Sabbatical 7

It looks like my sabbatical is going to last longer than Liz Truss’ time as Prime Minister. Although this blog will go quiet next week, as I observe the high holy days of October half term and dedicate a week to rest and relaxation (I’ll be back the following Friday - November 4th, all being well), my sabbatical will roll on until the end of December, while Truss’ time in office will end before the end of next week’s break. If we don’t have a general election before the end of my sabbatical, however, then we’re not even trying anymore to pretend this country is a democracy. Not that it ever was. But the pretence, at least, was always there. The correct tone of our oppression. Brexit, brought in on a lie, was at least, after 2019, a lie the public had demonstrated their belief in with their vote for the master-liar Boris Johnson. His promise to ‘get Brexit done’, even if we disagreed with it, was at least comprehensible as a mandate, and his actions to achieve it made some sort of democratic sense. The lies and bullshit caught up with him as COVID exposed the incompetence and venal selfishness. With Brexit ‘done’ (and boy are we feeling the effects!) the mandate was fulfilled and on the new big task of government - handling a pandemic - the government were not only failing, leaving the bodies piled high in their wake, but had broken their own laws and been caught deceiving and misleading the public time and time again. The call for a general election was made then, and should have been heeded. Britain is a completely different place, in a completely different context, since the election of 2019. It seems ludicrous to hold a decision the public made about leadership then as being one still relevant now, especially as Johnson himself, and his government, made resignation after resignation and conceded their unfitness for office.

But instead of democracy, and letting the people decide, the Tories decided to decide for themselves with a lengthy six-week leadership contest that meant, as the cost of living rose and many faced the fears of a long, cold, and hungry winter ahead, we had no government in place to make any decisions that might alleviate their suffering. When, finally, the Conservative Party did make their choice, it was Liz Truss: a walking and occasionally talking Thatcher-meme. Good at energising the right with social media savvy but terrible at public speaking, Truss looked out of her depth from the start. Then the Queen died, meaning that still the cold and hungry waited for anything to be done to help their plight while Truss and her government of friends focused on the pomp and ceremony of an overlong state funeral and period of public mourning. While thousands waited in The Queue to pay their respects to the late monarch, thousands more were waiting in an endless queue of their own: waiting for the government to show any signs of caring for their wellbeing.

The first act of business for Truss was a mini-budget that only made things worse for those desperate for her help. Throwing out gifts to the rich so obscene that even the markets balked, the pound crashed and the economy spiralled further down the toilet. Every single act she made in her short time in office harmed rather than helped, and yesterday, October 20th, after just 45 days on the job, she quit.

A General Election ought to be held simply on the basis that the Tories had their undemocratic chance to select an alternate to Boris Johnson and failed. It must now be down to the people to decide. Instead though, we have two new anti-democratic obscenities: 1) the Tories are going to choose a new leader themselves, and 2) they will do it in just one week, showing that the lengthy six-week process they made us wait for before was an unnecessary insult to those waiting for a competent government to be in place to do their job.

There is only one route to legitimacy for the new PM, and that will be, once selected by the Tories, to immediately call for a General Election to have that selection either authenticated or rejected by the public. A Prime Minister afraid of doing that would be a Prime Minister afraid of democracy.

So yeah - yet another eventful moment in the life of the nation happening while I’m sat at home without students to discuss them with. First the death of a monarch, then the death of a political career. Liz Truss, we hardly knew ye. I’m not saying there’s a pattern but I did find it interesting that the last time my wife and I went to London it was the weekend before the Thursday the Queen died. Last weekend, we went to London again and this Thursday Liz Truss resigned. I wonder what will happen the next time we visit the city?

