Sabbatical 5
Blog cover image, The Prelude (Babacar Mané), by Kehinde Wiley
There has been a lot of waiting this week.
The failed MOT saga of last week saw me spend most of Wednesday waiting around for news of a car I took into the garage at 8.30am and didn’t get back until 5.30pm.
The original plan was to walk the ten minutes to a nearby Starbucks and while away the hours in there. The last time I’d spent so long in a Starbucks was in Arizona the night Guns N Roses played and we had nothing left to do on our trip other than get to the stadium for the show. Parking didn’t open until late in the afternoon, so we drove to a Starbucks a few minutes away from the venue and spent hours there drinking coffee, eating lunch, and reading.
I had forgotten how excruciatingly dull that day was until we left for Guns N Roses!
Once I got to the Starbucks here, I ordered a pumpkin spice latte (because I’m that guy) and a lemon muffin and sat down to kill time. I drew the comic above, read a little of the Smackdown and Philosophy book I’d brought with me, wrote next week’s Philosophy Unleashed post, read a little more, ordered another coffee, went to the toilet a few times, but by the time noon rolled around I was getting restless and self-conscious. Even though two other people in the place had been there as long as I had been, they seemed to be doing ‘proper’ jobs in sales while I messed around drawing silly pictures and reading about Wittgenstein and wrestling. I couldn’t properly relax there and it was also getting pretty busy with the lunchtime crowd. Even though we don’t talk about the pandemic anymore - there is still a pandemic on - and I was having doubts about the wisdom of sitting amongst so many people for so long just because I had decided that the hour-long walk back home was a bit too long to bother with and was resistant towards spending money on buses or taxis. I wasn’t even that sure why - I was, after all, spending money on coffee and cake. Although there was some logic there as I had discovered I had some money leftover on my old pre-pandemic Starbucks app, so the first coffee and cake were actually free.
Still - I had only decided to chill at the coffee place because I knew I could get some work done there and it wouldn’t be a total waste of time (the Philosophy Unleashed post, the comic, the reading) and now I had done it all; any longer there and I would regret not being home where I could get on with bigger and better things. It was also lunchtime and I don’t really like the lunch options at Starbucks. Being honest, I hadn’t really expected to make it to lunch. I had made lunch for both my wife and myself earlier that morning. She had taken hers to work with her and mine was back home in the fridge. Just a salad - but a nice one. In the past this garage had usually been pretty speedy, calling me around elevenths to say the job was done. I had envisioned drinking a coffee or two, doing some work, and then strolling back to pick up the car and be home for lunch. Now it was nearing one o’clock, my stomach was growling, and an hour home seemed like a long wait for a salad. I also anticipated being about forty minutes into the journey back and then the phone ringing for me to turn around.
It was showering outside too. The car park outside was fizzing with splashed puddles and newcomers to the store pulled soaking hoods down from over their heads once inside and in the warmth. Very unappealing. But there was also an M&S Food Hall over the road and they did a good vegan fake duck and hoisin sauce wrap that was calling me. It couldn’t hurt to walk over there and get one then decide what happens next once my stomach was full.
Vegan wrap in hand, I decided to head home. I was already wet, and the exercise would do me good. Worse case scenario the garage does call mid-walk and I just do a little more exercise. Full of food now, that didn’t sound so bad. If I made it home I could do some work and then just get the bus back.
I was worried by the time I got home, completely soaked and cold, that I still hadn’t heard anything from the garage since the initial ‘visual check’ video they had sent me about an hour after dropping it off. In the video they had confirmed that the problem diagnosed at the failed MOT was a problem, and that fixing it was covered by my warranty, but had said that they didn’t have the part in, would hopefully have it in later, and that they would call with an ETA ‘soon’. It had been five hours now and I’d heard nothing. So, still in my wet clothes, I called them, only to be told that they didn’t know still if the part would be in yet but would definitely know in half an hour and would call me back then.
As I changed out of my wet clothes I was worried. It was two-thirty and the last pick up was at five. My MOT re-test was booked for 9am the following morning. If the car wasn’t fixed in time, I couldn’t do the MOT, and currently everywhere was booked up for weeks for MOTs and I wouldn’t be able to get another slot for weeks, meaning my car would be off the road most of October.
