and experiences. It's just such a pleasure to sit down and talk to interested people about interesting texts: this week has included Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the influence of James Baldwin on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Alice in Wonderland, Valerie Solanas's The SCUM Manifesto (full text) and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's been quite a while since a student offered a detailed analysis of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique unprompted - being stretched intellectually in class is one of the best things about being an academic. Hopefully there will be much more to come. 

The other academic pleasure of the month was taking part in the launch of this excellent book on Welsh Valleys' masculinities in literature by John Jenkins - I was his external PhD examiner, then read the book manuscript once it had been de-doctored, and there are even a couple of references to my dreadful PhD in it. We had an online launch with questions for John from Prof Jane Aaron and myself, then a q+a session which brought up some interesting new thoughts. While I have reservations about online teaching, being able to attend events normally out of reach has been a real high point of the last couple of years. The other massive pleasure of the past few weeks is examining a PhD on identity politics in nerd culture for an Australian university. They don't do vivas, which is really disappointing: while I have no interest in flying across the globe, an online one would have been fascinating because the dissertation is so good and I just want to hear more from its author. The topic is contemporary, the theory (a mix of feminist and classic Cultural Studies work alongside some ethnography and auto-ethnography) handled well and the writing is beautiful - clear and charismatic. 

Weirdly, despite reading all these texts and writing lectures on them plus all the other stuff, it feels like I haven't had much time for other reading, but I randomly plucked Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History from the Room of Unread Books. I don't know anything about her and had no memory of buying this book, but it really justified its 1000+ pages. Taking as its starting point the almost overnight disappearance of Burgundy, a rich and powerful state, in the 15th-century, Gentle constructs a quite brutally visceral alternative history, following the fortunes of a female mercenary leader into a plot that weaves an astonishingly detailed history (from the top and from below) with subtly handled fantasy elements. Definite shades of Byatt's Possession alongside familiar fantasy authors, and beautifully handled. 

Right, back to the lectures, the late chapter abstract and the late manuscript review…

The Beeb Bites Back!

 A couple of days ago I posted a quick piece on my disquiet about the BBC offering members of parliament anonymity to discuss government policy. 

Today I got a reply, and I have to say that both the speed and the content are unsatisfactory: I don't think that a serious issue of policy and journalistic ethics can be discussed and decided within such a short time. Even more annoying is the use of a no-reply email address - the issue is clearly closed as far as the BBC is concerned, and dialogue is not invited. 

This is what the BBC had to say:

Thank you for contacting us regarding Radio 4’s ‘The World at One’ which was broadcast on 15 September.

We note your unhappiness that the item on the cut to Universal Credit featured a contribution from a Conservative MP who agreed to speak to the programme off the record.

Choosing the individuals to interview for the reports on the programme is a subjective matter and one which we know not every member of our audience will feel we get right every time.

Sarah Montague did make clear to listeners that the team at ‘The World at One’ had attempted to contact both the minister and several backbench Conservatives before one MP had agreed to speak anonymously.

In an ideal world, politicians or their representatives might only speak on the record; however, in politics as in life, people are often more candid in private.

While our journalists always prefer on the record quotes, it is important to talk to unnamed sources to get a greater sense of what is going on in Westminster, which can then be relayed back to our audiences.

Without doing this, there is a risk that information coming out of Parliament would be restricted, which could impact our journalism and ability to hold politicians to account.

Nevertheless, we do value your feedback about this. All complaints are sent to senior management and we have included your points in our overnight report.

These reports are among the most widely read sources of feedback in the company and ensures that your concerns have been seen by the right people quickly. This helps inform their decisions about current and future content.

Thank you once again for getting in touch.

Kind regards

Terry Hughes 

BBC Complaints Team 
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints 
 
Please note: this email is sent from an unmonitored address so please don’t reply. If necessary please contact us through our webform (please include your case reference number).

I don't think this is satisfactory. The core issue is that the source was not providing any kind of insight beyond what had already been reported: he or she was simply stating support for his or her party's decision without risking any electoral unpopularity. 

