Get your hot takes here!

I notice from the readership stats on this blog that if I only write about books, I get 20% of the usual rate of clicks. People, I've devoted my life to literature: reading it, talking about it, thinking about it (if I have to). The stats are so low that literally more people have read my journal articles. That hurts.

If you don't want my book thoughts, what do you want? Here's this week's topics:

• In response to a query about their sustainability plan, my university tells me that the security staff needed a brand new SUV because a)

an electric vehicle was not suitable due to limitations on battery life versus mileage and the times required to recharge 

and b)

Security personnel wear bulky PPE clothing and as a result required a MPV to accommodate their physical needs.

'MPV' is a weaselly way to ignore the problems with SUVs, which include their heightened danger to pedestrians, found quite often on urban university campuses. We had a sustainability coordinator but she was only seconded for a few weeks and has now got another job. So that's how pressing climate change, pollution and congestion is taken here. This kind of response isn't serious - it's openly trolling anyone who's concerned. I suggest that their next vehicle be chosen from one of these options to ensure that the epidemic of violent crime sweeping our estate is stamped out:




What else?

• My teeth hurt. A lot. The dentist is very clear about whose fault this is (mine), and brooks no arguments about structural disempowerment. The next few weeks will be filled with a lot of pain, physical and financial. 

• I went to a concert: the CBSO playing Foulds' April, England, Vaughan Williams' London Symphony and Lise Berthaud playing William Walton's Viola Concerto. The Foulds was an enjoyable short blast, the London was very familiar and yet more stuffed with ideas and interesting figures than I remember, and the Walton was a revelation. I'm a sucker for the viola anyway, and Berthaud's tone was astonishingly rich, while the CBSO played with more precision and balance than I've heard in ages. Truly it was as a balm. 
• I've been obsessed with Hamlet all week - I'm teaching the second class on it on Monday, and we're focusing on its sexual and gendered dynamics, having taken a New Historicist approach last week. The more time I spend with it, the more complex I find it. 
• I hosted the regular meeting of the West Midlands Region Fencing committee. It was every bit as exciting as you might imagine (no decisions are made by trial by combat, something of a missed opportunity, I feel). 
• I've done a lot of union casework, almost all representing senior figures. All I'll say is that representatives don't get to choose their cases, and intellectual brilliance is not always inextricably linked to emotional intelligence or indeed accurate understanding of what life is like for everybody else. More seriously, it's solid proof that even a professorship is now an insecure and temporary post subject to the whims of a management that finds it hard to look beyond a spreadsheet.
• I was more saddened by the death of David Roback than I expected. I'm not particularly sentimental, and I'm not sure I'd have been able to name him spontaneously, but I've loved the music of Mazzy Star since their first album back in 1993 and hoped they would record more albums. 'Into Dust' is my alarm clock music, and familiarity has never degraded my admiration for how much emotion can be packed into such a skeletal arrangement.  

I hope that's the kind of 'content' you're looking for, because there's plenty more where that came from. However, in case you are the individual who'd like to know what I've read this week:

• Sally Nicholls, Season of Secrets. A very moving book about a young girl whose bereavement is assuaged by becoming enmeshed in the myths of the Green Man and the Holly King. The writing is limpid, the plot simple and the effect deeply emotional. A bit of a gem. 
• Country Girls by Edna O'Brien. I can see why the censors hated it in 1950s/60s Ireland but it's every bit as good as everyone says – the first in a trilogy about a pair of Irish girls moving from country isolation into adulthood, urban sophistication and their own sexual identity. 
• Sarah Davis-Goff's Last Ones Left Alive was a very enjoyable Irish feminist take on the zombie apocalypse novel. More horrific than my usual tastes but a bracing read. 
• Richmal Crompton's Family Roundabout. Famous for her William novels (which my grandmother bought as they came out in the 1920s - I still have her collection), she regretted that her novels for adults were overshadowed by the juvenile writing, but this one is a delight – a very sharp, ironic and wry tale of contrasting matriarchs and their families: a mix of EM Forster, Trollope and Compton-Burnett. Highly recommended. 

Here's the Walton:

and some Mazzy Star:

Try not to catch coronavirus racist paranoia this weekend. It's quite catching, I notice. 

Just books for once

I'm busy beyond reason this week so won't detain you for long. I also am very conscious that I've moaned a lot, so I promise not to this time. All my friends at other universities are on strike and while it's a terrible thing to have to do, I do feel a bit left out. My branch only managed a 29% turnout, well below the legal minimum required. In case the boss class is reading this, it's because we're exhausted, not because we love you.

So: non-moaning activities. Well, I've been stuck deep inside Hamlet all week, preparing for a couple of weeks devoted to it. I bought Emma Smith's new book on Shakespeare's plays, highly recommended by many people, though it feels unfinished to me - lots of introductory ideas or big picture assertions, but too short and snappy. I loved the idea that Othello is a comedy that goes wrong though, and her view of Hamlet as primarily a nostalgic work is a useful counter to the many readings that see it as the Birth of Modernity, but I don't share her identification with the aristocracy. She says it ends apocalyptically, with the royal family dead and foreign Fortinbras grabbing the throne. Greek dramatic tradition says that it's only a tragedy if important people suffer – nobody cares if the bin man pops his clogs early – and so technically Hamlet is a tragedy. We don't have to be tied to this though: as far as the ordinary Danes are concerned, one inbred toff is likely to be as bad as another. Old Hamlet admits he committed terrible crimes, but there's no evidence that Claudius has or will. Perhaps he'll be a better king. Maybe he'll be better than young Hamlet, who is paralysed by indecision. Certainly Fortinbras hasn't done anyone any harm, and the idea that a foreigner might be less destructive than a native is a poke in the eye for the Elizabethan ancestors of the Brexiters, who were soon to acquire a Scottish king.

Anyway, here's my favourite Hamlet adaptation. You can thank me later.