Our London visit was to celebrate the first birthday of my niece and we decided to combine that special occasion with some theatre. Saturday was busy - we watched the Aston Villa Womens team play West Ham in Walsall (shocking red card sideline fight action ended a disappointing performance from a team in Villa who should have won by a multi-goal margin but ended up losing 2-1. Still a fun afternoon out though!) and then rushed to Birmingham International to catch the train. We got into the city around five, got the tube down to Waterloo, checked into the Travelodge by the theatre, grabbed some food, and then went to the Old Vic to watch the excellent, EUREKA DAY. A play about an outbreak of the mumps at an American private school and the arguments around liberty, education, individualism vs the connected community, and vaccines. An uncomfortable watch at times, whether for reminding you of the ignorance of anti-vaxxers, or for daring to remind you also of their humanity, it is both an interesting satire on the righteousness of the way we justify our selfish interests through lofty morality about the greater good, and on how our idealism can crumble when it hits up against the messiness of reality. I liked it a lot, even as I saw aspects of my own character lampooned. Most importantly, I got to see Kids in the Hall’s, Mark McKinney act live for the first time, as well as Mad About You star, Helen Hunt (growing up Mad About You was one of my favourite shows) and This Is Us star, Susan Kelechi Watson (she plays Beth on that show, one of my favourite characters). There were other actors in the play too, but being honest, the chance to see these three were what made us buy the tickets. And they were worth every penny.

The next day we got breakfast at a nice nearby cafe and then got the train over to my sister’s flat to celebrate her daughter’s birthday, then we got the train back home (sadly missing crossing paths with the actor who plays brilliant Eastenders villain, Ravi, who was joining the celebrations a little later and is a friend of my sister’s partner) and, after doing a little bit of work and making dinner, spent Sunday night catching up on the important cultural markers, such as RuPaul’s Drag Race UK and Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing, we had missed by being away.

This being the last week of full-time sabbaticaling before next week’s half-term break, I wanted to get a lot of work done, but I had a mid-morning appointment with a car dealer because the lease on my current car is coming up. The 10:30am chat about options became a near three hour epic as those options became whittled down to an actual decision about replacing the car, only to have, predictably, my finances questioned because of my current status as an unemployed ‘homemaker’ instead of a fully employed teacher. My impending job in January couldn’t be entered into the computer and after all the hours of chat and hard-selling, I had to go home and wait as the system ‘referred’ me to some mystery decider.

Home, I began work editing my first proper draft of my ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER memoir. Honestly, that has been the bulk of my work this week as, last week, I finished it in a flurry of activity. At just over 100,000 words I knew it was too big and ungainly, so this week’s job has been making cuts and neatening things up, with a view to start submitting it places in November and see if anything comes of it. As it stands now i’ve got it down to 93,000 words and just have the last two chapters to look at in the coming days. Whatever happened with THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT, I can look back on this sabbatical and know that I completed an entire fucking book in just the first six weeks. And the book is important. It may not be, in itself, a work of serious philosophy designed to contribute to the important abolition movement and transform approaches to education, like THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT is, but on a personal level it has been a way of processing the last decade of my life. Not just my career as a teacher and the insights, observations, and regrets I have about what I have done with it, but my experiences of teaching during the pandemic and how that was affected by, and affected, my view of the profession. It has also, surprisingly, been a way of processing the deaths of my father and my mother, and considering my own biography. I think it is something worth reading even if you don’t know who I am, but even if no one agrees and it just becomes something else to add to the litany of failed creative projects I have under my belt, it was absolutely worth doing.

It’s strange how insecure we are about believing people would be interested in our real lives. If everything that happened to me for real, happened to a character in a novel, we would never question how worthwhile it is to read about it. When a novelist tells you there is this teacher called DaN and he’s going to go through some stuff, you accept it must be worth hearing about, but when DaN himself tells you about his actual life the instinct is to roll your eyes and call him a narcissist.

The car dealership called back later that afternoon and told me that because I’d been such a good customer over the years, they trusted me and all would be well with the finance. Amazing. Somehow they made me feel lucky to be able to come back in and sign paperwork for a car with more expensive monthly payments than before. Made me feel like it was a privilege to be both ripped off and burdened with debt. We truly are a messed up people. But at least I can be mobile still while the world continues to burn.

When I wasn’t spending the week editing the memoir, I was also editing and tinkering with what I have done on THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT. It is interesting how, while still eager to work on it, I have noticed how it has taken a definite back seat in recent weeks as the pressure comes off for it to be some big important key that will unlock an academic future I no longer want. Having now decided that it is not that, and is something I am writing for public, not academic, consumption, I look at the piles of books surrounding my desk covering various theories of punishment and pedagogy and I wonder if I have accidentally built a prison for myself? I look ahead at the next two months of freedom before I return full-time to the world of work and I wonder if I will regret spending them so intensely focused on this dark and infuriating topic and ignoring everything else I could be doing? There are other books I could be reading - areas of philosophy, or non-philosophical interest that have nothing to do with my research focus - which I can imagine still sitting unread on my shelves come January and feeling a pang of regret that I didn’t indulge myself when I had the chance. THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT, after all, will not be finished by January, and will continue in my spare time once I am back teaching again. It shouldn’t be rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, so won’t be, although I hope to get lots done. Recognising that, however, and the fact that completion in that time would be impossible it does make me more open to the possibility of taking the foot off the gas a bit and ensuring that while I have so much spare time I don’t miss out on some of the other, equally important, things I could be doing. Relaxing, for one thing, is something that has been strangely absent from the last seven weeks.