Terry's summary of my complaint is a little slippery: WATO didn't 'speak to' a politician 'off the record': it accepted a statement, anonymised it then read it out without any opportunity to challenge its basis. The statement was not 'candid': it consisted of a Conservative Member of Parliament repeating the government's view that the benefit uplift is no longer affordable. Nothing more. 

It seems ironic that the BBC feels that anonymity allows it to 'hold politicians to account' when providing secrecy to an elected representative prevents the electorate from holding it to account, while simply reading a statement rather than interviewing the MP concerned means that there's no possibility of the BBC doing so either. 

The Right to Know?

Amidst everything going on at the moment - graduations, preparing for a whole new semester of in-person teaching, examining a PhD, writing a chapter, reviewing a book and being part of an AHRC project, I found time to write a complaining letter to the BBC about its news coverage. I know, I felt my own heart sinking as I realised I've become that kind of pompous bore-cum-conspiracist. 

In my defence, I did write to The World At One first hoping to discuss the issue with them rather than make a formal complaint, but there was no reply, so off I went to the dispute service. What was I complaining about? Well, on this show, the presenters discussed the upcoming withdrawal of the emergency £20 per week benefit uplift, which is raising widespread concern on both sides of the political divide. WATO tried to get some Conservative MPs to comment on air, but none would - draw your own conclusions. 

If the piece had ended there, I'd have been satisfied. But WATO found a Conservative MP to give them a statement in support of the government's policy, on condition that he remain anonymous - they went so far as to have it read out by a member of the production team. 

A Conservative MP, yesterday

Now there's definitely a place for anonymity in news broadcasts: if the BBC were talking to an Afghan in Kabul who'd worked for UK forces, someone in hiding from an abusive partner, or a whistleblower, I think we'd all agree that anonymity was essential for their personal safety. The BBC has rules about protecting contributors:

We should consider whether a contributor/contestant might be regarded as being at risk of significant harm as a result of taking part in BBC content. We should conduct a “contributor due care” risk assessment to identify any risk of significant harm to the contributor, unless it is justified in the public interest not to do so. 

This guidance does not apply to individuals who appear in our news coverage when they are caught up in current events. 

It is concerned with contributors to BBC content where we owe due care to contributors or potential contributors who may be caused harm or distress as a result of their contribution, including in News and Current Affairs and Factual content where the BBC has approached someone to be a contributor in situations where there may be a significant risk of harm.

I can't see that any 'significant harm' ensues from an elected representative endorsing the government s/he supports. A member of parliament is different from a vulnerable source because s/he has power and privilege. They're elected by a specific group of people on the basis of their views, specific or general. There's no expectation of privacy when it comes to political opinion. Constituents are entitled to know what their MP thinks so they can take it into consideration when the next election comes round. 

The BBC is pretty clear on what counts as a 'vulnerable' person - here's one definition:

they are not used to being in the public eye

whereas 

We must judge this taking into account the editorial content, the nature and degree of the individual’s involvement and their public position

There's no question that this MP was in danger of nothing more than reduced popularity and perhaps some stiff emails. S/he was clearly too cowardly to openly support a policy he believes in being put into action by the government he put in power. I know this sounds really pompous, but I genuinely believe that the BBC affording anonymity to an elected representative in no meaningful danger to promote government policy is a distortion of the democratic process. MPs are rightly held to greater standards of openness than - to pick a random example - a pseudonymous blogger because they have real power. If the state broadcaster allows elected representatives to hide behind anonymity to support or oppose mainstream decisions and views, the electorate is denied the chance to make an informed decision. 

The BBC has some guidance for producers about anonymity, and it doesn't feel like they were followed when this article was put together. 

The decision to grant anonymity should be taken with great care. The programme maker must consider why the person wishes to remain anonymous.  

The most important question to pose to someone requesting anonymity is “Whom do you want to be anonymous from - from the general public or from people who know you well?

On the whole they're not keen on it: 

Sources and contributors should speak on the record whenever practicable and their identities and credentials made known to the audience so that they can judge the source’s credibility, reliability and whether or not they are in a position to have sufficient knowledge of the subject or events.  