I've also been reading, and weirdly for me, it's been ten days of male authors: two of Gilbert Adair's Evadne Mount crime pastiches, which were highly entertaining and clearly a labour of love. Well worth reading if you adore 1930s Golden Age crime thrillers. Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk is a scary account of the Trump government's version of Michael Gove's 'we've had enough of experts' but also a love letter to career bureaucrats and the necessity of good government – much needed in this climate. I enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across The Table for the prose but did find myself wondering if we needed yet another semi-postmodernist novel about young male intellectuals' emotional inadequacies, however well-written. It is very funny, but you do need to have read way too much psychoanalytic critical theory to get to that point. Larry Niven's Ringworld also suffers badly from the passage of time: it's sexual dynamics are pretty retro to say the least, but the scientific imagination and plotting are impressive. I finally got round to Tom Wolfe's New Journalistic account of the encounters between limousine liberals and the Black Panthers, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. As an exercise in style, superb, but as a critique of 1960s liberation movements, shallow and privileged. Only someone untouched by racial and sexual discrimination could casually satirise the efforts of both the oppressed and their well-meaning allies to do something about it. Certainly there were fame-chasers, charlatans and rip-off artists on all sides, but Wolfe lacks any generosity of spirit. Nobody, in his view, acts from good faith. It's very funny, and a lot of egos certainly needed puncturing, but Wolfe entirely lacks empathy for those on the receiving end of Jim Crow and all the horrors of COINTELPRO. It's just a racket for him. Next up: Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls, Sarah Davis's Goff's Last Ones Left Alive (an Irish feminist dystopian novel) and yet another Austen retelling: Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister (Mary, in this case). Kitty never gets a look-in. I'm also still reading Robert Frost, but confess to having had quite enough talk of ploughing.

I've read more than usual, I suppose - largely because I've spent what seems like days on delayed, diverted trains or on replacement buses. All in the name of moral duty - I went to a baptism a long way off and am now a godfather, the benighted child's parents having nowhere else to turn. I'm not sure I'm entirely equipped to oversee anyone's spiritual growth, but I've read Émile, so what could possibly go wrong?

Corporately-sponsored Random Acts of Kindness?

Aristotle defined kindness (in Rhetoric) as:

helpfulness towards some one in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped.

In slightly more contemporary terms, he downplays the utilitarian argument (though any kind act hopefully actually helps the recipient) and argues that the motive for kindness is of prior importance: any hint of self-interest renders an act unkind.

Kant might help us here: the conditions for kindness have to include free will and an understanding that your action is one that you would like to be applied universally (i.e. you wouldn't mind being on the receiving end yourself). Kindness is one of his 'imperfect duties': beyond the basic expectations of humanity, but falling short or failing is acceptable because perfect kindness is an impossibility. Moving beyond that, Kant insists that you absolutely must not treat other people as a means to an end. I can't remember off the top of my head whether he discusses kindness per se, but he does say that a world without charity might be more efficient, but would certainly be unbearable. He also talked about cruelty to animals: it desensitises the individual, making their duty to develop compassionate sensibility towards other humans less likely, and therefore breaking the categorical imperative. 

Much has been written about neoliberalism in the last couple of decades, some of it by me and definitions are hard to establish, but the core of it, it seems to me, is the replacement of Aristotelian and Kantian emphases on disinterested empathetic behaviour with a model of human relations derived from financial models. The self becomes a product to be carefully designed and then marketed; interactions with other human beings are to be considered transactional; any encounter can be accounted for in terms of profit and loss. It can be summed up in the poetic epigraph to the paper linked to above:

As nature's ties decay, 
As duty, love and honour fail to sway
Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,
Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe.
Hence all obedience bows to these alone. 
Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Traveller' (1764), 349–54.

I've also written occasionally on this blog about the overlooked need for kindness in all spheres. I've been the recipient of kindness from colleagues, students and strangers so many times. I might even, accidentally, have been kind myself in moments of weakness. Within a neoliberalised world, one in which we've unconsciously internalised its values, consciously adopted them or – perhaps most often – been forced into neoliberalised relations by a hegemonic system, the unexpected, random nature of kindness is something I value more and more. Being brought to tears by a cake that magically appears on your desk after a bad day, a stranger going out of their way to return your lost property (which happens to me about twice a month), or a kind word out of the blue are what make a spiritual difference amidst a social structure deliberately designed to maximise exploitation and inequality. 

So you can probably imagine my reaction to my university's decision to hold a Random Acts of Kindness Week. An institution with an enormous gender and racial pay gap, one which reserves real-terms pay rises for senior management only, one which has actively promoted climate-damaging activities, one which promotes neuro-linguistic programming as a management tool amongst its many contributions to unkindness, has decided that Organised Kindness is a thing. In basic semantic terms, it's a contradiction: awareness of an defined event renders any act committed within it un-random. In Aristotelian and Kantian terms, it's a contradiction too: consciousness of doing a kind act or the hope of a 'freebie or prize'  renders it Utilitarian rather than altruistic. Not just the individual acts either: the whole event is a Utilitarian plot, because it's a cheap attempt at generating some good PR.

Still, it might relieve some of the crushing pressures of the neoliberalised university, perhaps? Well, here's the kicker. The Random Acts of Kindness Week is sponsored – drum roll – by Sodexo. 

Some highlights:

Sodexo (formerly Sodexo) runs private prisons, cleaning services, probations services, school food, military catering contracts, childcare voucher systems and much much more. It's one of those companies that specialises in feeding off the public sector, promising 'efficiencies', by which they mean lower pay, vicious anti-union campaigns, horsemeat in your lasagne, ATM-style probation and rehabilitation and structural sexual and racial inequality. They sidle up to institutions like universities and promise to make all their 'problems' (i.e. cleaners wanting an hourly wage they can actually live on) go away. 

The idea of acts of kindness being 'sponsored' in any way both revolts and baffles me, and suggests that my university's extremely highly-paid management, already talking about contracting cleaning services out to save even more money (and coincidentally solving the gender pay gap by taking the lowest-paid women off the books) has lost all moral compass. The idea of offering incentives for acts of kindness indicates that (as Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson's excellent book demonstrates) university managements have fully internalised the worst aspects of neoliberalism, and have abandoned critical thought and notions of the public good in favour of the mantra of efficiency. 

I know that I'll be criticised internally for being a killjoy or a carper, but the point of being an academic in a university is to retain a sense of critical autonomy. Those at the top have constructed a perfect system, for them: cash, respect, privacy, baubles, autonomy and power flow up, while precarity, fear and surveillance flow down. Tone-deaf efforts like this simply emphasise the distance between us and them: thinking that some corporately-sponsored warm words and 'freebies' will heal the wounds of a vicious system demonstrate how divorced they are from the rest of us. Defining a space for and promoting 'random acts of kindness' with corporate sponsorship is an act of power which directly contradicts the philosophical values of altruism, whether you're an Aristotelian, a Kantian or something else. It puts kindness under a neoliberalism tractor beam, defining it as a transactional good which can be measured, confined and financialised – everything that kindness isn't. 

