I used to have a flat right in the city centre: I could see my office from the bedroom window, and go from comatose to lecturing in 2 and a half minutes. It was so achingly hip that 400+ crimes were reported on my corner in a single calendar year, largely drink-related. An author would have collected years of material just by writing down the words that floated up to my window. 'Abigail, you slag. You should have had an abortion' was one. 'Don't be an arsehole sir. If I have to arrest you the paperwork is endless' was another.
So anyway, it was a lively place, and I'd occasionally stroll out for a wander with the camera, trying to capture the spirit of a city that's had good and bad times. Mostly bad, to be honest: de-industrialisation has hit it hard. I didn't just take pictures of decay and brutalism, but there was no shortage of such subjects.
Railway station carpark. I like its clean lines and will regret its eventual 'regeneration'.
I bought my first SLR in 2009 - a dinky little Nikon D40 which took lovely pictures but wasn't very flexible in terms of user control. Only when I bought a D7000 in 2012 (which I've stuck with) did I get something I could really play around with. The joy of the D40 was its small size - I could take it everywhere and use it unobtrusively without making people freeze into poses. These are just some random shots I took that year
In my mother's garden
Another of my unending series of fences and boundaries with the added bonus of some rust - taken on the way to Shutlingsloe, 'The Cheshire Matterhorn'.
Meet James and Neal - two of the little band of walkers and friends affectionately known as The Map Twats. Dan always had a map, it didn't always help, but we always found a pub in the end.
These shots are taken in Oslo, one of the few times I've done some proper tourism. I loved the city and Scandinavia in general, though the very friendly locals kept bemoaning how boring it was. We adored the style, the generous public spirit, the commitment to a relaxed, socialist collective way of life that manifested itself not in the shortages and queues beloved of rightwing provocateurs' definitions of socialism, but in a bright public realm, clean spaces, cycling and a palpable sense of the public good. The fact that it's all paid for by filthy oil revenues is not, however, to be forgotten. That said, Britain had oil money and used it to privatise everything in sight. That said, what I took from Norway and a brief trip to Denmark was a sense that post-imperial nations if imbued with a sense of modesty, can find a role. While Britain refuses to address its past, to accept its reduced role in the world, Denmark, Sweden and Norway have built if not ideal societies, highly enviable ones.
The above photo is from Oslo's city museum, a mock-up of a 1970s house which just seemed to suit my friends' louche style. The two below are from Oslo's gleaming new opera house, a stunning piece of architecture which quite literally invites the public to climb all over it, and which slides into the fjord like an iceberg, encapsulating awareness of its surroundings and a democratic approach to culture almost entirely lacking in the UK.
Bird's funfair is an integral feature of Puck Fair - it's been coming for about 75 years, setting up a couple of days before the official event and staying on for a few days after before moving on to the next big event. I've never been one for the rides (except for the Dodgems, the closest I get to driving a car), but I get a Lady from Shanghai or Brighton Rock-style thrill from fairgrounds.
The roving bands of feral teenagers, the family groups, the gaudiness of the neon, the smell of candy-floss and frying doughnuts, the self-contained, secretive and self-confident culture of the fair folk.
Fairgrounds are great for photography - hyperreal colours, the rides and the people. I've never dared take shots of the most distinctive group, the Traveller and Roma teens, but there's no shortage of other material. I go back to them every year and I have a better camera and more refined technique since these were taken in 2010, but they're not too bad.
I wouldn't normally take pictures of unknown children, but the lad on the left demanded I take his photo. As I did so, his sister came along and demanded she be included: if I didn't, she'd tell everyone I was 'a paedo'. She was clearly torn between wanting to be noticed and defensiveness, and I think this shot represents that, as well as picking up on those amazing blue eyes.
This second shot is an attempt at an original take on the traditional ride photograph. It's of a video monitor focussed on the part just as the riders take a precipitous drop. The light's garish, the expressions are a mix of terror and gravity taking effect, and the colours are like something out of a Cronenberg film or Aphex Twin's 'Come To Daddy' video. Nothing about it is technically good, but the effect encapsulates the artificiality of the full-on fairground experience.
One of my favourite things about English is the ease with which puns can be made, and one of my favourite things about Britain is its peoples' willingness to make the most dreadful puns in any situation. I have heard a pun during a funeral eulogy, and reader, I laughed. Paronomasia forms the basis of most of Radio Four's outfit too, so we should take a moment to remember Tim Brooke-Taylor, a master of the art who died a couple of days ago.
And where would Irish literature be without James Joyce's use of punning? 'After all, the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun', he told a friend, referring to Jesus's classic gag of calling Peter (petros) his 'rock'. So replete with puns are Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that his patron Harriet Weaver – who published him in the Egoist referred to them as 'your Wholesale Pun Factory' (it's obviously catching: her money came from the cotton industry and her name is prime example of nominative determinism). Puns come easily to colonised people – when an imposed language is sufficiently strange, subaltern cultures play around with its possibilities to subversive effect.
Puns are wonderful - they prove that structuralism is right and make you groan at the same time (just like my lecture on that subject). There is, of course, a long academic tradition of studying puns: Eleanor Cook's paper on punning in Wallace Steven and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry provoked a long-running discussion, for example.
Shop name puns are an art form, whatever you may have heard. I snap them whenever I can. My favourite (though I sadly don't have a picture) is in the Staffordshire town of Stone, where a canalside cottage has been turned into a hairdresser's shop. It is called, of course, Lock Keepers. If they cut hair as well as they pun, they deserve your custom once this is all over.
Anyway, this is a bike shop in Oxford. It's a tiny bit tortured but all the best puns are and it works.
Today's photos are from the middle day of my first visit to Ireland's Puck Fair in 2010, during which a wild mountain goat is enthroned on a tower over the town, a Queen is crowned and three days of revelry and business commence, attended by 50,000 people. Records of the fair go back to a charter over 450 years ago, and the whole goat business implies more ancient origins. It's a huge economic boost to Killorglin, and chance for tribes to meet - the diaspora, the Travellers and Roma (always glamorous in a way that nobody else could pull off), the farmers from the mountains who come down to buy and sell cattle (they always say prices are terrible, but huge wads of notes quietly change hands), tourists and hawkers. You can have your palm read by the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, buy this year's tat (decorated light-switch surrounds were in a couple of years ago, ranging from Manchester United to Disney characters and tractors).