The decision to grant anonymity should be taken with great care. The programme maker must consider why the person wishes to remain anonymous. Do they have something to hide beyond their identity?  

When it is not self-evident to the audience we should explain to them the reasons why the production granted anonymity to a source. The strongest rationale for granting anonymity is simply to protect the contributor from illegitimate retaliation, harassment or undesirable consequences for providing information.

I don't think this case is justified at all, and no explanation was given on air, but it seems to me that the bar was set too low. How are we to know if the next MP to be given this treatment on some public issue doesn't have a monetary interest in the outcome, for instance? It could have been my MP, Stuart Anderson, a man with legal and moral issues of his own in a marginal constituency. Knowing his view might tip the balance in either direction, but we'll never know whether it was him or not. 

The BBC guidance is far more focussed on the protection of justifiably anonymised contributors - people with social or psychological vulnerabilities or potentially open to persecution: there's nothing in the guidelines about the public interest, which is deeply concerning. 

A member of parliament is elected by a specific group of people on the basis of their views, specific or general. Constituents are entitled to know what their MP thinks so they can take it into consideration when the next election comes round. There's no question that this MP was in danger of nothing more than reduced popularity and perhaps some stiff emails. S/he was clearly too cowardly to openly support a policy he believes in being put into action by the government s/he put in power. I know this sounds really pompous, but I genuinely believe that the BBC affording anonymity to an elected representative in no meaningful danger to promote government policy is a distortion of the democratic process. MPs are rightly held to greater standards of openness than - to pick a random example - a pseudonymous blogger because they have real power. If the state broadcaster allows elected representatives to hide behind anonymity to support or oppose mainstream decisions and views, the electorate is denied the chance to make an informed decision. How are we to know, for instance, if the next MP to be given this treatment on some public issue doesn't have a monetary interest in the outcome, for instance? 

An MP too ashamed to support his/her own party's policy or government's decisions should take a long look at her/himself, not demand and be given protection from public opinion. For the MP to ask for this is shameless enough, but for a broadcaster with legal responsibilities of impartiality and ethical behaviour is a serious dereliction of duty. The BBC's responsibilities include this stirring statement:

We must always scrutinise arguments, question consensus and hold power to account with consistency and due impartiality. 

4.3.14 Contributors expressing contentious views, either through an interview or other means, must be challenged while being given a fair chance to set out their response to questions. 

4.3.20 We should ensure that appropriate scrutiny is applied to those who are in government, or otherwise hold power and responsibility

How can this happen if an elected member of parliament is allowed to hide behind the protections ordinarily afforded to whistleblowers to endorse something as mainstream as a government decision, and is allowed to provide a statement rather than face scrutiny in the form of questioning? 

Maybe this is a very small hill to die on, but I really do think that if you want to exercise real democratic power, you should put your name to your beliefs, and you shouldn't be aided and abetted by the most powerful media organisation in the country when you want to avoid public scrutiny. 

Back to the paper mines

Hi all. I've been on holiday in Ireland for the first time in two years, where the shelves are groaning with food and coronavirus appears not to have led to a collective nervous breakdown unlike certain countries I could mention. It was great: several swims in the Atlantic, a bit of walking, fine restaurants, a homecoming parade for the local Olympic rowers and a lot of good reading. I started with Ariosto's absolutely bonkers 1516/32 Italian epic Orlando Furioso, a poem that mixes obsequiousness, total contempt for the peasantry, sexy times, history (particularly the wars between the French and the Spanish Moors), Arthurian legend, ultra-violence, religion, romance, a trip to the moon on a hippogriff with St John the Evangelist to collect a lump of brains, and shaggy dog stories, all tied together by a hugely endearing narrator who can never resist a fork in the narrative road. 

Funnily enough, I then read Jo Walton's Lent which was also set in Renaissance Italy - the central protagonist is Savonarola. She specialises in fantasy novels that engage with Classical and late medieval/ earlyRenaissance philosophy, especially neo-Platonism, and Lent manages to explore these themes, demonstrate her incredible historical knowledge while also working brilliantly as fantasy - similar in some structural ways to Adam Roberts's The Thing Itself, Christopher Brookmyre's Pandaemonium and Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game. It's the first work I've read that humanises Savonarole, which is ironic given the plot reveal. That said, the only other novel about him I've read is George Eliot's Romola in which Savonarola is a forbidding but ultimately altruistic and inspirational figure for the eponymous heroine. Highly recommended, by the way - if you only stop at Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss you're missing some of Eliot's best work. 