The vampires are circling and all the fat-cats can say is 'bite me'. Be kind: but do it spontaneously, and don't expect prizes. 

A Few Of My Favourite Things

I'll give you a day off from my gloomy, bitter prognostications. Eeyore is in his stable. Instead, a quick list of good things that have happened over the last few days.

I saw Sandi Toksvig performing live. Thoughtful, interesting, funny and an expert comedian in terms of structuring her act, engaging the crowd and shifting gear. I've got to admire someone who gets a full-Brexit crowd on their feet to conduct Beethoven's Ninth, while omitting to mention that it's also the EU anthem. The added benefit of ending your show like this is that you've also engineered your own standing ovation. Actually, it wasn't a full-Brexit crowd: all the demographics of her long career from kids' TV to Bake-Off via QI and The News Quiz were there - you could tell who was who from which jokes or points they responded to.

Later in the week I went to a a masterclass by my retired colleague Gaby on the wonderful Goth Girl and In-Jokes which was predictably magnificent, a real antidote to the baby talk about literature often doled out to school kids. That was followed by a lecture by Michael Rosen, organised by my colleague Josiane as part of the city's literature festival. Another triumph: Rosen is wise, witty, profound, hugely knowledgeable and intelligent and a supreme communicator. Within five minutes he had a crowd of schoolchildren laughing about and understanding fort/da and French narratology. If only I could do the same… He did a deconstruction of Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are (which he loves), eventually uncovering its hidden tale of parental absence and lovelessness. He used his astonishingly expressive face to extend – and sometimes subvert – what he was saying, and his bond with the children was really moving. If you ever get the chance to see him in action, do, if only for his explanation of why camping holidays in the rain with his parents were prescribed by Marx. I took some pictures - you can see them here.

Michael Rosen

After that, despite battling a heavy cold, I went to several other literature festival events: a well-attended talk by Jefny Ashcroft and artist Joy Baines about a mysterious portrait of 'Miss Brown, a Jamaican Nurse', novelist Kerry Hadley-Pryce's discussion of psychogeography in the Black Country, Rob Francis's poetry-writing masterclass, Daisy Black's Mappa Mundi stories, and Alan McGee, the former boss of Creation Records. You can see some pictures here.

Jefny Ashcroft, Joy Baines, 'Miss Brown'. 

Kerry Hadley-Pryce

Rob Francis

Daisy Black

The only exception to the general wonder and vitality was McGee. Clearly more comfortable talking about the 'units' he shifted (record sales and lines of coke), he was amazingly unreflective for a man who's written an autobiography. There was a smidgen of regret for the excess, but he made no connection between his own hedonism and his own son's long-term addictions. He had little insight into why the music his label promoted suddenly became so popular, and no interest in wondering why it was so laddish. Having got through 40 minutes without mentioning a single female musician I asked him. He pointed out that there were women in a couple of his bands, but eventually just said 'it was a different time'. So much for Riot Grrl, Lush, Stereolab, Melys and a host of other female-fronted bands that Creation didn't sign. I should say that I have a massive record collection with 90s indie at the core, so there's an awful lot of Creation's output on my shelves. Top Tips: Super Furry Animals, The Telescopes, Teenage Fanclub and Idha's underrated albums Melody Inn and Troublemaker. My other musical discovery this week has been Ann Southam, the Canadian minimalist. Hannah Peel played a marimba arrangement of her Glass Houses on Radio 3 and I was entranced.



I've managed to read a couple of books too. Pynchon's hippy-noir crime thriller Inherent Vice was fun and evoked 1970s California's strange melange of libertarian good vibes and heavy-handed authoritarianism but didn't feel like an essential addition to his oeuvre. The Manson background adds a little menace and there are a lot of good gags though. Angela Brazil's mid-40s Three Terms at Uplands was pretty bad. Coming at the end of the Queen of the School Stories career, the plot is so basic (girl is slightly misunderstood at boarding school; gets into very minor scrapes; is eventually accepted) that it was barely worth reading. It felt like someone going through the motions. Finally I read Irrepressible, an American biography of Jessica Mitford, the sister who ran away to the Spanish Civil War with Churchill's nephew, emigrated to the US, joined the CP, fought for equal rights, hosted the Black Panthers, infuriated the funeral trade and ended up drunkenly recording albums with Maya Angelou.





It's a good read - well-informed and more interested in Mitford's political activism than the legend of the Baron's Terrible Daughters that so captivates British biographers. Next up: the first two of Gilbert Adair's meta detective thriller pastiches, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style. 

I'm off to Amsterdam for a meeting in a few minutes. Absolutely no time to look round one of the world's greatest cities, which is very sad, but at least I get to take the train all the way there, and experience the welcome now afforded to EU passport holders on the way back in to the UK. See you next week, if I'm not refused entry…

Slán, Sasana

I looked out of my window this morning to see my Italian neighbour, who has been here 40 years and is very patriotic, flying the British flag at half-mast to mark the end of this country's membership of the EU. A brave thing to do in this ultra-Brexit area, but also heart-breaking.

I have a complicated relationship with the Union Jack: too associated with skinheads and being waved triumphantly over piles of foreign dead from Ireland to India for my tastes, but my neighbour has developed his own more flexible version of Britishness which incorporates affection for a country which welcomed and nurtured him while not denying his origins: he still imports a freezer-lorry of grapes from his home region every year to make wine with. That half-mast flag speaks volumes about the way he – and many of us – have been forced by a vicious complex of paranoias and pressures to adopt less rich, less complex identities just as we thought that the poison of xenophobic nationalisms had been eradicated across Europe. 