The organised activities vary little over the years: an opening ceremony and parade including the evergreen Seán O Sé singing An Poc ar Buile ; bands every night, a middle day of family activity like the fancy dress and bonny baby competitions, Bird's funfair, late-night drinking (though no longer 24 hours per day), street stalls, a horse fair and a cattle fair, and street musicians everywhere and of every age, concluded by the dethroning and liberation of the very pampered goat. Yet despite the regularity of the fixed events, there's always something new. The buskers always have folk versions the song of the year (one awful year saw the domination of Ed Sheeran's Galway Girl but Vampire Weekend featured intriguingly a few years before that). The market hucksters always have a new household gadget, while the knock-off DVDs and 'designer' clothes reflect changes in fashion and taste. So I go out with my camera to the same events every year, and yet the images I record are ever so different. I'll definitely be posting more of them, but these two are early attempts to capture the independent spirit of Co. Kerry and its people. Taken during the cattle fair, they give a fair sense of the very distinctive, weather-beaten beauty of Kerry's rural people and their indifference to cosmopolitan tastes. The old folk always dress up for the fair if they're not working - it's the Irish passegiata. Whether there'll be a fair this year is in doubt - I hope there will at least be a ceremonial enthronement for the sake of historical continuity.
I'm from a big, rural family. We've had a succession of semi-feral animals - rabbits, guinea pigs, cats and eventually chickens. They're mostly rescue hens plus the occasional cockerel, and they were free range until the public garden next to my mother's house claimed that the visitors didn't like their cream teas being half-inched by grounded fat beasts with the manners of seagulls. Now they have a large run in an orchard and as many worms as they can eat, and they can't terrorise the current cat any more.
Racist? The Rhode Island Reds and the Bantams won't mix. At all.
A couple of carvings today, from the famous Kilpeck church which we visited in Spring 2009. I'm lucky to have several friends who're interested in the hidden histories of these islands - the quirks, the curious, the history from below and the cultural, social and spiritual aspects that have been suppressed or forgotten. They can read a landscape, identify an obscured hill-fort, or lead us to the Piers Gaveston memorial or James Whale's birthplace more easily than any of us could tell you about some toff's slavery-funded mansion. Julian Cope is our guru!
These shots are from Kilpeck, the Herefordshire (and once Welsh) village whose crowning glory is an ancient church festooned with strange and often charming carvings including a Sheela-na-Gig and a Green Man, the mysterious figures who appear on so many rural churches while appearing to be pagan in origin. Instead of them, I've chosen the dog and rabbit for their charming cartoonish appearance (the sheep is also delightful) and for contrast, one from my ongoing collection of threatening gravestones.
A couple today, seeing as it's a holiday, and they're both taken in the forbidden Outside.
This rural scene is a variation on a theme: I always take pictures of baths in fields, because they seem to be such a common motif in the UK and Ireland: I hope the same is true in other countries. Whether it reflects farmers' canny recycling or a generation move towards jacuzzis, pretty much every dairy or sheep farm has al fresco bathing facilities. The author and farmer Lloyd Jones once told me that 'proper' farms only produce two things in major quantities: 'shit and scrap metal', and I always look out for them (Mr Vogel is very funny; Y Dŵr (Water) is elegiac). Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countrysidewas a revelation when I read it twenty years ago, and I've had an eye for the scruffy and marginal every since - that's where the magic happens, not on the pristine agricultural land that's actually little more than a 'green desert'. There's a huge range of bathroom suites to be found in various fields: this is an old steel bath somewhere near Church Stretton, and effort has been made to plumb it into the landscape.
The shots below are taken at Rás Mumhan (Tour de Munster/Tour of Munster) in 2011. I'm a keen cyclist myself – I like the speed, the ability to get out of your own familiar area quickly, the ratio between effort and fitness, the geeky technical details and the nicer side of cycling culture (proper cyclists don't care how slow or uncool you are, they say hello). I also love and hate professional cycling: I like the bikes, the routes, the inhuman distances they're expected to cover in a short space of time, the cosmopolitan nature of European cycling, the meandering commentary, especially Seán Kelly's pronunciation of 'classement', the local support, the crashes, the doomed solo breaks and occasional outburst of honourable behaviour I hate the sports-washing that sees various dictatorships and polluters sponsor teams, the one-eyed supporters and detractors, the drugs, the machine tactics and the commodification of a noble art by capitalism.
The Rás is a couple of rungs below the Tour de France - its competitors are a mix of high-performing amateurs, semi-pros, local heroes and stars of the future (such as Mark Cavendish, who didn't win), all forcing themselves round Ireland's most mountainous terrain. I'm not always in Killorglin when the Rás comes through town, but the start/finish line is the ideal place to catch the riders giving it their all on the uphill drag to the line. It should be going through town this weekend but like everything else, has fallen prey to the 'Rona, so here it is in all its glory.
There's nothing special about this photo at all. It's a hastily-taken and unposed snap which happens to date back to 2009 and a friend's 50th birthday party. The subjects are all friends and colleagues from my university.
I picked it because it illustrates so much about academic life, or at least my version of it, which should probably be 'academic' 'life'. Much like anyone's professional life, it involves entering a workplace with its own formal and informal rules, an established set of official and unofficial hierarchies, and people at every stage of their careers and intellectual journeys. Working long hours means that your colleagues (hopefully) become your friends, as frequent movement is common and quite a lot of us don't have children or relatives close by.
I've been at my place for 20 years or so now, which is very uncommon, and tells you a lot about my employability skills. It does mean that I've been to a lot of birthday parties, retirement dos and more than a few funerals, and they've all been memorable. Mike, in the central of this shot, is an expert in interwar political history, specialising in organisations such as the Youth Hostel Association and similar grass-roots bodies whose characters were contested and shaped by social forces. He's also an inveterate writer of letters to the Guardian, a deliberately terrible poet and a wicked mimic: no retirement celebration is complete without his unnerving impression of the VC, the subject of which kindly turns a blind eye to proceedings when he happens upon it). I could have written a few admiring lines about either of the other two and about pretty much any of my colleagues. We infuriate each other now and then, as must any group of people whose working and social lives are so closely entwined over a long period, but my friends have been the enduring joy of what we must laughingly describe as my career – I've learned more about teaching, research, negotiating institutional life and pretty much everything else than from any source.
