Musings – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

An actual Nazi on campus?

It’s been on my mind to write about this for a while, but I was waiting for the right trigger in current events. This week, news has broken that a student at Leeds University has been suspended from her work at the student radio station and investigated by the Students’ Union for, allegedly, “not acting in a duty of care,” putting the “health and safety” of members at risk, not “upholding the values” of Leeds Student Radio and the Student Union, and “bringing the reputation of the University, the [Student Union, or Leeds Student Radio] into disrepute.”

I’d already had some online contact with Connie Shaw, as she seemed to me to be a very impressive young woman who has been treated quite outrageously by her university and I sent her a message to that effect; her situation has now been reported in the mainstream media, so many more people are aware of what has happened to her. Connie was interrogated by the Union about her “gender critical views” (which are protected in law) and it seems pretty clear that the apparent complaints about her “conduct” arise from the fact that she has launched a podcast on which she interviewed Graham Linehan, Andrew Gold and Charlie Bentley-Astor; these are all people who have had personal experiences and/or hold views that do not align with the prevailing narrative on a typical university campus these days, so Connie has found herself in a whole heap of trouble. Unfortunately for Leeds, Connie is not somebody to be pushed around or silenced and her predicament has now been highlighted in the national press.

I wish my recollections were clearer for the situation I wish to contrast this with, but when I was at university I really was not involved with Union politics. I made sure to vote for representatives, as I have always believed that voting is important. One of the things that has driven me absolutely wild over the many years that I have spent signed up to various Unions is that the average member rarely votes. The number of conversations I have had with people who bemoan the fact that their Union committee is dominated by political zealots at the same time as admitting that they don’t bother to vote makes me want to bash my head against the wall. I will point out until the end times that the reason why so many Unions are dominated by representatives with extreme or bizarre views is because people with extreme or bizarre views get off their butts and run for office, and people who support those views get off their butts and vote for them. The problem is rarely the extreme or bizarre views themselves (which are not held by the vast majority of Union members), it is the apathy of the majority which allows them to thrive. So, yes, I always voted. My only other involvement was I acted as a volunteer for the Nightline service, a telephone support line manned by students and modelled on the service run by the Samaritans. But that was it. I didn’t go to hustings and I wasn’t involved with the day-to-day drama of Union politics.

Despite my lack of involvement, even I managed to hear about the fact that we had a Nazi on campus in 1992. “Nazi” is an over-used word these days and Connie Shaw has joked about being called “a Nazi” by those who disagree with her. It is beyond doubt that, in the current climate, this ridiculous insult is regularly rolled out by people on the political left when they don’t like what somebody else is saying. But this was university in 1992: there were no websites, no chat rooms, no social media, no hashtags and no mobile phones. We used to leave a note on our doors to tell friends where to find us. These were different times in every sense: I recall hearing another student making an openly homophobic remark about one of our lecturers within earshot of dozens of students (and the lecturer himself), and I was the only one to call him out on it. Even when I did so, nobody else backed me up. And again, when I say “homophobic” I really mean it: “Better keep your backs to the wall, lads” was what he actually said as the poor man walked past. Yeah, I know. This was how the world was in those days and believe me when I say that very, very few people were willing to step in and say something. At 19 years old I was already one of them and I’m proud of that.

So, the concept of labelling anyone who failed to meet the exacting liberal standards of a certain kind of Guardian journalist “a Nazi” had very much not taken off in 1992. Quite the contrary. Yet rumours abounded that we had a genuine, bona fide Nazi on campus and he was causing trouble. I first became aware of the situation when I heard that this self-confessed Nazi had applied to speak publicly at a Union meeting and lots of people were very upset about it. From what I could gather, there was a lobby of students pushing that he should be disallowed: nobody wanted to hear what he had to say and why should we have to put up with his revolting opinions being platformed and aired in our own Union? I had a considerable amount of sympathy with this view and understood the strength of reaction that his application to speak had sparked. However, after much discussion, everyone accepted that under the rules of the Union – of which this student was a member – Nazi Boy had the right to speak. Lots of people were very unhappy about it, but those were the rules.