I'm an Irish citizen (and have been for a lot longer than some of my friends who have suddenly taken to sporting underarm pigs) of multiple origins, from German Jews to turf cutters - and Europe has been an unalloyed good, economically, socially and culturally. The tensions between Britain and Ireland have been blunted by common membership of the EU, while freedom of movement has been the saving of both countries so often. I see the origins of euroscepticism in Britain's failure to address its imperial past, and to plot a post-imperial course. Every time I hear some pumped-up politician talking about Britain 'punching above its weight' I cringe. How about not wanting to punch anyone? How about – like ex-imperial nations like Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Norway and Spain – accepting that having heavy weapons isn't a global mandate to lead or dominate? I've heard so many Brexiteers explain that they can't abide the EU because it's a superstate, but they never make the logical leap to supporting Welsh or Scottish independence, and they're largely enormous fans of an Empire they've never considered from the perspective of those on the receiving end. Super-states aren't a bad thing, it seems, as long as you're on top. 

I'm desperately sad today. I look round my city and all the other desperately poor areas of this country which voted Brexit and wonder what they expect. Every social initiative and new building displays a discreet EU-funded flag. What few employment rights the precariat have come from the EU, as do the clean water and air directives the UK is currently breaching. Safe toys, cars and food, privacy regulations, freedom of speech and assembly: they all come from Europe. While a hunger for votes might make the Tories pay a little more attention to deprived areas, nobody should expect a renewed concern for the left-behind in Westminster: not the old, the poor, the Welsh, the northern, children, the sick or anyone else. Some Brexiteers are happy enough to accept that they'd rather be 'free' than fed, but I can't help noticing that the people expounding these principles tend to own hedge funds domiciled abroad, or have otherwise insulated themselves from chlorinated chicken and pharmaceutical price hikes. They will wave the flag while hiding their wealth offshore, creaming off the benefits of deregulated finance while consciously and deliberately exposing the rest of us to the viciousness of the free market. 

My passport means I can still move around and might qualify for an airlift when we get to the pointy end of things, but I'm taking no pleasure in having an escape route. I'm here because I love this place, from Marmite to sarcasm to cricket, Dorothy Richardson to AS Byatt, Moulton bikes, curry houses, wry demonstration placards, dusty bookshops to haggis. I've lost good friends and colleagues, frozen out by Brexit and the behaviour of some of its supporters. I know German people who've learned Welsh to the extent that they've become literary critics and historians of and in that language: now gone. Britain won't just become poorer: it will be narrower, sadder, culturally-bereft and more suspicious. There's no positive vision beyond 'freedom': to me it looks like the freedom Lear found on the blasted heath, only without the epiphany. 'Very well, alone' worked when Churchill said it, because 'alone' meant 'at the head of a global empire which will do what it's told': now it's the loneliness of the body left on the gibbet to be picked clean by its supposed allies and its leaders. 

I did wonder whether Brexit would be good for the world. A mad dog tamed, and perhaps split into its constituent parts, never to threaten anyone else ever again. I think it's unlikely - once outside the infuriating, ponderous system of patient, unsatisfying compromises that define European progress, Britain, or England, will just get madder and badder. When the inevitable results of Brexit occur, the Brexiteers will blame perfidious Europa, stabbing a freedom-loving people in the back, and they'll win more elections on that basis, slowly (or quickly) condemning a rich, fascinating, complex country to a bitter national dementia. You might not think so, but it's what a majority voted for in a referendum and under the stupid electoral system you decided to retain. You know your racist grandpa? That's your country, that is. 

(Good things also happened this week but they pale into insignificance. Maybe next week). 

A little ado about less

Another quiet week here: marking, reading, preparing lectures for the next semester and screaming inside as the world burns. Plus ça change really. The oddest bit was going to a recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue at the local grand theatre – very talented comics (all-male, somehow) doing very funny jokes that could have appeared in an episode broadcast in 1976. Which I suppose is half the charm, and clearly what the audience wanted. Silly wordplay, funny noises, familiar catchphrases, incongruous juxtapositions and the odd innuendo to make the audience groan. They didn't like the very mild Prince Andrew joke though… Samantha failed to appear though, which was very disappointing. She had a very good excuse though.



Other than that, not a lot. I went fencing as a charitable gesture: I stand there and let the young folk use me as target practice. Tectonic plates react faster than me these days, but it's still good fun.

I only managed a couple of books this week: Jennifer Donnelly's A Gathering Light and John Christopher's The World in Winter. I have no memory of buying A Gathering Light and historical fiction isn't usually my thing, but I enjoyed it. It's a bildungsroman - the story of a rural New York peasant girl's intellectual awakening, tied to a real-life murder of the early 20th-century. The community and its poverty is beautifully drawn, but I did find the central characters' perfection a bit much to bear. Matty suffers from maternal loss and paternal ignorance; she has a black friend and an inspiring teacher. There's an alcoholic, a groper and a racist in the cast and an unsuitable boy, and she eventually rises above the challenges they all set. It's essentially Anne of Green Gables without the psychological complexity, but it is a good read. I see from the reviews that it was marketed as a teen/young adult novel, which didn't strike me at all. The protagonist is a teenage girl but apart from the rather simplistic ending, it didn't strike me as one aimed primarily at teens at all.

The World in Winter is more problematic. The set-up of this 1962 eco-dystopia is fine: climate change (hot to cold in this case) renders Europe uninhabitable, causing Britain's residents to seek succour in the former African colonies. It could have been a fascinating examination of colonialist attitudes as the white former rulers adapt to being supplicants to those they previously considered inferior. Sadly, the novel's whole point is that whatever suffering must be endured, white people should look after their own. The hero casually applies slyly racist nicknames to people who later help him; he double-crosses them even when they're entirely sincere, solely to re-establish a minimal white population in Britain. The mass murder of the white population down to sustainable levels is presented as little more than a regrettable necessity and apartheid South Africa is the only congenial place (and one about to wiped out by the ungrateful African nations and their renegade white mercenary forces). The plotting and the evocation of a devastated, inhospitable Britain populated with gangsters and cannibals is brilliantly presented, but all in the service of a racist ideology. Without doubt one of the nastiest novels I've read in a long time – the Brexiteers will love it. To take the taste away, I've started Pynchon's hippy crime thriller, Inherent Vice – another one that's been sitting neglected on my shelf since it came out. It's good fun so far, but I'm not sure where it's going, if anywhere.