One's position in the social group imperceptibly changes - I've slipped from being the impoverished postgrad on whom the old lags lavished beer money to the one who occasionally does the lavishing, remembers the birthdays and perhaps even, once a year, says something of interest to the next generation. The social circle expands and contracts as people enter and leave, or interests and situations change - one of the toughest tests is when a friend becomes a manager and the formal relationships intervene. Sometimes there's little difference, sometimes it's a fraught process that takes years to process.
It's hard to recall the awe that I felt for the people in this shot and their generosity in welcoming me in back then. Awe has become deep respect, often hidden under badinage, but it still occasionally feels odd to provide comments on an illustrious friend's journal article for instance, or – as has occasionally happened though not to those pictured above – represent them as a union rep.
That's it really - just a snap to say 'aw, you guys'.
Today's shots are a couple from my first trip to Poland in 2009, and my first gig as a team manager for the England Tomorrow's Achiever's team - 35 or so teenagers whose results implied that they were challenging for selection to the England full team or the GB team.
It's memorable for so many things. Mostly the fear: I'm not a parent and was a very boring teenager, so working out how to entertain, support and corral dozens of high-spirited kids over the course of several days in a new country and with plenty of downtime was a real challenge. Some were homesick, some were boisterous, some hid injuries and eating disorders were not unknown. Some had friendship groups acquired from the competition circuit while others were on their own (and let's not even get on to my infamous rant about Fencing Parents And How To Murder Them). Quite a few were terrified of the scale and the level of Challenge Wratislavia, a major U-15 competition, while a select few, having done well in Britain, thought they'd ace it. Reader: they didn't, and it was a fraught but ultimately educational experience for us all.
I've been a lot of things in the fencing world: mediocre competitor, mediocre referee (up to World Cup level!), mediocre team manager, mediocre welfare officer, mediocre coach, mediocre roadie and much else beside, though those days are largely over. I gave up competing seriously once I started my PhD: training 4 nights a week and travelling to competitions was impossible on £6500 a year. Instead I turned to coaching and refereeing, gradually going further afield and taking on more responsibility. That trip to Poland was a corker. It started with a parent handing over her daughter and asking if she could sit next to me on the plane because she'd never flown before, was terrified and needed a reassuring presence. I smiled, faked it and didn't let on that I'd flown precisely once in my life, a flight which involved a faulty engine and a lightning strike and didn't persuade me of the need to ever repeat the experience. I still hate flying and only do it if there's absolutely no alternative.
Most of the time I really liked it - given a few days with a group of people you learn what they want, sometimes what they need, when to blunder gracelessly in and when to shut up. As a coach I learned that the very best fencer can get something out of a lesson from a very bad coach, and that sometimes less is more. Also that wandering aimlessly around with a camera and a couple of languages means you can steal techniques that make you look like the king of the world back in the fencing backwater that is the UK. Despite the massive problems I have with the fencing world, especially the way it's run here and its troubling demographic profile (to put it mildly), I enjoy the camaraderie of doing an odd sort of sport, and of the joys of volunteering in it. The backstage crew of technicians, armourers, referees and the like are usually quirky, clever, witty people who – once they've decided you're not a dick – form a travelling community of people who enjoy seeing each other in windowless sports halls week after week. It has its own vocabulary, its own rhythms, complaints and joys. I was astonished how quickly the 2012 Olympics became just another long competition, working with familiar faces and facing the same problems as heads of state wandered by (Putin was a particular pain in the backside) or gold medal winners celebrated while you were trying to repair a spool.
I've reined back my involvement recently - I train regularly and do a couple of competitions per year, but the increasing professionalisation of the bigger events and my own commitments means that I volunteer closer to home – a bit of refereeing (though I'm really too old-school for the contemporary version of foil) and lumping kit around, plus chairing the West Midlands committee. One thing I really appreciate is the total separation of my quotidian life from my fencing life. My friends and students couldn't imagine my fencing persona, nor are they interested. Likewise, the stresses and strains of daily life are irrelevant once you're in the salle or on the piste. Apart from the chap whose opening comment was 'Don't you recognise this tie? It's from Eton', you're judged only by your ability, whether that's in correctly clamping a wheelchair into its frame or spotting the correct use of counter-time. I always enjoyed working with youth teams, and especially liked the UK School Games, which was slowly murdered by the 2015 government for the crime of being a Labour invention. I even, god help me, coped with the 2 a.m. hotel room patrols.
These photos aren't particularly special - as I acquired a better eye and a better camera they improved, and I might share some with you later on. The challenges for fencing photography are that everyone looks the same in the full kit, that everything happens at ultra-high speed, and that flash is banned. I ended up compromising by using an f/1.2 50mm lens for the action shots and otherwise looking for the moments of triumph and disaster at which people display their personalities most obviously. I like these two shots though because they're not formal - in the first, three of the young epeeists go through their warm-up with such obvious enthusiasm, while the second one gives you a sense of the Wroclaw outskirts, taken from the coach. The city centre is a beautiful pastiche, a medieval heart rebuilt brick by brick after it was flattened during WW2, but the majority is as you see above: flat, cold and bare, especially during the winter. The two figures are local fencers on their way to the venue: it reminds me that while fencing is still sadly an elitist sport in much of the UK, it's a perfectly normal one for the people who live in those flats.
This one was taken on Carnedd Llywelyn in February 2009. Out with some friends escaping the industrial midlands and our lives for a day, we experienced all the weathers: burning sun, rain, thick fog (which cleared at one point to reveal that we were standing on a shelf of ice and snow projecting out from the quite high mountain), and we saw everything from weasels to eagles.
I always take pictures of fences and rust. Fences because their regularity gives interesting perspective and focal points to undulating landscapes, but also because I fundamentally reject the idea of delineating what should be public land (which in my view, is pretty much all of it - I'm a huge fan of the Kinder Scout Trespass and Benny Rothman). There's a long and proud tradition of socialist and Communist walking and cycling cultures, as my friend Mike Cunningham and others have established, and without their contribution the countryside would still be closed to most of us. Every time you hop a fence on Prince Charles's 54,000-acre country estate or destroy a trap set for birds of prey, you're channelling the spirit of these pioneers.