After that I read the final volume of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. Despite having absolutely zero interest in the Tudors, her grasp of psychology, power, the slow creep of corruption, group dynamics and politics in an essentially lawless and permanently unstable polity, just as hereditary officers were jockeying with talented commoners for position was absolutely gripping - it deserves all the plaudits it received. After all that time in the 15th-16th centuries, I cleansed my palate with Josephine Tey's clever 1934 murder mystery The Man in the Queue (recommended on Twitter by Aberystwyth University's @Tasha_Alden), before heading back to Italy for Sally Vickers' more contemporary Miss Garnet's Angel. I'm still reading it and am enjoying the quality of the writing while rather resenting the implication that socialist teachers are dried up old sticks requiring a Forsterian revelation in Venice to show them the error of their ways and give them feelings…But then she is a Liverpudlian 'red diaper baby' (as the Americans put it) like Alexei Sayle, who is rather less repentant about his communist heritage. 

The holiday was wonderful and much-needed. Now I'm back for a very different kind of year. Plenty of teaching this semester, lots of it in-person for the first time in ages, and no new modules for the first time in at least a decade, so less hurried cobbling, more mature reflection (in theory). After 8 years I've given up my course leadership to the mutual relief of myself and my colleagues. The role was unpaid, and involved responsibility for programme management but not (thankfully) line management, and managed to be both essential and unrewarding, onerous and yet unchallenging on any level. I'll miss being the students' first port of call, but not stream of unexamined initiatives from the army of non-teaching 'experts' who've colonised universities. 

The idea is to fill my time with research and writing rather than forms, but we'll see. I have an AHRC project to be getting on with, a PhD dissertation to turn into a book, my book on politicians' novels to write, a PhD to examine and much much else! But at least I'll never have to think of the phrase Continuous Monitoring Touchpoint 4 again. 

 Here are a few of my favourite photos from the break: the rest are here. 

Vintage MG at Knightstown, Valentia Island

Rosaries left at the Valentia slate quarry grotto

Valentia slate quarry grotto, perched high above the ground

The Sceiligs (now even more famous thanks to Star Wars)

The farmer was herding cows by driving along, banging on his bonnet with a pipe

Our new album is taking a rock direction…

At the Olympic homecoming for rowers Monika Dukarska and Aileen Crowley

Cromane beach

Now That's What I Call 90s

I'm picking up hints of a 1990s revival. I don't like it, but if there's no choice, it's got to be the right version of the 1990s: countercultural, traveller/free-festival friendly and non-sexist. For those readers too young to remember, it all went wrong when the boys with guitars started waving union flags around and feminism was replaced by 'girl power' which according to Geri Halliwell included adoring Margaret Thatcher. Then we got student tuition fees, the invasion of Iraq and eventually 9/11, recessions, pandemics, endless surveillance and constant culture wars. Not necessarily all the same order of magnitude, but there was an ease and joy that doesn't seem to have returned. 

I'm certainly no expert on the dance scene, largely because music that you needed drugs to like and drugs that made you like people you probably don't like in an unstimulated state was not my cup of tea (and in any case the crusty ravers had largely been replaced by very heavy gangsters) so I won't recommend that side of thing to you. Instead - some of the indie/rock songs that have stuck with me despite the passage of time. And one or two dance numbers. But basically twee, wet, bedwetter indie of the kind that will confirm all my friends' prejudices. Oddly, I'm seeing most of these videos for the first time ever - we didn't have music TV at home or in my student houses - I have all these songs on vinyl instead. 

Disclaimer: I'm not necessarily saying any of this is a) representative of the 90s or even of my tastes or b) any good. They're just the ones that stick in my mind after all these years. 