Bath, Bad Books and Beyond

January is always a weird month here in academia. We're still in Semester 1 but it's an assessment period: no lectures, no seminars but occasional individual tutorials with students mixed with marking (now online, to my chagrin), little daily structure but a lot of demands. When the semester ends we have a week to finish marking and prepare teaching before Semester 2 starts - in my case case reorienting what little remains of my cognitive functions away from The Book of Mormon, The Passion of New Eve, children's literature and assorted American literatures towards the European renaissance: Shakespeare, Webster, various sonnetteers and pamphleteers, plus all their Italian and French influences. Simultaneously there's the BBC novels project to work on, plus my books on masculinity in Welsh writing in English and politicians' fictions to get on with. And of course dissertation supervision, PhD vivas, course leadership and all the pastoral care that doesn't show up on workload allocation forms but very much does show up, in tears, at my desk at regular but unpredictable intervals. Pressured though all this is, it's also enjoyable - no day is the same.

Away from work, I've managed to partly block out the general misery (world on fire, local MP – who has blocked me from his Twitter feed – banned from Wikipedia for editing out the more inglorious episodes of his career, general gloom) by visiting Bath, riding my bike and (of course) reading books. I took some pictures in Bath which you can see here.

A Victorian chandelier in Bath Abbey

Sulis Minerva 

Two-faced (I can't resist a pun)

A hunting scene

Despite Jane Austen's horror of the place (she makes Mr Tilney describe it as 'the most tiresome place in the world whereas romantic dimwit Catherine loves it, and Austen refers in a letter to 'another stupid party'), I liked it: good food, good company, good bookshops, fine walking and the palpable presence of a counterculture challenging the deep sense of privilege. The Roman Baths were astonishing so much remains, history piled on history giving a striking sense of the way the Romans and their successors merged spirituality with commerce: the 'wellness' ethos avant la lettre.

I also went to the local council's cycling forum last night. An all-white, all-male and (other than me) all 60+ affair, it encapsulated citizenship in the best and worst ways. The best of it was the way a group of people volunteered to give their time up to help improve the city. They were highly-informed, altruistic, thoughtful people with a commitment to local and global environmental improvement, and they had practical, constructive ideas which the council officer considered and debated with respect. The downside was the homogeneity of the group, a function of wider structural conditions for which those present can't be blamed. The result, however, is that without wider representation, decisions will be made without consideration of other perspectives. This city is a traffic-clogged hellhole: only the hardiest (or foolhardiest) brave its multi-lane ring road, dangerous junctions, damaged road surfaces and psychopathic drivers on a regular basis. Enthusiasts like me will always take a chance and literally have the scars to prove it, but to make this place better it needs to be a safe and pleasant environment for cyclists of all sexes and backgrounds and speeds to take their rightful place. Not present in the room were all those people who'd like to commute by bike and choose not to, and a way needs to be found to take their views into account.

As far as reading goes, only the two books this week: Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance and Alissa Nutting's Tampa. I read most of Murakami's novels in the 1990s when I was young and (slightly) less embittered. I enjoyed the whimsicality, the mixed genres, the tinge of magical realism and the protagonists' slightly obsessive characteristics. If I'd read Dance Dance Dance then, I think I'd have rated it as one of his very best. As a quest novel, it works very well: the quest is of course whimsical and obsessive but it's also emotionally complex and not entirely resolved. There's some good humour, often at the author's expense: 'Hiraku Makimura' is a washed-up author character. With the benefit of experience though, I struggled with the protagonist's and the author's sexual and gendered attitudes - even if we assume that the protagonist isn't meant to be uncritically admired, the plot, resolution and attitudes are relentlessly misogynistic. The women are all waiting for a man, waiting to be sexually available, tarts-with-hearts or bafflingly out of reach. Dead women's bodies abound, too. There's no doubt about Murakami's ability to create a world and a character, but he clearly can't manage to empathise or understand women.

As for Tampa, it came close to being the first book I've never finished. I should have known it would be bad when I noticed that the cover blurbs were by Irvine Welsh and Alex Niven - the self-styled bad boys of literature. Hailed (by them) as a female Lolita, Nutting's novel follows a term or so in the life of a female paedophile and school teacher, Celeste, as she entraps a couple of 14-year old boys before exposure inevitably befalls. There's a vague attempt at psychological justification of Celeste's condition (first sexual encounter was with a 14-year old boy, fixing her idea of perfection, and her marriage is loveless) but it's perfunctory at best, and much of the novel is badly-written pornography. I'm not convinced that it's deliberate, an attempt to reproduce the damaged psyche of a sociopath: it's an endlessly repetitive series of encounters without the mechanical drive of a Ballard, Ellis's early work or Moore's Lost Girls.

Lolita, disturbing as it is, has style and structure. Tampa is just one unlovely word following another until we get to the end. If you want confrontational women's writing taking on previously male-dominated subjects (and you should: plenty of men get to publish books about bad things, often bad books abut bad things), I'd suggest Helen Walsh's Brass and Belinda Webb's The Clockwork Apple instead. Walsh's latest novel is about a woman's affair with a 17 year-old boy: I haven't read it yet but I'm pretty certain it's less exploitative and more intelligent than Nutting's effort. Tampa fails because it has nothing to say really, beyond the obvious fact that women can be paedophiles too. Celeste has no origins, no social context, no causes: she's just a monster to be judged (but enjoyed first, it seems). So what?

I actually regret reading this novel. I don't often feel that my time's been wasted despite having read an enormous amount of forgettable or meretricious work in my time, but this one just didn't justify the paper. If you're going to address something important and shocking, you've got to do it well. This didn't.

Back to the marking for me. Enjoy your weekend.

Back to the Future…sadly

New readers may have been lulled into a false sense of security by my generally sunny disposition and wittering on about books, but those of you with less active social lives and a longer acquaintance with this blog may remember the dark years of 2010-15, when far too much of my life – and yours – was taken up tracking the nefarious activities of one Paul Uppal, Conservative MP and a man whose venality was matched only by his idleness. Uppal's fans may be delighted to learn that having been given a sinecure by his old friends in the party, he has had to resign as Small Business Commissioner due to a conflict of interest – i.e. the same old same old. No wonder my Freedom of Interest request about his declarations of interest was refused. Let us hope this is the last stain Mr Uppal leaves on public life.