Aesthetically, I like rust because it's so textured and because it's a handy reminder of mortality and entropy. This photo is also slightly remarkable for me because I used flash, something I virtually never do, unless it's a bit of fill flash in strong sunlight. It works here because it gives such a strong contrast with the surroundings.
Also, rust gives me an opportunity to post one of my most beloved songs ever: Joan Baez's bittersweet reflection on the end of her relationship with Bob Dylan, 'Diamonds and Rust'. I notice with some horror that it was released the year I was born - 1975. Her voice is beautiful on this one, the tune is deeply moving and her lyrics turn ordinary words into poetry. I particularly like the slyness of 'speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there'.
While we're under house arrest (and I'm away from my camera), I'll post a photo every so often from my collection. No particular reason for any of them. I just hope you like them. Some will be pretty ropy - I still feel like I'm learning what's possible.
This is from a winter's walk up the Stiperstones in Shropshire - the moment we realised that we weren't the first people to crawl into the shelter of a broken-down wall for a moment's respite. We were in fact sitting on an ex-sheep.
How are you all getting on? The gilded cage that is Vole Towers has not yet descended into the Ballardian anarchy of High-Rise or his under-rated later novel Millennium People, but I like to think that JG would have enjoyed a roasted dog's leg on the decking with me, nodding in appreciation at his own foresight.
Last week I talked about the British 'cosy catastrophe' subgenre and its more recent American offshoot, but Ballard's chilly work is much more grounded in the new turn in British SF from outer space to inner space (sadly I can't find a copy of his 1962 New Worlds essay 'Which Way To Inner Space?' to link): often urban, and always more interested in psychological and cultural reactions to social and technological change than in rockets and dilithium crystals. I'm struggling to remember whether Ballard sees any cause for optimism and coming up with nothing, so perhaps I shouldn't recommend his work right now, but the pictures of supermarket stampeded are very reminiscent of the shopping mall that becomes a prison, a cult cathedral and a consumerist utopia in suburban London in Kingdom Come. Think of it when you're wrestling the last jar of truffles from a tired nurse in M+S Food.
I gather the craze for dystopian reading and gaming is slightly subsiding. People have now read La Peste (in which the plague is an allegory for fascism) and watched Contagion and now want something more comforting so I've probably missed the window for recommending Connie Willis's Doomsday or Wiliam Owen Robert's astoundingly good postmodern novel Y Pla, translated from Welsh as Pestilence. If he was writing in English he'd be the darling of the literary press, by the way. Anyway, a few friends have been asking for comfort-reading recommendations. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster and the Psmith novels are perfect, as long as you ignore his shady WW2 behaviour and the endless shelves of golf humour he also wrote. If you're in the mood for Wodehouse-influenced silliness, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide middle-class-Englishman-lost-in-spaceseries is perfect, and I've a soft spot for Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affairand its sequels.
One of my other addictions is re-tellings of and unofficial sequels to Jane Austen novels, occasioned by early exposure to Clueless, the Hollywood adaptation of Emma that set the bar very highly indeed.
They range from wonderful to awful, and sometimes it's the most well-known authors who produce the worst books. PD James's Death Comes To Pemberley is particularly dreadful: it's as if this very accomplished author has a grudge against Austen and indeed the Austrian sentence. Also mentioned in despatches for horror despite my admiration for her other work: Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible. In the Good column are a mix of call-out novels defending minor or uncherished characters and out-and-out gleeful trash. Jo Baker's excellent Longbournis much more high-minded: Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective. It's just a good, thoughtful novel. For cheaper thrills, Seth Grahame-Smith's exploitation-thriller Pride and Prejudice with Zombies displayed more understanding of Austen's writing style than Death Comes To Pemberley and is a hoot (just skip the film and the various attempts to extend the franchise). Similarly Arielle Eckstut's Pride and Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenesof Jane Austenfills in Austen's narrative gaps in eye-opening fashion and with tongue firmly in…cheek. Lady Catherine would send no compliments to her mother.
Instead of watching the dreadful ITV attempt to finish Sanditon, try Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe detective thriller based on it, The Price of Butcher's Meat. Apparently Hill liked to pastiche other authors' work in this series. I haven't read any more but this one really works. I'm also a fan with some reservations of the vlog The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. There's also a recent retelling centring on Lydia Bennet which I enjoyed a lot but I can't remember its name. If you're more of a Northanger Abbey type, you can now get all the 'horrid novels' Isabella Thorpe presses on Catherine Morland: for years it was thought that Austen made them up, but copies of the actual texts started appearing in the early twentieth-century so Regina Roche's Clermont,Lathom's The Midnight Bell, Kahlert's The Necromancer, or the Tale of the Black Forest,Eliza Parsons' The Mysterious Warning and The Castle of Wolfenbach, Grosse's Horrid Mysteriesand Sleath's The Orphan of the Rhine will pass away the hours beautifully. For someone who inhaled Ann Radcliffe's superior Gothic thrillers while a students, this is manna. If you're a Regency type of person, I also can't recommend Maria Edgeworth's novels highly enough, from the social comedy of Castle Rackrent to Belinda.
Crowley's Little, Big, which I've just finished, is one of the most magical, layered novels I've read in a long time - an amalgam of mythology, fantasy, Shakespeare and much more beside, shaped with the most delicate of touches. It reminded me - not just for its mash-up of Americana, Shakespeare and magical realism, of Chris Adrian's San Francisco retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Great Night. I haven't yet got round to his The Children's Hospital (Adrian is also a paediatrician) but I'm looking forward to it. For comic legal thrillers, I'm grateful to my friend Gaby for recommending Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered and its sequels - witty, arch, packed with in-jokes and with decent plots and some stylistic quirks. It's just a shame Caudwell wrote so few before she died. For big enveloping novels, go for Kate Atkinson or Byatt's Possession, a sweeping and very knowing return to the Big Victorian Novel with plenty of twists. Or if you're in the mood for eccentric families, I Capture The Castlecan't be beaten: a seemingly slight novel which sneaks up on your emotions.