I called them back and no one picked up. It went through to a switchboard who told me they would ‘give them a message’. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t, but no one called me back. As the clock neared four o’clock I realised time was running out on my ability to walk back in time to pick it up and I also had to be careful with the bus times too. My window was closing and I still hadn’t heard anything, nor had I really been able to get on with any work. At four fifteen I called them again. I finally got through and was told the part was in ‘but we won’t be able to get to it today so will you be alright with leaving the car with us?’
I basically exploded. I explained the situation, the need for the MOT, the fact that the part was meant to be in and ready because I’d booked it over a week ago specifically to replace that part and had been told it would be good for the MOT by the next day. I hoped for a miracle as the person on the end of the line listened and, despite the lack of God, one occurred. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘you’re right - it should have been done. I’ll see what I can do.’ When she came back a few minutes later she told me there were two people there who could do it and stay a little later and it would be ready to pick up by five-thirty. Even though walking back in the rain was out (not enough time, and a killer blister had formed from the first walk) and the buses were out too, I was happy to get a taxi there after all the stress. Not to make a long and boring story even more long and boring - I got the car back by six, just in time to realise my time in the rain had messed me up a bit and I might have caught a chill. A reminder for future to check the weather forecast before planning stupid October japes, but at least the waiting was over.
My first bout of waiting though had been Monday, where I waited to hear back from the job I had interviewed for on Friday. I thought it had gone well and had already counselled myself that, whatever happened, I had made a good showing of myself and been utterly me in the interview, so if they didn’t want me it wouldn’t have been a right fit. They’d told me on Friday I might not hear until Monday if I didn’t hear back Friday night, and that had given me the relief of not having to worry about it over the weekend once it became clear the call wasn’t coming on Friday. I was able to fully enjoy the weekend - which was great because we had a friend stay with us who was back in the country for a few months from Columbia where he usually lives. We used to live together at university and our visits these days, due to geography, are infrequent, but always a joy when they happen. He had been meant to visit right at the start of the academic year but been laid low with covid instead, so it was great to see him. We watched all that week’s AEW wrestling, which I had put off watching until Saturday (a nod to our former selves, having bonded over a mutual love of WWE wrestling and usually making sure over the years to catch up every Wrestlemania, including live-watching the first ‘Mania after the pandemic together via zoom across the time-zones), got takeaway, and then went to Charlecote Park on the Sunday to walk the grounds and see some deer.
Before his visit, my wife and I had gone to our second live AVWFC match of the season, this one not a regular league game but for the Continental Cup. It was our first at the official ‘home’ ground in Walsall. Frankly - it’s obscene that Villa, like many other WSL teams, aren’t just able to play in the Aston Villa home ground, Villa Park, like the men’s team, and a bit of an insult to make them play miles away, but we knew that going in and were excited to see the place they’d play the majority of matches and find the seats we’d chosen when blindly buying our season tickets. I’d actually been there once before, in the nineties, to see my dad’s team, Bury FC, play Walsall. All I remembered about the match was that the Walsall ground had chips and ketchup, which nowhere else we’d seen football up until then had done, and I was very impressed. However, sitting there and watching the match, although no further memories were jogged about being there before, it did evoke some nice memories about years of visiting Bury’s home at Gigg Lane with my dad.
Here’s where our novice status as football fans kicked in though: Villa had played a scrappy and resilient game, battling back from a 0-1 deficit to make it a 1-1 draw by full-time. The final whistle blew, we knew we had to get back home to be back in time for our friend’s visit, and I had also stupidly left my phone in the car so wanted to get back and make sure it hadn’t been stolen. People rose all around us and started moving to the exits and we joined the shuffle, zombie-like. I did notice as we left the grounds and walked towards the car park how few people seemed to be in front of us, but I know that one of the trademark features of WSL matches is that afterwards the players and fans often interact. A lot of kids had been lingering near to the pitch as we walked out so I put it down to that. The family in front of us had certainly left and we were trailing behind them the whole way to the car. Remarking on how easy it was to leave the crowded car-park we were impressed with how quickly we were back on the motorway home.
It was then, my wife driving, that I decided to Google what a 1-1 draw meant for points within the cup tournament. ‘Um,’ I said to my wife, ‘this seems to say the match is still happening and we’re currently up 4-3 on penalties.’
We’d missed a penalty shoot-out! Not only that - but a really thrilling one too. We watched it back later on TV and it was a belter. We were utterly devastated that we’d assumed it was all over and just walked off. It turns out the crowds of people heading to the exits were probably just going to the toilet before the shoot-out, and we had just happened to follow the one other family who, like us, either didn't know or had other plans they needed to get to. We just didn’t think! Oh well - we know for next time. Like Alanis Morrisette says: ‘you live, you learn’.