On the day after the event, I spoke to one or two people who were present at the meeting when it happened. Apparently, the guy stood up and said his piece. Nobody shouted him down, because the decision had been made that under the rules he was allowed to speak. However, by the same token, nobody was interested in listening. His speech was not good: it was not articulate, it was not rational and it was, of course, offensive. After he sat down, nobody applauded. The meeting moved on. That was the sum total of his impact: zero. Following what turned out to be quite the non-event, the student in question did not last the year on campus: he left after a few months, and was quickly forgotten.

I am agog as to how quickly we have shifted from a committee of students in 1992, who reasoned that the right to free speech must prevail above all else – even if that meant sitting on their hands and grinding their teeth while the worst of all views were shared publicly – to so many of them believing that nobody has the right to say anything that might challenge a prevailing social narrative in 2024. Here’s the thing, kiddos – when you let people speak, they reveal the truth about themselves and their views. If those views are insane, offensive or irrelevant, perhaps it is all to the good that they are exposed for what they are. If I’m honest, I’m still not sure whether it truly was the right decision to allow a Nazi to speak in the Union, but I believe that the scenario is worth recalling and I applaud the Union committee of 1992 who believed that the agreed democratic process was what mattered most, despite the pressure that they were under to ban the guy from speaking.

We have moved from a situation in which the youngest of people were capable of grasping the dangers of curbing free speech in even the most challenging of circumstances, to one in which students refuse to even entertain a narrative which may jar with their own. Quite how these young people navigate their way through the world I struggle to understand. What a terrifying and dangerous place it must seem, when you cannot cope even with hearing some politely-spoken words you disagree with. It seems to be a frequent occurrence in many universities now, with students either refusing to platform certain speakers or protesting their very presence when they do appear. I defend anyone’s right to protest, but it seems to me that this important right is now exploited by people who simply do not wish to allow others to speak freely. Ask any student who protested the appearance of Kathleen Stock at the Oxford Union what their purpose was and I am quite sure that they will happily tell you that they wanted to drown her out, as they believed that her views were hateful.

Perhaps some students are terrified of any alternative narrative because deep down they are actually afraid that they might be persuaded by it. What if I start to believe what the other side has to say? Yet surely it says very little for the strength of anyone’s convictions if they are genuinely terrified of a conversation. I guess if you lack all moral fibre and courage then it’s easier to scream until you can no longer hear the other speaker. In that way, you also get to drown out the niggling voice inside your head: the voice that says maybe – just maybe – you’re the bad guy.

Call that a PhD?

You could be forgiven for thinking that Gregg Wallace’s video was the most explosive thing to happen on social media this week, but you would be wrong.

Picture the scene: a young, female academic at Cambridge shares a happy picture of herself, smiling and clutching her freshly-acknowledged PhD thesis in English literature. Ally Louks, now Dr Ally Louks, probably thought that her message of celebration that she was “PhDone” would be liked by a few and ignored by the majority. Yet her post at the time of writing has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people and Ally has received torrents of abuse, some of which beggars belief. The whole storm has sparked outraged discussion on all sides – most of it thoroughly ignorant – about what a PhD is or should be.

Here’s the thing, for those of you that haven’t been there. A PhD is like going potholing: you wriggle down into some difficult spaces and explore the subterrain. Nobody will ever know those particular underground passages better than you, because nobody else is ever likely to go there or, indeed, even want to go there. The reason you’re awarded the PhD is because you have traversed new terrain and – in the judgement of the potholing community – you are the first to do so, or you have uncovered a sufficient number of nooks and crannies that previous potholers did not comment upon. Most of the time, you don’t find an underground palace, a glistening river of stalactites or a dazzling crystal chamber: you simply wriggle your way back up to the surface and get on with your life. Your thesis will sit on the shelf of whichever institution recognised it and – if you’re lucky – it will be consulted by a tiny handful of niche-hole specialists over the next few decades, the number of which you could count on one hand.

Personally, I blame Stephen Hawking. During his doctorate, he hit upon a leap of understanding so brilliant that it changed the direction of theoretical physics forever. Most of us don’t manage that. This does not mean that our PhDs are not worthy of the title: it simply means that most of us are – demonstrably – not a genius like Hawking. There is a reason why Hawking has been laid to rest between Newton and Dawin: he is right up there with those two when it comes to the significance of his contribution to his field. Yet many people seem to assume that Hawking is an example of what is expected of a PhD candidate – a particularly famous example, perhaps, but an example nonetheless. In reality, most research is utterly banal and unimportant: it’s not going to shake up our understanding of the fabric of the universe.