For something a bit more demanding, try Aidan Higgins' 1962 modernist Irish masterpiece Langrishe, Go Down. I picked it up after many years, triggered by seeing someone on Twitter getting a PhD on his work. If you've read JG Farrell's later Troubles, you'll know the territory: the fading away of the Ascendancy, maundering away in their crepuscular Big Houses and learning (or not) how to cope with a social structure turned on its head. Higgins' novel uses a gentle stream of consciousness technique to explore the lives of three sisters trapped with each other and going nowhere. The opening pages, depicting Helen Langrishe struggling to cope with the sweaty, smelly hot confines of a bus on the way back to Kildare was presumably meant to convey her discomfort with the hoi polloi but reads very differently in a time of 'social distancing'. There's so much richness to this novel, but one motif that keeps cropping up is distorted vision: mirrors, windows, reflections, peeping and spying recur again and again. I haven't yet seen the film, but it was scripted by Pinter and starred Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons, so it's probably worth catching.
Talking of being trapped with people, one thing I've noticed while watching TV (mostly old Doctor Who and Channel 4's 2002 The Book Group(I'm missing awkward discussions with strangers about books, seeing as the university is closed) is quite how much hugging goes on, no doubt an American habit imported with the talkies. All these pre-'Rona people can't keep their hands off each other, pawing and stroking and caressing. I'm firmly of the view that an affectionate handshake at Christmas between close relatives should quite sufficient for anyone, and I trust that recent events will see a return to the brief bow/curtsey as the height of physical expression. If anyone tries to hug me in future they'll feel the point of my rapier in their gizzards.
Anyway, that's enough from me for one day. I'm off for my state-approved constitutional. Look after yourselves.
Looking around me, this seems to be the order of the day - here's Johann Schütz's version of the popular classical theme:
I've heard it mistranslated as 'And I am in Arcadia' and thought of as a joyful scene or perspective, but it's actually 'Even in Arcadia, I am there' – the tomb in the background suggests that 'I' is Death. Looking around me, the sun shining, people in shorts going for careful walks, barbecue smoke drifting in, many of us seem to have made this slightly tense accommodation with death in springtime. We should be admiring lambs and daffodils (and we are): death is a wintry spectre. Yet here we are, weirdly enduring a sort of holiday with mortality.
It's not an unknown approach. The 1950s and 60s saw the rise in Britain of the Cosy Catastrophe novel, perhaps most famously encapsulated by John Wyndham in The Day of the Triffids and other works. Something terrible causes mass death and total social and governmental collapse, but a small group of sensible people – usually led by a resourceful gentleman and an emotionally-grounded woman he rescues – use their skills to head off somewhere defensible to rebuild, making hard choices along the way but assured of success.
It's an interesting mélange of the famed Stiff Upper Lip and Cold War paranoia, plus a degree of resistance to the collectivist spirit that produced the Welfare State and the NHS post-1945. There's a much more recent American version too, of which James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand series is a good example. Drawing on the long history of individualist paranoias prevalent on the far right (such as Ahern's terrible The Survivalist series to which I own my in-depth knowledge of guns and ammo), the newer version is far less openly fascist (Kunstler is clearly conservative but no authoritarian) but no less worrying. In them, catastrophe reinforces the hero's conviction that modern life has become too complicated on every level for its own good. Civilisation collapses and rugged individuals use their huntin' shootin' and fishin' skills to fashion a new, simplified Amish-like life for themselves, untrammelled by the previous worries about, say, women's liberation, sexual identity, suspiciously commie leanings or the pressures of urban life. Survivors' social structures return to feudalism or barter, Providence is once more acknowledged and the pioneer spirit wins through. It's Thoreau's entrancing, infuriating, incoherent Walden (a book that changed my life, despite subsequent revelations about its veracity, its poverty tourism and its inherent self-absorption) but with a reactionary and Calvinist spin and lacking the transcendentalist driver. Thoreau may have been the American Savonarola, but he didn't revel in catastrophe for self-congratulatory kicks. No democrat himself, Thoreau famously and perhaps patronisingly asserted that 'the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation' (something every gig-economy non-employee worker might nod their heads at) but unlike the Cosy Catastrophe crew, he didn't fantasise about disaster sweeping them off the stage to leave room for the Real Men.
Ironically, like all apocalyptic texts, it's the kind of book that can only be produced by a sophisticated urban population and a pretty smug minority within it which needs the tang of disaster to enliven a comfortable existence. I don't know whether it's any less healthy than the more popular genre of disaster fiction, in which there's only temporary or no hope of survival - eco-catastrophe is huge in young adult fiction at the moment. There's a debate about whether such literature spurs people to action or persuades them that there's nothin we can do other than settle in for the ride, and I'm undecided, Walden is probably why I've never driven a car, hardly ever fly and don't have children (though my face and personality may also have had some bearing on the latter). Thoreau certainly had a cold-eyed view of catastrophe: castigating those who couldn't enjoy walking on a beach littered with the bodies of shipwrecked Irish refugees, he asserted that 'it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still' with death so close.
People are currently playing Pandemic and watching disaster movies, but once the death toll mounts I suspect we'll increasingly be turning to Mary Poppins and Friends re-runs. I'm currently watching old series of Doctor Who as an antidote to the news. Like many people, I'm also making light of the situation - slightly enjoying making do with less access to ingredients, enjoying the empty roads for cycling, feeling slightly pleased with myself at adapting to changed working conditions fairly well, coming up with witty quips on Twitter and the like, but such cheerfulness depends on the unspoken assumption that it will all be over soon, and that I won't be closely impacted. In the meantime, lots of friends and family have lost their incomes, contracted the disease (mildly, thankfully) and are in far worse conditions than me. Finding any pleasure in all this is – to use a dreadful phrase – a mark of privilege of which nobody should be proud.
That's not to say we shouldn't make the best of it, while looking out for others. As well as the Who marathon, I'm still reading. The last of the Green Knowe series was a suitable ending to a magnificent children's series. Following Beckett's account of the decline of the CPGB, I also read Geoff Andrews official history of the last 30 years of the Party, End Games and New Times, which I heartily recommend. For a revolutionary organisation, the CP was deeply conservative and really struggled - in interesting ways - with the 60s and the Youthquake. Sometimes it or factions within it got things badly wrong (long hair and The Beatles = bad), sometimes surprisingly right, often in ways nobody noticed despite the party's influence in old-style mass political organisation. Right now I'm eking out John Crowley's long, so-far wonderful and almost indescribable low fantasy novel Little, Bigin which an odd, rural family on the edge of faerie negotiate identity and destiny in a space slightly apart from but not unaffected by (or opposed to) galloping American modernity. If anything it slightly resembles Gormenghast but without the poisonous atmosphere, but it's far less cartoon-like - the characterisation has real complexity and depth, and there isn't a magic sword to be seen.