The match was fun though - even when we thought it was a draw. And it was nice to be able to chat football with our friend who, despite living with him for three years and him being a massive football fan, I had never been able to share conversation about on that topic before.
So that was the weekend - no stressing about phone-calls from prospective employers and lots of relaxing fun. But Monday morning my wife left for work and I got about my own business - THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT - all-too-aware that any moment my phone might ring, waiting for that call that would tell me ‘yes’ or ‘no’… And waiting… And waiting…
I knew from my own experience of jobs we had offered at my old school that such things usually took place after hours. Meetings had to be held and different higher ups had to sign off on things. I wasn’t really expecting to hear anything until evening, but the fact that I might just made this buzz of tense possibility permeate the whole day. I read a lot, I wrote a lot, but I was also in a sort of fugue state about the whole thing and only remember how frequently I glanced nervously at my phone or paced about the house to burn off some of the anxious energy.
I kept going through various rationalisations too, re-assessing how I thought I’d done on Friday and viewing it from all sorts of different angles. Although I thought I’d done well in all the interviews, and delivered a good lesson, I was able to see new holes in everything I’d said and done. It also worried me that no-one had taken a copy of all the ID stuff I’d been asked to bring. When I got home and emptied my bag I found my neatly ordered file I’d brought along all untouched and unasked for, and got a sinking feeling in my stomach: they must have known they didn’t want to hire me and so didn’t bother asking for it before I left. Clearly a sign that I was doomed from the start?
My wife texted and asked if I’d heard anything?
Not yet…still waiting.
By the time she left work and was driving home, I still hadn’t heard, and when we spoke briefly on the phone I was imagining the time it would take them to call the person who got the job before they got around to calling the also-rans like me to tell me the bad news. I shuffled off to the kitchen to start making dinner feeling pretty disheartened.
‘Dinner’s going to be a little late,’ I called my wife back a few minutes later. Just as I had started getting out the ingredients, my phone had rang. I got the job!
As those of you with perseverance enough to read all these TL;DR Sabbaticals will know, I was feeling pretty despondent about the thought of academia, and was missing teaching. A lot. I was missing teaching philosophy specifically, and while I never regretted leaving my old job where I felt I had achieved everything I wanted to, I was regretting focusing so much on an academic dream I didn’t really want anymore at the cost of not taking seriously potential jobs I could have applied for in schools for September. I had never intended to stop working and just have all this time to indulge in my research and writing. This Sabbatical has been fun, but I had hoped, being honest, that I would be teaching in some university come September when I first handed in my notice in January, and as September drew nearer and my thoughts on academia changed, my new hope became that by January I would have something exciting lined up where I would be teaching again.
Well, I’m incredibly excited as, come January, I will be stepping into a maternity cover for the rest of the year as head of theology and philosophy at an excellent and completely different school than my last one. A different environment, but a very philosophy-centred curriculum and ethos, and one I really loved visiting last Friday. The position still gives me until January to pursue THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT and enjoy this Sabbatical, and leaves the future nicely open once the maternity leave is completed, but it also gives me both an end-point and the happy knowledge that by the new year I will be back in a classroom again. It was brilliant last week thinking about teaching and planning the lesson for the interview - an A-level lesson on Aristotle’s virtue ethics - just as it had been brilliant delivering my talk on anarchism a few weeks before at Winchester. Turns out you can take the boy out of teaching for a bit, but you can’t take the teacher out of the boy.
Almost as if to prove that fact, by seven that evening I was teaching again. Winchester had me back to run a webinar with their sixth form students and, as it was the start of Black History Month, I chose to do something with them on bell hooks and ‘The Possibilities of the Classroom’. Taking a cue from hooks, and not wanting a lesson on her to take the form of ‘domination’ instead of the education ‘as the practice of freedom’ which she advocates, I ran the webinar as an experiment in hooksian pedagogy. A few days before I had distributed to the students a handout with some information about hooks, as well as some information from Aisha Thomas about why representation matters, and the work of hooks in helping educators become anti-racist, and asked the students themselves to set whatever agenda they wanted for the session based on the reading. It was really good fun, and I think they thought a lot about what they discussed. It added another buzz of excitement about possibilities for the future in an environment that really values intellectual pursuit rather than dogmatically aligning itself to the whims of Ofsted.