I drew that comic on Wednesday evening and decided to spend Thursday doing nothing but finishing that Jana Casale novel (it is excellent by the way) and playing guitar. I realised that I’d barely played a lick in the last few weeks and that realisation made me sad. It was like this idea that I had to make the most of my time away from work had made me perceive this entire period as having to be incredibly productive and pro-active, instead of realising that the most productive and pro-active thing you can do sometimes is to do nothing at all. I felt tension and stress slipping away yesterday that I didn’t even notice I had, and slept deeper than I have done in ages last night. I’m still drinking too much coffee, but baby steps… Hopefully the week off next week will be a proper stop and recharge. The following week, we’ll see how much of that final few months of my sabbatical I spend focused exclusively on prisons and pedagogy and how much I open myself up to the freedom to just be alongside doing my research.

Wednesday was also fun because my wife and I met up properly with an old friend from our university days we bumped into last week and discovered was working in the city. We were clearly fated to meet up again at some point this week because, bizarrely, after not seeing each other for over fifteen years we also ended up being on exactly the same train to London together on Saturday and walked a few steps behind each other the entire way from the platform to Euston’s exit. Small world. Drinking coffee and eating halloumi wraps on Wednesday evening, we caught up with each other’s lives and found we had a lot in common still. He is currently an academic, living out my one-time dream, and while it sounded frequently to contain all the elements that made it so alluring to me, he did not disagree with my objections and reticence. It was great to talk philosophy and drama theory, but even he could so how much pedagogy formed such an important part of my thinking. I was left intellectually invigorated but with no regrets about my recent change of heart.

Speaking of hearts, my heart really wasn’t into making a new playlist this week as I found I was barely listening to any music as I focused closely on editing the text I had produced or reading. So I threw this playlist together mainly for the sake of walking to the train station Wednesday afternoon. It turns out though that doing a playlist with minimum thought seems to work out much better than doing one with full intention. I really liked this mix in the end. Probably one of the best of the last seven weeks:

I was also delighted to discover this morning, about a month late, that Editors released a new album at the end of September. Weirdly, despite new songs of theirs popping up in my Spotify ‘Release Radar’ playlist every Friday, the simplistic cover and EDM looking title of EBM, made me think they were all EDM remixes of old songs (I am terrible at remembering specific song titles), so I had sort of ignored them all. Like being prodded and poked out of a dream, finally this morning I realised it was something new and have been listening to it on repeat since 7.30am:

I studied A-level philosophy in the same class as Russell, their bassist, and have always enjoyed seeing his continued success in this project. He used to do sound engineering at one of the venues we played back in the day, and at one point, when we were young kids deciding our futures, I remember him coming for advice from my girlfriend at the time, who he had been at school with. He asked about wanting to study music tech against his parents’ wishes and we both told him to go for it. I think choosing to do that is where he met the rest of the guys in the band and Editors formed. They’re a great band and the new album is dark, brooding, insistent and all the right feels for some repeated autumnal listening. Check it, and their entire back catalogue, out if you haven’t already.

I also enjoyed, yesterday, reading this old education special of Cubesville fanzine which I noticed he was selling. Lots of cool interviews with punk academics and stuff about the academic study of punk. It made me yearn for more speed with the Anarchism and Punk Book project I’m part of. I can’t wait to see my chapter out and read all the rest, but book one is still yet to be released and my bit’s not coming out until book two! Fingers crossed there’ll be some movement soon…

So yeah, another busy and over-thought week in my life away from work. There will be no new Sabbatical next Friday because, like I said, I’m taking the week off, but for the handful of you out there actually reading this thing (remember: I have access to analytics, so know the numbers) thanks, and I’ll be back November 4th with more navel-gazing nonsense.