If you're in the mood for a really evocative account of life under the looming threat of catastrophe though, I can't recommend Comet in Moominlandhighly enough.
“Moomintroll thought how frightened the earth must be feeling with that great ball of fire coming nearer and nearer to her. Then he thought about how much he loved everything; the forest and the sea, the rain and the wind, the sunshine, the grass and the moss, and how impossible it would be to live without them all, and this made him feel very sad.”
Hope you're all OK out there. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when…
I'm still in the office, though the atmosphere is increasingly weird. I'm actually used to the solitude – I tend to come in during the holidays unless physically locked out, so the emptiness and silence is fine, but the palpable jitteriness is novel. Some people are simply worried about the illness itself, or about infecting older or unwell people. Others are worried about their jobs and finances, especially those on part-time, short-term or zero-hours contracts. Mostly, in the corporatised university, these are teaching staff, security guards, cleaners and caterers. Thankfully, management (despite their very revealing adoption of military strategy terminology like Gold Command) is making all the right noises about this, though the tunes aren't reaching all ears: communication is still a problem. There is also the long term issue. So many universities are on very thin financial ice, and long ago ran their reserves down to the legal minimum. The immediate financial hit will be enormous, and recruitment next year is likely to be apocalyptic for many departments or entire universities. One institution has already warned staff that their jobs are threatened, which seems callous and opportunistic.
The people I'm most worried about are the students with mental health issues, especially those with anxiety-related illnesses, of which there are a lot. Late capitalism has deliberately produced a population which is financially insecure, precariously-employed, unsupported by the state and dumped out of the minimal obligations which used to exist between employers and their staff. To that we've added exciting new ways to stress people out via social media, privatised schools, fiddled constantly with educational policy until it resembles a game show where the losers are taken out and shot, binned a lot of the healthcare system, literally set the world on fire, fled Europe's international association of grown-up countries, then announced that anyone who can't deal with the above is a snowflake. My students are drawn from the general population and share all these worries, plus they'll graduate with £50,000+ of debt. Now they're terrified of a rampaging disease and many aren't coping well. It makes me ill just watching them trying to cope with it.
As for me, I'll be OK in the short-term. I'm naturally quite solitary and have an entire room of unread books, though sadly they're mostly ones I bought to make myself look much more high-minded than I really am (past me had some pretty optimistic and inaccurate ideas about my intellectual and moral development). I may not be entertained, but I'll get through this more educated. By next week I'll have the entire works of Henry James, Skelton and Dunbar committed to memory. Then you'll be sorry. It might be difficult work-wise though. While I have a collection of antiquated computers at home, I don't actually have an internet connection. My natural idleness and slight obsessiveness means that I've always done long hours at work because home-working would pretty much immediately become weeks without sleep while I followed the internet crumbs down every available rabbit hole. I do 1-12 hours at work most days, come home and don't want to look at another screen, so I chose not to install it at home: that may have to change. In the meantime, online teaching will require breaking in to work or war-driving until I find an insecure connection outside someone's house. I'm spending the next couple of days shuttling back and forth between home and work on my bike, moving books, computers and papers around until I know I've got enough to get on with. I'll be able to finally turn my PhD into a book, and then – oh joy – 500 politicians' novels to read. Oliver Letwin's just published a truly horrendous hybrid in which interweaving chapters of fiction and analysis come together to form one big Jeremiad about disaster planning. Timely, except it doesn't consider pandemics and demonstrates literally not one iota of understanding about how actual real people think or behave either individually or collectively. It's like he's never actually met a human being. The only thing worse than his lack of psychological insight is his grasp of the rudiments of fiction. (Yes, Dr Letwin's the Old Etonian who championed the poll tax, suggested that only black poor people riot, and was filmed dumping his constituents' letters in a park bin).
I've been on a bit of a tear in terms of reading recently - the more stressful or busy things are, the more I read. Yesterday I read a couple more children's books with a view to adding them to the eponymous module: the last two in Lucy Boston's largely wonderful Green Knoweseries, and Jenn Swann Downey's romp (with philosophical and moral depth) The Ninja Librarians: The Sword in the Stacks. Books plus swords: consider me satisfied. I also enjoyed over the last few days Bella Bathurst's Special, Eric Ambler's Cause For Alarm and Uncommon Danger, Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Francis Beckett's The Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. Despite the claims of some people featured in Beckett's book (some of whom I know), it's a thoughtful and kind-hearted history. Despite the absolutely monstrous behaviour of the Party and/or some of its members at times, he finds the best in them, while not forbearing to identify the ideological, social and strategic howlers they committed. For my part, while I have a huge amount of affection for the hard left, I've always been saddened by the CP's failure to distance itself from so-called Communist regimes that clearly behaved appallingly (I've always seen the Soviet Union as a thinly-disguised Russian Nationalist enterprise), and by the serious left's preference for sectarian ideological purity over, you know, doing something. Monty Python's 'People's Front of Judaea' sketch might have been posh public school types laughing at the serious kids, but there's a lot of truth in it.
A genuinely democratic Communist Party free to criticise the Soviet Union in 1936, 1956 or 1968 and adapt its programme to local conditions might have been the salvation of this country. Instead, it and its splinter groups became squabbling sects of interest only to a security state which bolstered its own power and funding by inventing a threat that never really existed.
