Dispatches from the bunker

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 Knowe series, 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.

Free the Warwick One

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.

The Weekly Drivel

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.

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!