(Sub Sub got middle-aged, picked up acoustic guitars and became Doves - a fine band in their own right)

I remember hearing Steve Reich interviewed about his Electric Counterpoint being sampled for this track by The Orb - he sounded a bit bemused, flattered and thoughtful. There's definitely a link between the minimalist classical scene and the repetitious nature of the more intelligent dance crowd.

Maybe Catchers were too ethereal for the big time and I've never met anyone else who liked this melancholic duo from Northern Ireland, but if you liked The Sundays, you'll love this. 

Talking of whom:

Moving on: who doesn't like feminist Anglo-French Marxist Krautrock, in the form of Stereolab? With apologies for the appearance of Jools Holland at the start - he infested music back then too. 

PJ Harvey just thrilled me back in 1993 and I think her work still stands up - the early loud angry stuff and the stark, hushed darkness of White Chalk most of all. Around at the time and shamefully underrated by me at least are Aimee Mann and Liz Phair, whose work still sounds thrilling while also being much more grown up than a lot of the teen/college bands of the time. Same goes for Suzanne Vega, whose 'Tom's Diner' is a real Marmite song, but which deals with some horrific trauma in deceptively catchy form. 

Can't ignore Riot Grrr: so many great bands, and I loved the style - paratrooper boots paired with Laura Ashley fabrics or babydoll dresses (Courtney Love's famous 'kinderwhore' look). 

 

But for fun times: Elastica. I saw them touring their second album, which certainly wasn't fun times for them or us - line-up changes and heroin had taken their toll. 

Meanwhile in Gogledd Cymru / North Wales mod guitars and union jacks were very much not apparent. I bought these 16 year-olds' second album (!) on 10" vinyl when I got to university and rapidly fell into a deep hole of Welsh-language pop, krautrock and twisted folk: David Wrench, Catatonia, Rheinallt H Rowlands, Ectogram, Fflaps, Topper, Melys, Datblygu and Super Furry Animals. 

The other 10" I bought that fateful day was by Tindersticks. Not their very best but representative of their work - one of the bands I've always gone back to and seen live whenever possible. Lead singer Stuart Staples' voice is another highly divisive topic, but I like it. 

Then there were the American college rock/post-rock kids represented here by Madder Rose and singer Mary Lorson's subsequent band:

Throwing Muses' University was a big presence once I lived with some stoner-Goth scientists, so here's a bit of that followed by Veruca Salt's spiky fun one hit: 

Elsewhere in the US, who could resist the muted Mormon melancholy of Low? Here's one of their Christmas songs and a cheery cover from the B-sides collection. 

Too wordy? I'd be tempted to hit you with some Mogwai, Tortoise or Slint, but here's an Aerial M EP I've always enjoyed.

Back home in Blighty, the much-maligned Twee movement mutated interestingly - I loved The Field Mice's melange of electronica and indie-pop very much indeed. 

That led to New Order's rhythm section, The Other Two, and to St. Etienne (and Neil Young but that's another story)

and thence to Kenickie (former members are now respected sociologists and presenters of Desert Island Discs)

From Kenickie it's an easy leap to Helen Love and her DIY feminist power-pop: here's Beat Him Up. 

She was covered by the teenage Ash (back to Northern Ireland) - here's an early one of their own:

Can't miss out Belle & Sebastian, which really divided everyone - my first copy of Tigermilk was a copied CDR surreptitiously supplied under the counter of my local record shop after the original pressing of 400 produced as a college course assignment sold out immediately. Through them I discovered all the Scottish indie greats from before and after - Teenage Fanclub, Spare Snare, Mogwai, The Delgados, The Phantom Band, Chvrches, The Pastels, The Vaselines, Orange Juice, Josef K, BMX Bandits, 18 Wheeler and more. I had the first B&S t-shirt in Bangor's Indie Night. It, though sadly not me, was an object of devotion and desire. 

Lots of my friends liked to listen to Beth Orton when they got home from raves in quarries - I associate her music with badly-rolled joints, exhaustion and elation. It got me into modern folk, particularly Eliza Carthy and her ilk - folk by and about the tribes driven off the roads after the Battle of the Beanfield and the Criminal Justice Act (god I miss young people getting angry en masse). 