However, there's a new Sheriff in town: I have a new Conservative MP and it looks like he's going to fill Mr Uppal's corrupt shoes admirably. Even before he was elected the Guardian pointed out that he'd illegally taken £54,000 from his failing company – in a fit of sympathy not extended to your average teenage shoplifter, HMRC allowed him to repay only £2000 lest he go bankrupt through running a company badly and then stealing from it. Private Eye followed this with a report that Mr Anderson, a rabid Brexiteer, has started another company: one supported by European Union grants. Curiously, eTravelSafety has already been dissolved, though it still has a website. But don't worry, Stuart's got a third company on the go: Stand Sure Enterprises, which itself seems to have owned eTravelSafety. It's all very odd, but then there's a tradition of extremely marginal 'entrepreneurs' promoting the free market while sucking up state subsidies. No wonder he was listed as one of the most controversial new MPs. Still, now he's got a nice fat MP's salary, I'm sure he'll repay what he owes us.

Sadly Mr Anderson has blocked me on Twitter, which seems a little precious for a public tribune, let alone dubious given I'm a constituent of his. Still, I intend to keep an eye on him, which is more than the local paper – a long-standing Tory rag – has done. When the illegal payments story emerged they recorded a tearful video of him explaining that it was all done to keep his family off the streets. The latest delight is the government's launch of Town of the Year initiative. If you read the Guardian, you'll know that it was kicked off here by Robert Jenrick, another local. You'll also know that neither he, nor Mr Anderson, nor the government were aware that The Dark Place has been a city since 2000. Curiously, the Express and Star missed this insult in a way that I'm sure they wouldn't have done had a Labour government made this mistake. Instead, they refer only to 'areas' being regenerated. They are also fully behind Mr Anderson's campaign to demonise travellers, perhaps unsurprisingly for a paper that referred to them as a plague.

So anyway, this is fair warning: I'm still going to be wittering on about books, bikes (I bought No. 4 - a second-hand, heavily upgraded Boardman AiR Elite 9.0 - just before Christmas), music and the like over the coming year but there's also going to be a fair amount of petty spitefulness on my part. It'll be a stretch but I'm sure I can manage it.

Books read recently: Phineas Redux (Anthony Trollope) - hugely enjoyable, and featuring a dodgy Tory PM who first staves off and then springs an election while ducking any examination of principle whatsoever. Felt strangely appropriate. Then Nicola Ammanti's Anna: standard post-apocalyptic children stuff though featuring a compelling protagonist; Byatt's The Children's Book, which was largely wonderful. Now I'm reading Robert Frost's Selected Poems and Alissa Nutting's controversial Tampa. Marking is about to come in so I must make hay while the sun shines. Happy new year!

Always winter, never Christmas

In her own Christmas address, the Queen referred to 1992 as an 'annus horribilis': part of one of her castles had caught fire, a downmarket tabloid published pictures of Sarah Ferguson sans brassiere, and several of her children's marriages failed.

The castle was rebuilt at public expense, Sarah's body is of far less concern than what her ex-husband did with his to whom, and Brenda's children appear still to be influential, rich, married and dissatisfied once more. 2019, however, has few saving graces. Unless I missed some bright spots while I lounged around at home nursing a broken collarbone (thanks, inattentive driver!), a year of political misery, homelessness, food banks, economic decline and political cynicism looks set to be followed by another recession and the willed isolation of a nation that prefers xenophobia to actually accepting that modern life is (as Blur didn't quite put it) complicated. A friend's father, for instance, has been made redundant as a direct result of Brexit: he is still all for 'getting Brexit done' in the same way that the white American peasantry was persuaded that white hunger was somehow superior to being black and hungry. There's absolutely no solace in 'I told you so', and schadenfreude is best enjoyed from a considerable distance, but here I am - a citizen of an EU state determined to stay on with my friends and family (and also, it turns out, not wanted in Irish university jobs that have come up) while being uncomfortably aware that for a year or two at least, my middle-class income and occupation will keep me insulated from the worst effects. Black humour will also help when turnips become the national dish…and currency.

So anyway, I've finished teaching for this decade with a Friday afternoon class on Chris Mullins's A Very British Coup. The module is Populist Texts, examining how popular culture takes on current affairs and social issues - we started with Black Panther and finished with this politician's conspiracy novel to discuss how art and issues affect each other. In retrospect, perhaps it was an overly optimistic choice: Harry Perkins actually gets elected, whereas the current moderate-to-serious left can't even get over that initial hurdle. Mullins's novel (adapted twice for TV) was published in 1982, a period when the Thatcher government went from dead-in-a-ditch to triumphant, thanks to the Argentinians. Winning the Falklands ironically led to their dictator being overthrown, while a Tory hegemony was established. A Very British Coup is many things, including a consolation to the suffering left: there's a kind of carrion comfort in assuming that the permanent state or Establishment are what's preventing you from winning rather than your own beliefs, strategies, or the electorate. We discussed why Mullins wrote a dystopian novel rather than another socialist utopian one, and why it ended in defeat - perhaps it was a product of its time, or a sales gamble, or a genuine belief. If I ever get the chance to write my book on politicians' fictions, I intend to ask him, and explore why so many MPs from both sides wrote conspiracy thrillers in the 80s and 90s (Helen Liddell's Elite sticks in the mind as being the last one, and the most baffling, but also a harbinger of New Labour and the Third Way).

I felt physically sick for a few days after the election result, which has never happened before. It wasn't surprise, and I'm generally far too insensitive to let things affect me at a gut level, but the knowledge that things are going to get immeasurably worse on all fronts and that those who'll suffer most voted for it in droves left me nauseous. My immediate response was to take solace in my students (we were looking at Watchmen that Friday, which counsels against trusting in super-men of any sort), friends and in coping mechanisms. I listened to the recent Trinity Wall Street recording of Philip Glass's Symphony No. 5 several times, especially this movement.



Also on my playlist at the moment is Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás and Herbert Howell's Cello Concerto – escapist I know, but I'm in the mood for solace. Once the new year starts I'll be militant for lost causes once more. Climate change and electoral reform will be my focus, I think. I've also retreated into books (surprise!), though not particularly challenging ones. I've just started AS Byatt's The Children's Book which balances a shockingly bad attempt to render Stoke-on-Trent's dialect as Standard Northern with an evocation of Edwardian radicalism which fascinates me. Arts and Crafts, William Morris, Guild Socialism, Rational Dress and bicycles (talking of which, I also assuaged the savage breast by buying a six-year old, heavily upgraded Boardman Elite AiR 9.0 - my first carbon fibre bike: it's no Moulton but it's wonderful). I've long thought (and indeed blogged when Ed Miliband lost his general election) that evoking the utopian optimism of the late Victorian socialists would be good for the Labour Party and its left/liberal fellow travellers.