Louks’ PhD sounds – to me – rather fun. Okay, I’m one of those wish-washy artsy types that got a PhD in Classics, not theoretical physics, but I reckon her thesis “Olfactory ethics: the politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose” sounds like a more stimulating read than a huge number of PhDs that have passed under my nose over the years (pun intended). In response to the unexpected interest in her work, Louks shared her abstract, which only further made my nostrils twitch. Her thesis explores “how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse – the language of smell and the olfactory imagination it creates – in structuring our social world.” Her work looks at various authors and explores how smell is used in description to delineate class, social status and other social strata. I mean … fine? No? Quite why a certain type of Science Lad on the internet decided that this was a completely unacceptable thesis baffles me. Apparently, there is a certain type of aggressively practical chap, who believes that exploring how things are represented in literature and how that literature has in turn helped to shape our world is utterly unworthy. Well, more fool them. They should read some literature. I suggest they start with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, a modern classic that is quite literally a novel about smell.

I’ll confess that the whole thing has left me feeling quite jumpy about my own thesis, which in 1999 was welcomed as an acceptable contribution to my very narrow, very obscure corner of the underground caves. Once I had seen the reaction to Louks’ abstract I decided to re-read my own. Having done so, I concluded not only that it would sound utterly barking to the rest of the world, it sounded utterly barking to me! This was a field in which I was immersed at the time but have read nothing about since I walked out of the room in which my viva took place.

The viva itself is something that most people do not really understand and is difficult to explain. It is not an examination. Short for viva voce, which is Latin for “with the living voice”, the viva is there in principle for the PhD candidate to demonstrate that they are the author of their own work. In practice, it is also an opportunity for the examiners to quiz the candidate and explore their hypothesis further. The examiners may have questions and it is common for them to advise corrections and amendments; often, the examiners make the passing of the thesis conditional on these amendments. Best case scenario (and one enjoyed by Ally Louks), the examiners pass your thesis with nothing more than a few pencil annotations, none of which require attention for the thesis to be accepted. Worst case scenario, they say that your thesis is a load of old hooey and that you should not – under any circumstances – re-submit it, corrected or otherwise.

While the worst-case scenario is rare and indicates a profound failure on the part of the candidate’s supervisor, who never should have allowed the submission, it does happen on rare occasions. The last time I saw one of my old lecturers from my university days, he reported being fresh from a viva on which he had acted as an external examiner and had failed the thesis. This happens so rarely that I was agog. Having been so long out of the world of academia, it is impossible for me to express in simple terms the intellectual complexities that he explained were the reasons behind his decision, so I shall have to quote him directly: apologies if the language is too academic for you to follow. “Basically, it was b*****ks,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was kind of brilliant b*****ks: but it was b*****ks nevertheless.” That poor candidate. I ached for him. I also found myself recalling the gut-wrenching moment during which Naomi Wolf’s PhD thesis was exposed as fundamentally flawed by Matthew Sweet, live on Radio 3. If you’ve never listened to the relevant part of the interview, I highly recommend it: it is – especially for those of us who have submitted a thesis for judgement in the past – the most toe-curling listen imaginable. Wolf’s entire thesis appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of a legal term, which Sweet discovered simply by looking it up on The Old Bailey’s website. Wolf’s thesis had been passed at Trinity College, Cambridge, an institution that would be hard to beat in terms of intellectual clout and reputation, so quite how this happened is mind-boggling and shameful.

The reaction to Souks’ thesis does, I suspect, have a great deal to do with the increasing suspicion with which academia is viewed, and in many ways I am not unsympathetic to people’s disquiet. There is, without question, a good deal of nonsense (or b*****ks, to use the technical term) talked in a lot of fields, particularly in the arts and social sciences. Yet the vitriol with which Souks was criticised has nothing to do with this. Her abstract, to anyone with even a grudging respect for the field of English literature, makes intellectual sense. No, the roasting of Souks and her work betrays a profound and depressing ignorance as well as a nasty dose of good old-fashioned cruelty. Before people decide that an entire field of study is unworthy of merit, they should maybe ask themselves whether there is even the tiniest possibility that they perhaps don’t know enough about it before they pounce. One can but hope that these people who value their rationality so much will next time run a more scientific test, rather than dunking the witch to see whether she floats.

How did we do?