Then there's Slowdive's successor band Mojave 3: here's one that really builds slowly. 

A bit like Mazzy Star, whose hushed melancholia will never stop sounding classy:

 

Here's an album that's nearly completely forgotten: Boo Radleys' hugely ambitious Giant Steps - swept away by Britpop and their own subsequent mega-hit, 'Wake Up'. I listen to this one a lot even now - it feels fresh - a mix of Pavement's oddness with Scouse pop melody. I love everything they've done (especially their noise-rock cover of New Order's 'True Faith' - I collect covers of New Order songs, hence the Rheinallt H Rowlands number elsewhere in this post, which you might recognise) but Giant Steps is the most coherent, compelling album they made. 

In the bad boys' corner, a couple of thrillers: Credit to the Nation and Blaggers ITA's ode to rebellion:

Want something sweeter? Well, there are the Cardigans, whom I saw in 1994 when they were a cute Swedish guitar pop band prior to becoming global megastars (on a bill including the terrible Fluffy, mediocre Heavy Stereo and the charming Bluetones for a bargain £5), and the lovely Frente, represented here by their beautiful cover of the New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle:

I can't remember the 1990s without The Charlatans. Never the hippest of the Manchester bands (perhaps not even a Manchester band), but 'The Only One I Know' is a stone-cold classic, they had a string of further pop gems, and they took triumph and defeat in their strides. I saw them in the late 90s, well past their critical peak, in a half-empty hall in Stoke. They played like it was a massive arena gig packed to the rafters - it meant something to them and they knew it meant something to us. That deserves some respect. 

Another inescapable indie-night classic was Edwyn Collins' 'A Girl Like You', his second act after his band Orange Juice in the 1980s. There still isn't much that sounds quite like it. We always paired it with Iggy Pop's 'The Passenger' to get people dancing. 

Also in the terminally unhip category (first for being unwashed right-on hippies, then for having an annoying worldwide smash): Chumbawamba, who I saw play their natural habitat (a tatty Students' Union bar) in 1993. Catnip for an 18-year old with no fixed views or tastes. And with the benefit of 30 years' hindsight, their blend of anarchist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-corporate politics with catchy beats very much stands up. I might understand the underlying political and economic dynamics better than I did then, but my instincts were right. (Honourable mention also to The Levellers, who I admire more than I like, though I did see them in the early 90s and had a good night). 

The dark side of the 1990s is summed up for me by two particularly sleazy tracks: Pulp's 'This Is Hardcore', their horrified reflection on what Britpop had done to themselves and others, and The Folk Implosion's 'Natural One', from the Kids soundtrack. 

Rather more innocently, but equally downbeat, I really fell for Hydroplane, a spin-off from The Cat's Miaow, whom I heard on John Peel's show, or it may have been The Evening Session. Anyway, I never got to see them live but still get phishing emails via their long-since hacked and defunct mailing list. I forgive them, thanks to the rackety beauty of this song (a cover of Young Marble Giants' 'Wurlitzer Jukebox'), followed by another lost and much-loved bunch of Aussie funsters, Paradise Motel. 

A lot brasher but a lot of fun in a grunge-adjacent way were Sebadoh:

I'm not sure if anyone remembers or cares to remember the short-lived goth-madrigal scene, but Miranda Sex Garden were at the heart of it so here's some:

Another band I couldn't have been without in the 90s was REM: I turned up at university with a £10 Woolworths tape player and two tapes: a Vaughan Williams greatest hits and a copied Automatic for the People. I still like them both, though I've moved on from cassettes. I worked backwards from Automatic, which was nigh-on ubiquitous at the time, to discover the strange and contrarian world of a band that seemed like 'our' U2 (i.e. not preachy poseurs) but also forwards - while most people reckon that Monster and New Adventures in Hi-Fi are pretty poor, I love them - the last flowering of a band that eventually got too big. Monster is big guitar rock, a reaction against the hushed imagism of Automatic, while New Adventures is a 90s take on the obscurist beauty of their early-80s work. 

And that's where I'll stop - I suspect if you've made it this far you're reaching for the Prozac, another popular 90s youth thing we'll leave for another day.