Why Be Happy…? wasn't exactly a joyful read, but it was moving and so hugely intelligent. I've read and taught the 'original' or fictional version of Winterson's story, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and must now teach the two novels in tandem. The later autobiography is a lot shorter on laughs and witty evasions, and feels much less shaped in literary terms, which is probably not true: Winterson is an expert on form and expression, so every word will be deliberately chosen for literary effect. I'm not one for memoir usually, but Winterson is an exception: brutally honest about the way her damaged behaviour led to dreadful treatment of herself and others, and a depth of wisdom and empathy – even for those who treated her most badly – that most of us could never aspire to. In contrast, Bella Bathurst's Special had no light in it at all. That's not to say it's a bad book: it isn't - well-structured, purposeful, and very persuasive characterisation. It's just emotionally so raw. Special is about a group of boarding school girls trapped together in a hostel at the fag-end of term, barely cared for by a pair of disillusioned, exhausted teachers. Every one of them is screwed up in some way, and their relationships are brutally exploitative. Empathy, care, concern, love and friendship are fleeting – these girls are too damaged in various ways to cope with their own concerns, let alone those of others. I read it pretty compulsively, but did breathe a sigh of relief when I got to the end. For a more emotionally-rounded tale of girls on the loose, try Alan Warner's The Sopranos. Finally, the Ambler's. He's an interesting author - very much on the left in the 1930s (and embarrassed later by his naivety about Stalin), he introduced a new seriousness to the crime thriller genre: his plots often feature decent, naive young people being caught up in the darkening political weather of that period. In that sense, they're good reads for now: ordinary people doing extraordinary things for the public good, sometimes against their instincts. Not sure what to tackle next. I've read too much apocalyptic fiction, from The Decameron to Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to Station Eleven to want to go back to it immediately. I think I'll alternate light fiction with history, plus of course the politicians' excrescences.
Despite my misanthropic aspect, I will miss my colleagues and students, and like many people, my friends are essentially workmates, aside from those dispersed around the country. I'm hoping we'll be allowed to meet up for walks and things so we don't lose touch entirely. My life is gradually closing down - no more fencing, my poor cousin's wedding is postponed, family is out of reach in several countries (perhaps a good thing), concerts are off, and even meetings are cancelled. Meetings! The lifeblood of the modern university! My closest relationships depend on public transport, so if that shuts down things will be unutterably worse. I've still got my bikes though, so hopefully I'll be able to get out and about for shopping and leisure.
The other problem with home working is that my house is a dump. I spent every penny on a place I could afford and have studiously avoided getting a new kitchen, bathroom, carpets, furniture etc, and diverted the money into books, records, bicycles, cholesterol and tweed. Now I'll have to stare at the consequences of my idiocy for weeks, and perhaps months. Still, I've got it so easy compared with pretty much everyone else.
So there we are. We've had floods, fires, Brexit, a Tory government, locusts, Trump and now a pandemic. I'll try to whistle in the dark here and on Twitter, but I can't tell when or how often I'll want or be able to post. What a relief, some of you might say. Twitter isn't just a binfire of anxiety to me: I'm enjoying the (sometimes) black humour and the cameraderie of my little corner of it. Academics With Cats is a joy, and the teasing as people post pictures of their home-working spaces. We're all discovering the joys and otherwise of online learning too, while wary that the Edtech Commandos will stage a coup. I wonder what popular/ephemeral culture did during the Spanish Flu of 1918. Presumably plenty of them ironised their way to the grave as well.
Animals, as you might expect from an account calling itself The Plashing Vole, are complex cultural creations. Beyond the physical reality of a bag of flesh that differs from our own shapes, the animal gets sorted into categories that differ over time and between cultures. We give them to our children so they can learn about birth, sex, nurturing and death. We let kids cuddle bears, while knowing full well what would happen if they tried that in real life. We project our own desires and fears onto them. We rely on them for labour, emotional support and dinner (and hope that that vector isn't suddenly and fatally reversed). We send them into space (and leave them there) and we buy them clothes, when we're not devoting massive scientific resources to discovering more efficient ways to destroy the ones we don't designate as cute. Our social media seem to be divided between sex and animals doing things that reinforce our fantasies about animals' purposes, behaviour and relationship to us (in the darker corners, this becomes a Venn diagram with way too much overlap).
I was thinking about this partly because like all reasonable and sane people, I like cat videos on Twitter, especially the #academicswithcats hashtag.* One of the stars of British academic cat Twitter is Rolf the Campus Cat at Warwick University, an 'ambassacat' with a remit to improve 'student wellbeing'.
Rolf is undoubtedly a resourceful, characterful beast, and Warwick has increasingly harnessed his talents to promote the institution as a warm, friendly, relatable and quirky place just like so many corporate organisations which employ someone to 'banter' on social media with their counterparts at other companies (there's even @universitycats to collate every neoliberalised HE moggy). Warwick particularly needs this because it's been seen as the capitalist Darth Vader of HE ever since it was founded: EP Thompson's Warwick University Ltd. has been reprinted several times since 1971 and is well worth a read. So Rolf serves a number of purposes, principally softening the edges of a distinctly hard-edged institutions. I don't know if Thomas Docherty's mindfulness and wellbeing was improved by Rolf visiting his office while he was persecuted for having a sarcastic face, but I doubt it. Likewise the students: is a machine that could have been designed to produce anxiety and precarity less harmful because a handsome killing machine is around to demand treats?
Rolf popped into my feed this morning looking cute in an economist's office and I realised that this was only possible if Rolf, the economist and the cat's media team had all crossed a picket line: UCU members at Warwick are on strike. Rolf is either a scab, or an undercover UCU agent using his AAA collar to identify scabs, the people who will take advantage of any gains made by their striking colleagues while betraying them all. Looking through Rolf's Twitter account, it's pretty clear that this most undirectable of animals somehow missed all the picket lines surrounding his home and place of work. The actual cat isn't a scab, but the simulation of him is clearly part of a sophisticated machine dedicated to spreading charm and diverting his public's attention away from the hard realities (and yes, The Cat Shepherd is complicit in the deaths of his delicious, tender charges, cute as he is) My UCU counterparts over there should be turning Rolf, if he isn't already our undercover operative: fit him with a bugging device and send him into the VC's office.