The modern world is increasingly baffling. If I feel like this at the age of 50, what’s it going to be like in another 30 years’ time, assuming I am granted the good fortune to make it into my twilight years?

Yesterday, I visited eBay, browsing for an item I was (unbelievably) struggling to find on Amazon. I did a couple of searches for the item on their site, before getting bored and closing it down. Within hours, I received an email from the computerised bots managed by the team at eBay headquarters. They were keen, they said, to learn about my experience.

When did the most banal of activities become an experience? It is a remarkably recent phenomenon, but one we have apparently come to accept. I am asked to rate my experience of everything from browsing a website to attending an appointment at the hairdressers, at the optician, at the gym, at the dentist. The dentist! Do they really want my honest opinion regarding lying flat on my back while a man fires a high-frequency jet of freezing water against my gums, then offers me patronising, unsolicited advice about how to brush my own teeth, followed by a bill for over £100?

On some level, I get it. Of course. I am self-employed and there are times when I have to ask clients to throw me a bone by leaving me a review somewhere that can be verified. This all helps me to get seen in a noisy, overcrowded online world, and I would struggle to source clients without a little of that kind of support. Some people are kind enough to offer, without being asked. But I hope to God that I have never asked a client to “rate their experience”, nor pestered them with multiple messages when they promised to leave a review and then never got around to it. Most people don’t realise how much small businesses rely on this kind of thing, and I understand completely that it is not top of anyone’s list of priorities to be rating me on Google. I am enormously grateful for the people who do so and think no less of the majority who don’t.

When I was first setting up my business, watching the last few arrivals from the regular salary I had taken for granted for over 20 years, I read and listened to a good deal of business advice. Much of it involved the use of social media, which I dabbled in before realising what a right royal waste of time it was, plus email marketing, which I am glad to say I resisted with pride from the very beginning. Nobody – least of all me – wants their inbox jammed full of self-congratulatory “news” from someone they employ, nor do they want constant exhortations to “let us know how we did”. The ruthlessness with which I police the contents of my own inbox and indeed my phone have become somewhat legendary, indeed I recently had to rather shamefacedly get myself back onto a list of an organisation I belong to, who had taken on board the fact that I had unsubscribed from all email communications and taken myself out of their WhatsApp group. I don’t mean to be unfriendly; I simply don’t want the bombardment of standardised self-promotion which inevitably follows. I habitually set up filters for anything unsolicited that arrives to be deleted automatically – it doesn’t even go to my spam folder, which I have to monitor as sometimes a new approach from a fresh contact will end up in there. Nope, with the filters as I have them, it goes straight in the bin.

The irony is, because I am self-employed and I understand how important ratings and reviews can be for small businesses, I am really diligent about doing them. If a local professional of any stripe does a good job for me, I make sure to ask them where they would like me to leave a review and I make sure that I do it: Google, Check-a-Trade, whatever they wish. If they’re really good, I will also send their details directly to any local friends who might benefit from their services. It’s one of the really nice things about living in a community that one can share this kind of thing and help local businesses to benefit from word of mouth. Everybody wins that way: the business is rewarded for doing a good job, the people in the community benefit from reliable and trustworthy service-providers. What’s not to like? But in the hands of big businesses (and – it has to be said – some overly enthusiastic small ones), this simple, organic and entirely benevolent system has somehow morphed into a leviathan, a behemoth with which to hassle their customers with remarkable tenacity. Well, I’m not having it. I shall continue to police my inbox with more rigour than has ever been managed by US border control.

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Vox populi

The Roman intelligentsia never really understood the rise of the demagogues. Those who saw it coming were those who viewed Rome as in decline, at the mercy of mob rule; they never understood the needs and legitimate frustrations of the ordinary people, who counted for little as far as they were concerned. Those caught by surprise had only a hazy grasp of their own handle on power.

The authority of the Senate was based on custom and consent rather than upon the rule of law: it gave advice, but could not enforce its rulings. The Senate thus had no legal control over the people or their magistrates. This uneasy rule by consent lasted for a while, but complacency and arrogance ultimately led to the Senate’s authority being dismantled in all but name.