Just as the waiting paid off on Monday, Wednesday’s waiting had also paid off as on Thursday morning my car passed its MOT and became road-legal again. We had also been waiting since January to sort out a broken gas fire in our lounge. Thursday afternoon I finally got a gas-safe engineer out to take a look at it and I can happily say, as the temperature continues to drop and autumn really draws in, the fire now works. I am not so happy to say that all that was wrong with it was that the batteries needed changing on the receiver for the remote, and that essentially, had I not also got them to service the fire afterwards, I would have got a fully qualified gas-safe engineer in just to change some batteries for me because I’m an incompetent idiot, so I just won’t tell you about that part.
Somewhere, amongst all this waiting, as well as THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT ticking along nicely with some slower bits of the research phase happening in the background, the memoir I have been working on has hit the 80,000 word mark and is starting to look like a real book with only really one more chapter to go. It continues to surprise me in its topics and themes, and I think it will be really interesting for people to read once its done.
As always, the week has also been full of music. The latest playlist was inspired by the awfulness of the Conservative Party Conference:
But as it’s Bandcamp Friday as I write this, here’s a few recommendations that have got me through the week, or this morning if they’ve only just been released (The Bobby Lees!):
I don’t know what I’d do without music. It’s always such a friend. I was delighted to pick up my own guitar a few times this week too and bash out some of the classics to alleviate the various waitings. I need to pull my finger out and get recording again as I have a handful of tracks just waiting to be done, including the title track - ‘I’m Sick of All the Hustle’ - which I’m finally playing right 100% of the time instead of my previous best of about 75% thanks to an annoying middle-eight. The song feels sadly even more necessary with every extra day of the Truss government that passes:
I’m sick of all the hustle
Life shouldn’t be this hard
It isn’t admirable
how close to the line you are
Or how much you may have struggled
Your way up from the streets
Because everything you needed
Should’ve already been on every street
Right from the start
We shouldn’t celebrate this
badly broken system
By making role models of
The ones who wouldn’t let it kill them
Ignoring all the others
Too tired to take up arms
The ones without a choice but
Succumbing to its harm
Forty years of nine-to-five
You never missed a single payment
But you missed a whole lot of birthdays
And you never spent a single day fulfilled
We glorify this bullshit
How hard we work to make ends meet
How long we fought to make it
The things we did so we could eat
And it serves only the system
The one that fails us every day
A fairy tale pretending
Things can’t be another way
Than the way they say
All we ever needed
Already it exists
But has been stolen from us
For somebody’s profits
To keep us all exploited
As if it is the natural way
But we could change the whole world
By changing everything today
But I don’t want to change the world
Because I’m sick of all the hustle
Every day another fucking hustle
Life shouldn’t be a hustle
And I’m sick of all the hustle
Speaking of lyrics and poetry - it was National Poetry Day on Thursday, and so I wrote this poem which no-one seemed to like when I posted it on social media:
National Poetry Day
They invented a day
Where we were encouraged to speak
In a certain way,
So that one day we might,
At last,
Have the language we need
To refuse.
Using forms dictated
By long dead voices,
Who couldn’t speak out loud
To each other
How they really felt,
So wrote it down instead,
alone and in private,
In convoluted patterns,
To be read later.
At a distance.
Safe from real emotions
That might transform the moment.
Then repeated year after year,
by rote,
From the mouths of others who,
Themselves,
Also did not know
How to share feelings in real life.
Until,
Repeated enough,
Old patterns might grow stale.
Inherited forms
Vulnerable to change.
With which we might play,
Grow bold enough to stray.
Take everything that they say,
And throw it all away.
In the hope we might unlock
The right selection of words,
In just the right order,
To speak a truth as yet unspoken,
Loud enough to jump up from the page
And reinvent the world.
I was really happy with it - so what does social media know? To be fair, it was barely readable on this stupid format I used:
So I’m going to blame the font and presentation rather than the poem itself. All-in-all a pretty productive week considering I did it all with this ridiculous cardboard-inflicted ‘paper’ cut from squashing down the box from a new coffee maker on Sunday that made things like playing guitar and typing difficult:
Despite the perfectly functioning espresso machine and French press cafetiere that we also have, when the filter coffee maker died on Friday it had to be replaced as soon as possible such is our dependency on caffeine in this household. As I tweeted on Friday, before my interview:
Until next week…