So Rolf is two or three things at once: an animal, but also a cultural and social construct (a political animal, if you will), or perhaps in Baudrillardian terms, Rolf isn't a cat but a simulation of one. Promoting strikebreaking and spreading the message of 'business as usual' is propaganda: it seems unlikely that impoverishing academic and support staff will really promote 'student wellbeing' in any meaningful way, but it gets Warwick uni a lot of free publicity. Rolf certainly fulfils all the marketers' mantras about quirkiness: Brown and McCabe's Brand Mascots and other marketing animals is a very instructive book on this subject. People have been culturally conditioned like cats, the thinking goes, so they won't be thinking straight when they cross a picket line or wonder why their jobs are being outsourced. The values and feelings they have for Rolf will be transferred to the institution that gives him a home and cuddles. Nobody will go to Warwick because of Rolf, but their choice might be swayed by the sense that it's a warm and caring place to be despite all the evidence that sexual predators are given an easier time than the women they harassed. A university is a complex place that's difficult for any entrant to understand: Rolf's function is to sweep away the stressful process of cogitation and choice, replacing them with warm feelings and a character that can't be analysed or dissected. Even better, one black cat can be replaced with another if it starts demanding more snacks, or a secure contract. Perhaps it's already Rolf 2.0…
My place used to have convenient animals available for adoption, but we pulled back. For several years a peregrine nested on a windowsill high up on our tallest building. Perhaps management felt that the signifier was too polysemous. Peregrines are beautiful, stunning creatures, but a ruthless killer perched above the crowd is a metaphor that even the most mulish union activist could grasp. On the other hand, we mere staff might have had some fun with the idea of a highly-skilled but desperately endangered species living permanently on the ledge. My institution's name offers another animal possibility but none of its referent's qualities are particularly cuddly, so I don't think we'll be going there either.
Our peregrine (sadly departed) is therefore unlikely to become an iconic brand mascot because it's too edgy: Guthrie (writing about religion) pointed out quite a long time ago that animals, anthropomorphised 'spokes-critters' or whatever you want to call them tend to appear during recessions and other hard times. Staff demonstrating outside? Cat pictures. Petting zoos during exam periods are designed to temporarily assuage anxiety by encouraging humans to spend time with nonjudgemental animals which exist within a less complicated social structure, though I can't help seeing them as indentured labourers at best. Rabbits are twitched up at the best of times - spending their time being mauled by distressed people can't be helpful.
I don't hate Rolf. I like him. I feel for him, a celebrity forced to perform for the cameras day in day out, his natural instincts repressed. To some extent I identify with him: I run my department's social media accounts and carefully separate my more critical views from the promotional duties undertaken on there, consciousness fully divided.
Free the Warwick One!
*I don't intend to relitigate the Cats v Dogs debate, partly because one Guardian reader settled it by pointing out that while there are plenty of police dogs, there's no such thing as a police cat. Libertarian individualists they might be, but cats aren't coppers' narcs, unlike dogs.
So last week I said that I'd read and enjoyed Richmal Crompton's Family Roundabout, one of the novels for adults that she felt was overlooked in favour of the William series (which is wonderful, to be fair). My copy is one of the beautifully understated volumes published by Persephone Books, who specialise in forgotten English twentieth-century middlebrow women writers, always include a very good introduction – yes, I am the person who reads the introductions, though not always first – all packaged up in cool, elegant covers. The bespoke bookmarks for each volume are a lovely touch.
Reading Family Roundabout led me to the book next to it in the Room of Unreads, another Persephone classic, Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day (1938). It's a glorious romp: Miss Pettigrew is a depressed, lonely spinster on the verge of entering the workhouse when she accidentally gets entangled with some very fast Bright Young Things who spend their time sleeping with inappropriate young men, drinking cocktails, attending Night Clubs and sniffing cocaine. Miss Pettigrew, at the end of her tether, suddenly realises that she doesn't have to be a tedious old moralist about all this and gives in to temptation after temptation proffered by the hipsters, who detect in her something admirable. In return, Miss Pettigrew gives them the benefit of her experience (especially about which men might be reliable over the long term) and they treat her as some kind of oracle, with happy results all round. It's enormously funny, quite satirical and has a heart of gold. There are also, sadly, some very interwar features that haven't aged well: foreigners and Jews are very much not part of the joke.
Watson wrote several rural-romance style novels to good reviews and sales, but really struggled to get Pettigrew published - the publishers thought it would scare off her imagined readership of old ladies: she persisted and it was an international hit. I loved it – it takes such joy in reversing the expected response of someone from the older generation meeting the kids at their most hedonistic – Miss Pettigrew's epiphany is a salutary lesson to anyone who finds themselves reaching for words like 'snowflake'.
By contrast, I also read the latest Rivers of London book, False Value. Highly enjoyable, good plot, decent satire of the tech billionaire class, stuffed with Hitchhiker's Guide gags but not as tense and scary as the author clearly thinks. If your narrator has to tell your readers that the final encounter with the forces of darkness felt a bit evil, you probably haven't quite pulled off the atmosphere. Next up: Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, her belated non-fiction version of her semi-autobiographical debut novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. If that's confusing, blame Winterson, who's made a career out of brilliantly blurring generic boundaries of all sorts.
I'll also be reading Francis Beckett's The Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. The CP was a funny beast: founded by people influenced by the humane traditions of Methodism, Guild Socialism, Chartism and countless other precursors, run on Stalinist lines even when Stalin did things like murder its General Secretary's partner, massively popular in particular times and places, enormously progressive in some ways (such as feminism) and deeply conservative in others (solidly opposed to the Beatles and long hair, which is why it was largely irrelevant to the popular perception of The Sixties, which of course wasn't the one most people experienced), at once oppressive and liberatory. CP lifers ('red diaper babies', as American hereditary communists referred to themselves) are at the forefront of so many good causes, yet the party stumbled from crisis to crisis, losing support at every step. Policy changed at the whim of Moscow, factions split off constantly whenever deviation was spotted, Tankies and Trots faced off, Euro-communists were suspected of betraying The Cause…and yet peace and picnics and joy were all part of membership: it was as much a community as a party, perhaps more. I remember attending a conference on CP culture (speaking about Lewis Jones, novelist, councillor, seditionary and a man who insulted Stalin to his face and survived) at which every faction and impulse was represented. It was kind of a wake: nostalgic, regretful, baffling, but also the kind of wake at which the various survivors accuse each other of murdering the body they're gathered around.
For a comic, but also very moving take on being a 'red diaper baby', try Alexei Sayle's memoir, Stalin Ate My Homework ('a pack of lies, according to his mum') or Michael Rosen, who writes and speaks beautifully about his Jewish Communist upbringing.
Anyway, that's all I've got to say this week. Politics is utterly depressing. Neither I nor anybody else has anything useful to say about Coronavirus, and all my current trades union representation work is serving to remind me that there's absolutely no correlation between intellectual and emotional intelligence – and I don't just mean management! At least the sun is shining.