The Optimates were the dominant group in the Senate, those with families dating back to the mythical good old days and the easy confidence that aristocracy brings. They consistently blocked the wishes of others, who were thus forced to seek support for their measures via the tribunes, who led the tribal assembly. These men were called the Populares or “demagogues,” by their opponents. The Optimates tried to uphold the oligarchy and thus maintain their aristocratic stranglehold on power; the demagogues sought popular support against the dominant aristocracy, sometimes in the interests of the people but also to further their own personal ambitions. To be clear, both groups of men were eye-wateringly wealthy: this was in no way a rise of the working man. The demagogues achieved some success via purely political means, but ultimately the generals who commanded military forces in the provinces (also fabulously wealthy) began to realise that there was an opportunity here. The Roman elite found out the hard way that those who win the hearts and minds of the military are the ones who hold power. And it was still all about money – you didn’t make it in this battle for power without it.

It is difficult and not to say puzzling to watch the existential crisis being experienced by Democrats and their supporters across the Atlantic. Rarely has a nation been so divided and so unable to listen, although I am experiencing uncomfortable flashbacks to our own country during the fallout after the Brexit vote. I cycle through news channels on an endless loop and find person after person talking, talking, talking. Talking to each other, talking at each other, talking over each other. Nobody’s listening. Although a passionate supporter of people’s right to protest, I am beginning to lose my faith in even this simple kind of expression, for in today’s world it seems always to descend into people screaming at each other, nose to nose across the barricades. But you can scream as hard as you like. It doesn’t matter if nobody’s listening.

I do not claim to know why the American people voted as they did. I have my own pet theories, but these are shaped and coloured by my own peculiar interests and passions, and therefore too biased to be of relevance. I can only say what I see, and what I see is a population that feels betrayed by politics. I see people who are sick of being told what to think or – even worse – being told that they don’t think, that they are incapable of it. That their small-town lives don’t matter, that their values are old-fashioned and need to be consigned to history, that they need to get with the programme, wise up, wake up, listen up, sit up and shut up.

The trouble with democracy is you ask people what they want and they tell you. It may not be the result you were hoping for. Winston Churchill no doubt thought when he saw his country through the second world war that the next election was in the bag. In fact, he and his party were voted out of office. To quote the man himself: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Cicero denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, Palazzo Madama in Rome

Roman spooktacles

As the leaves turn and the nights draw in, many cultures prepare to celebrate festivals that explore the boundaries between the living and the dead. Halloween is a festival steeped in history and rich in symbolism and so this year I am trying to be less grumpy about it. I’ve never liked Halloween and tend to lock myself away in doors, but I have decided to embrace the spirits and attempt to understand why so many people feel drawn to this festival.

To appreciate Halloween’s origins, we must travel back to its Celtic origins and also to ancient Rome, where festivals of the dead held significant cultural and spiritual importance. Modern Halloween is heavily influenced by Celtic traditions, particularly the festival of Samhain. The Celts celebrated Samhain at the end of October — marking the transition from harvest to winter — and believed that the boundary between the living and the dead was at its most attenuated during this time. Roman practices undoubtedly shaped the evolution of this festival into what we now call Halloween. As the Romans expanded their empire, they encountered various cultures and incorporated aspects of their beliefs and practices. This cultural blending likely contributed to the transformation of Halloween from a purely Celtic observance into a more widespread celebration that includes various elements from different traditions. Many see Halloween as an American export and in multiple ways it is; but we can thank/blame the Romans for most things, so I don’t see why Halloween should be any different.

One of the most important Roman festivals dedicated to the dead was Feralia, which in itself was part of larger nine-day observance called Parentalia, dedicated entirely to ancestors. During Feralia, families would visit the graves of their loved ones, bringing offerings such as food, wine, and flowers. It was a time to reflect on the lives of those who had passed, and rituals often included prayers and sacrifices. Many modern Halloween traditions across Europe involve remembering loved ones who have died; altars, decorations, and memorials are common in many parts of the world during Halloween, reflecting the human desire to honour those who came before us. A ritualistic response to death is one of the things that defines us as a species and tentative evidence of burial or funerary caching goes back to the Stone Age; it seems clear that our earliest ancestors began interring their dead, sometimes with personal effects. Some anthropologists argue that such relics are evidence for a belief in some kind of afterlife, in which it was assumed that the deceased individual would require the tools of his trade; others are more cautious, and argue that grave goods are simply evidence of individualisation and respect – religious or not, we like to bury a person’s things with them, as symbolic markers of who they were and the impact that they had on the world.