Other things I've read recently include Gillian Cross's pointed but slightly shaky teen novel After Tomorrow (British refugees in France find themselves unwelcome), India Knight's anthology The Dirty Bits – For Girls (the introduction is perfect for my session on women, reading and Jilly Cooper); the first Tracy Beaker novel for Children's Literature - superb; Armistead Maupin's Babycakes, which allowed me to talk about serial novels and non-heterosexual plot structures, Terry Pratchett's Dodger which I found too laboured, Beloved again, which never fails to move and horrify me, Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection which I thought was fun but too self-conscious without going the full Auster that would have justified such self-consciousness, Jeff Noon's first crime novel Slow Motion Ghosts which I thought was magnificent and Brian Aldiss's debut, Non-Stop. I've rather avoided Aldiss, put off by his late career as a crusty gammon, but Non-Stop is brilliant - a compact novel stuffed full of interesting ideas, satirical gestures and a great twist. It came out in 1958 and presumably was one of the earliest in the generation ship genre. I've read lots of them and none of them beat his novel for economy and wit. Its sexual politics are very dated and the satire on Freudian psychology feels a tad old-hat but everything else holds up really well. Oh yes - I also read Perrotta's The Leftovers which was rather a good exploration of public and private grief in the wake of 9/11 but really didn't need the Rapture-like framing (or an extensive TV adaptation). 

I seem to have read quite a lot this year, partly due to being off sick for a few weeks. The texts that most stuck in my mind were Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Stevie Davies's Impassioned Clay and Awakening, Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley which I found problematic but was in retrospect too harsh about, Emily Dickinson's poetry – re-reading it for teaching just plunged me back into a wondrous world, Emerson's essays, Milkman (predictably), Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure, Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier, Emma Dabiri's Don't Touch My Hair (extra marks for the Solange reference), Kate Charlesworth's joyous but also moving Sensible Footwear, Niall Griffiths's Broken Ghost (disclaimer: we're friends and I'm in the acknowledgements for no reason I can imagine) and Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth even though it needed pruning. I've definitely read more books by men than women this year but the ones that stayed with me are mostly by women. 

Musically, the ones I mentioned above were recent purchases, but I've also listened to a lot of Kate Bush, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Julia Kent's Temporal, Audiobooks' Now, In A Minute, the new Nick Cave, The National and Sleater-Kinney albums. Speech Debelle's Speech Therapy feels like a forgotten classic already; Pauline Oliveros, quite a lot of medieval music and polyphonic choral work and Chvrches also featured prominently.

So that's it for 2019. I'll be in the office on Monday, then I'm going to lie down in a darkened room for a few days hoping that it will all have been a fever-dream. Nollaig shona duit, Nadolig hapus i chi, Happy Christmas to you all. All I want from Santa is enough students to keep my course open. 

We're gonna need a new electorate…

Dick Tuck, I think it was, once gritted his teeth in the face of an electoral defeat and muttered that 'the people have spoken, the bastards'.

The same sentiment is raging around the liberal and leftwing corner of the world that I inhabit, with the added implication in some cases that what we need is a new electorate, not a new party or policy. I am in the happy position (if possible) of never having had any illusions about my own place in the political world, nor that of the Great British Public. Once in a blue moon something I passionately believe in becomes briefly fashionable and then goes away again, just like my lifelong attachment to v-neck ganseys and corduroy is occasionally mirrored in the fashion world and then goes away again for another decade or two. The confluence of weird cultural, social and political pressures that made me what I am – plus those regular pedagogical beatings suffered in headteachers' offices and the playground – also blessed me with the awareness that I will always be out of step with the majority. This doesn't necessarily make me feel any better, and it always carries the temptation to become either smug or a Vanguardist, but it does mean that blows like today's election results aren't freighted with an element of surprise.

There are two common responses to defeat on this scale: either the public are fools, or knaves - Steve Bell's cartoon responding to John Major's surprise victory in 1992 tends towards the foolish diagnosis. It's a Gramscian reaction, I suppose. Gramsci sat in a fascist prison cell in 1920-30s Italy and asked himself why the people repeatedly supported policies and parties which acted against their economic interest, despite the efforts of generations of Marxists. His answer in The Prison Notebooks was culture: that the combined forces of religion, politics, education, the arts, sport and all the non-economic aspects of our lives produced a version of 'reality' that persuaded the masses to act in the interests of a dominant elite and against their own. A crude – though not necessarily inaccurate – version of this is the argument that American conservatism has successfully persuaded poor Americans that 40 years of earnings decline is less important than abortion or immigration.

It's hard, this morning, not to take that line. I live in a poor, left-behind city. It is overwhelmingly working-class and has a large immigrant and first and second-generation population. Skilled jobs are increasingly rare and where they do exist, they're subsidised by a council suffering massive funding cuts, and by the European Union. The day after the EU referendum I was in leave-voting Abertawe/Swansea, where every new building bore a plaque with the EU flag marking where the money came from. I thought then, and think now, that none of the people voting Conservative or Leave will ever be the priority of an English Conservative administration. The Conservatives (much like New Labour) have idealised a working-class electorate that is racist, paranoid, selfish and bitter, thus bringing this electorate into being. They will throw them enough red meat to keep the votes flowing, while continuing to serve primarily the finance sector's insatiable demands for deregulation and an ever-smaller state. Britannia Unchained, the collection of essays by Raab and his cronies is essential reading here: it explicitly describes the British workforce as lazy and ignorant, and makes clear their belief in the abolition of the state beyond nuclear weapons and a legal system designed to protect capital. This is the world of V for Vendetta: the hedge-fund economy represented by Jacob-Rees Mogg and untethered from the rest of us will dictate policy, while an electorate that has proved it just wants things 'done' will be encouraged to look the other way by the most cynical policies Dominic Cummings (who at least is honest, in a weird way) can dream up.

The Conservative campaign made this clear: environmental collapse is upon us but a denialist party didn't bother making even the weakest statement in favour of prevention or adaptation. It treated the regulated media sector with total contempt, and the BBC responded like a beaten dog, failing in basic journalistic duties such as fact-checking. The private media did what it always does – monster a Labour Party that threatened its economic interests, while Labour ran a campaign of staggering naivety.