Another notable Roman festival of the dead was Lemuria. This festival is perhaps closer to that of Halloween, for it focused on the appeasing of restless spirits, particularly those of deceased family members who had not received proper burial rites. The father of the household would perform a series of rituals, including throwing black beans over his shoulder and chanting incantations to exorcise the spirits. The beans symbolized the offerings made to the dead, while the rituals aimed to ensure peace for both the living and the dead. Echoes of our festival of Halloween are obvious in the theme of dealing with spirits. Many Halloween customs, such as carving pumpkins to ward off evil spirits and dressing in frightening costumes, are deeply rooted in the idea of confronting and appeasing supernatural entities. The shared emphasis on rituals and offerings reflects a universal human desire to connect and to address fears of the unknown.

The Roman festivals of the dead offer us an insight into how ancient cultures grappled with the concept of mortality. In an ever-changing world, the rituals surrounding death and remembrance remain vital to many people. Whether through offering food to the spirits, lighting candles, or sharing stories about loved ones, we find ways of engaging with those we have lost. Halloween serves as a reminder of our connection to those who came before us, a celebration of life, death, and the enduring bond between the living and the dead.

The modern festival of Halloween is rather characterized by a mix of fun and irreverence and most of my students absolutely love it. Trick-or-treating, ghoulish fancy dress and haunted houses dominate the festivities and many of these traditions do hail from our friends across the Atlantic. Many people argue that the act of dressing up in costumes can be seen as a way to confront the idea of death and the unknown, much like the Romans did during Lemuria; all of that said, I’m not sure how many of my students see it as anything other than a jolly good excuse to eat vast quantities of sweets and – bonus prize – scare the absolute willies out of the grown-ups.

I’ll bring the ideas

This week, I had an appointment with a man who mainly works with people who have sports injuries. This might seem totally mad, since I do not partake in any sports and – to all intents and purposes – I am not injured. So, what on earth am I up to?

More than one local friend had spoken highly of Greg and I was intrigued to see whether he could help me. As someone who lives with chronic scoliosis I have seen various osteopaths over the years, but that has reached something of a plateau in terms of how helpful I am finding the sessions. Furthermore, I suddenly realised that I was becoming somewhat frustrated by the gloomy outlook taken by the osteopath who was treating me. He was well aware of the fact that – despite my lifelong recalcitrance with regards to all things exercise-related – I now attend a local gym and have successfully improved my overall fitness, particularly my muscle strength. My range of movement, however, has proved to be a more stubborn nut to crack. When I asked him for suggestions as to what I could be doing that would help with my restricted mobility, he shrugged and stated that there was nothing that would help in that department.

Now, it is true that I have an untreatable and irreversible spinal condition which is not going to disappear. Nothing will fix the curvature of my spine, nor unfuse the bits which are resolutely fused together. I will never attain perfect posture nor the mobility of someone with a normal spine. And yet … I remember a time when I wasn’t in pain or discomfort. I remember a time when my mobility was dramatically better than it is now. So, despite the reality of a chronic condition, I simply refuse to accept that the way things are at the moment – which, to be honest, is pretty awful – remains the harbinger of my future. I refuse to believe that this is as good as it gets and that it’s downhill from this point on.

So, in a fit of self-investment, I’m trying a new approach with this recommended local physical therapist. I explained my situation to him and gave him plenty of room to turn me down, stating that I would understand if he felt that I was not a suitable client for his expertise. To my delight, he was really keen to help, so we met within a couple of days. His assessed me as I was, whilst asking me a considerable number of questions about what I currently do in terms of exercise as well as what my goals are – something nobody has ever asked me before: not the numerous consultants I saw as a child, not the (mainly useless) physiotherapists provided by the NHS, not the several private osteopaths I have seen over the years. To be fair, Greg was probably pretty relieved to be told that I am not planning to enter any iron-man endurance races or aim at the next Olympics, but he seemed to share my determination and my enthusiasm for the idea that things could be greatly improved from the state of near-seizure that I am currently in. He wrestled and pulled me about for a bit in the manner that these specialists like to do, then carefully taught me some new suggestions for exercise, bespoke movements which he felt would benefit me and work against my most troublesome symptoms. This is exactly what I was looking for and I am already beginning to notice a difference.