The Tory campaign won because it was simple. It ignored the pressing problems and blamed the rest – despite being in government for a decade – on easy targets that made no demands on an electorate that always wants to put off a reckoning. Foreigners; IRA-loving killjoys; 'liberal elites'. The genius of this is that there will always be such enemies. When Brexit is the disaster that it absolutely will be, the government will blame an EU conspiracy aided by Remainer enemies within. The world is a complicated place: Labour made the mistake of saying so, rather than pandering to the demands of an electorate that wants to be told that it has no responsibility, that everything's going to be great, that it's somebody else's fault.

Of course there are other reasons. The UK's kindergarten electoral system which prefers dramatic moments and confrontation to boring old compromise and negotiation; an entire political class which hasn't addressed deindustrialisation despite having generations in which to do so; a Labour Party balanced between right wing machine politicians with nothing inspiring or interesting to say and left wing ones who have all the answers as long as you don't start from here.

I'm left with an MP who took office having been exposed in the national press as a thief and a hypocrite. My students - some of whom voted for this outcome - are going to find that their university, their subject, their careers and their communities are not just beneath the notice of our new rulers, but the targets of scorn and hostility.

Are there any consolations? For me, yes. An Ireland peacefully united is inching closer; Scottish independence looks like really happening. Not much consolation for me, living in England and sharing the consequences with everyone else, but the self-inflicted dismemberment of the UK seems both overdue and good for the world – it's long been a rogue state, and deserves to wither away until it comes to terms with being a small, post-imperial polity with much to apologise for. However, this doesn't even start to make up for the knowledge that students, friends and neighbours don't have enough to eat now, let alone in six months' time. Being right shouldn't give anyone a warm glow, especially me.

If we thought 2010-19 was bad, buckle up and be kind to each other.

Is Widening Participation REALLY the enemy of progress?

They're wearing hats and gloves in hell this morning, for Radio Four has provoked me to stand up for my Vice-Chancellor. This is worse than when I found myself nodding in agreement with Linda Snell one dark day.

It all goes back to 4.30 a.m. yesterday, when I got up to go to a recording at my university of BBC Radio 4's alleged flagship news show, Today. 24 hours later, having got the date wrong and endured a day's mockery from my dear colleagues, I tried again.

As part of the show, Mishal Husain (whose journalism and presenting style I rather admire) interviewed the boss. Rather than explore the HE landscape, the university's role in a hard-hit city or the decade of wage suppression that everyone in HE except its leaders have endured, Husain (private school, Cambridge) decided to ask whether places like mine were essentially running a pyramid scheme by accepting money from students with poor A-level qualifications who were bound to fail. The VC then had about a minute and a half to unpick the assumptions and errors implicit in the question, and did a great job. I've had a couple of hours more and don't feel constrained to be so polite about it.

There are many hot takes on the bin-fire that is British higher education, but this was a new one. Given the elite universities' notorious failure to admit poor, provincial, working-class and especially minority ethnic students (at all, in the case of certain colleges), it's a brave move to accuse an institution with a 40% BME, 90% working-class intake of being the enemy of progress.

A quarter of Oxford colleges didn’t admit a single black student in at least one year between 2015 and 2017
Eight of the 29 colleges at Oxford admitted two or fewer black students between 2015 and 2017 (less than 1% of all UK students admitted to the college). This means that in at least one year those colleges can’t have admitted any black students. We don’t know what happened in each of the individual years between 2015 and 2017, so it’s possible there were more colleges who didn’t admit any black students in any given year.

The interesting question would be why and how underfunded, unfashionable places like mine are expected to repair the damage caused by structural and systematic racism and economic injustice. Instead Husain's question implied a direct, uncomplicated link between individual effort and academic success. My students come from multiply-deprived families, communities and locations. They have been failed by an compulsory education system that has never done well with ethnic minorities and has been privatised to such an extent that pernicious activities like 'off-rolling' drive a league-table culture at the expense of students. A-levels are a snapshot of achievement with their own problems (in my subject, the direct result of Gove's move towards a mechanical, boring curriculum has been a collapse in English Literature applicants) which to a large extent reflect privilege rather than potential, something a rigid qualifications-based HE entrance system largely fails to acknowledge. My colleagues at selective universities largely aren't racists excluding anyone they think smells of chip-fat: that's not how structural inequality perpetuates itself. Unequal access to HE is the end-product of a rotten system, not an individual failing.

Presumably Mishal Husain believes that attending a fee-paying school had no bearing on her own academic success and entrance to Cambridge: if so, her parents should ask for their money back. In the meantime, I'll stick to spotting the talent other institutions overlook. Also: state-educated students tend to do better at university – they haven't been educated beyond their natural abilities as many private school kids have been, and they're more independent.

Teaching mostly first-generation HE students is both a joy and a challenge. There are issues of cultural capital and actual capital, but they have usually seen more of life than their peers, and can be more driven. That's why so many of us choose to teach in places like mine (not me: I lucked into this and lightning doesn't strike twice) – we don't have a white saviour/missionary mentality but we see the difference we make and we don't have to cope with the entitlement of those who take education for granted.

Someone on Twitter described Husain's question as the product of a 'stay in your lane' mentality, and I'm sorry to say that I agree. The ruling class clearly believes that higher education should be reserved for the affluent middle and upper classes. The Morlocks should accept their roles in the service economy and take enough vocational training to work in an Amazon warehouse. I hate this. I've seen too many brilliant students who should be running companies, publishing novels, lobotomising government ministers or presenting BBC current affairs shows get dumped by the wayside for being too black, provincial, common or badly-networked. If History of Art is or Medicine is open to a cabinet minister's offspring (acknowledged or not), it should be good enough for my neighbours' kids.  If teaching Anne of Green Gables, Welsh literature, politicians' novels (my current research project) Jilly Cooper's Riders, American Psycho, The Book of Mormon and Hamlet (to select a few of my recent classes) goes some little way to tipping the scales back in the right direction, I'm happy.*

Anyway, that's the rant you get when I'm forced out of bed at 4.30 a.m. I'll go back to book-blogging and random nonsense again next time.

*Happiysh: I still want paying properly.