While very much a realist, I cling to the idea that most of us can make improvements to our own health and wellbeing; I believe that pain can be reduced with the right kind of management, one that doesn’t involve taking more pills or drinking more alcohol. I am determined to find ways to ameliorate my situation whilst I am still young enough and fit enough to find the energy to do so, to instill good habits in myself that will benefit me as I age. Unless I do so, I fear that the prospect of ageing is pretty bleak.

It is often said (a quotation usually misattributed to Einstein) that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If I want to experience change, then I need to make those changes happen; kick-starting that process means investing in someone who agrees with me that change is both desirable and possible. At the end of my first session, I felt the way that many of my clients report feeling when they have met with me for the first time: that feeling when you’ve found the right kind of person with not only the experience but the confidence and the belief that they can potentially help you. It’s the kind of conviction that years of experience brings, as well as a genuine passion for what you do. Greg’s energy for and interest in what he does shone through from the moment I contacted him, and I realised with a jolt that he had communicated this to me before we even met, in just a few simple words. He wrote: “I’ll bring the ideas”.

As soon as I read that message, I knew that I had potentially found the right kind of person to help me. I’d been experimenting with difference types of exercises and had become deeply frustrated by my lack of progress. I was all out of ideas and so was my osteopath. As for the physiotherapists I have tried in the past, the last one genuinely shrugged and said, “you seem to be managing okay.” Sure, I’m managing okay … I mean, I’m standing upright. But is that honestly as good as it gets? Is there no hope for improved mobility, reduced discomfort and better prospects for old age? For me, “managing okay” is no longer acceptable and I’ve decided to believe that things can be better. It feels great to have found someone who agrees.

Fulfilling your destiny

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

Currently, I am obsessively plugged in to an audiobook, the latest release from my favourite author, Liane Moriarty. Moriarty writes what is often scathingly referred to as “chick lit”: a genre which at its worst can be undeniably vacuous, but no more so than the two-dimensional thrillers churned out by authors marketed to men. The withering contempt with which “chick lit” is viewed says a lot more about how society treats the everyday lives and concerns of women than it does about this particular genre of popular fiction.

It is undeniable although perhaps a little depressing that Moriarty is an author unlikely to be read by vast quantities of male readers. Her stories revolve around people – mainly suburban women – and the thoughts inside their heads. Often there is an unfolding plot, but the focus is on the development of character and relationships rather than on action or suspense. Moriarty is an absolute master of the genre and writes with an effortless charm that belies her talent; the best authors make it look easy when it isn’t. It’s a great shame that more men aren’t interested in some of the things which interest women, and a truth that I have pondered the reasons for on and off. I speak as someone who has read quite broadly and have flirted with books categorised in modern times as “lad lit”: I am a huge fan of Martin Amis and if you haven’t read David Baddiel’s forays into novel writing in this genre then you should – they are annoyingly good. So if I, as a woman, can enjoy books written from a male perspective and read by men, I find it somewhat irksome that so few men have the desire to show any kind of interest in the fiction favoured by women. Anyway, I digress.

Much as many of Moriarty’s books (perhaps most famously Big Little Lies) focus on the lives of suburban women, some of them are intricately plotted and follow the lives of a complex set of characters, all of which cross paths in various ways and with a myriad of consequences. Because of this, I was greatly surprised when I heard the author interviewed and she revealed that she writes without a plan. Prior to her most recent release, the last novel she wrote called Apples Never Fall followed the tensions and anguish within a family from whom the matriarch has disappeared: most of the novel we spend wondering what has happened to this character (including whether she has merely walked out of her life or has been horribly murdered by someone within it), and Moriarty reports that she too spent much of her writing time wondering the same thing. She had not, by her own account, decided what had actually happened to this key character when she began to write the book. She started with the idea of the disappearance and discovered the truth behind it along with her characters. It is perhaps this very unconventional approach to plotting that enables her to write with such authenticity – she’s not dropping hints or trying to plant red herrings in relation to the real outcome, for she has no idea what that outcome will eventually be.

I am around one third of the way through Moriarty’s latest and am gripped as ever by her writing. Here One Moment is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet as it circles around the idea of free will and destiny. In summary, the scenario is that a group of people on a flight from Hobart to Sydney are each pointed at by a woman on board the flight and told the supposed time and manner of their death. Some passengers are given what amounts to welcome news by most people’s standards (heart failure, age 95), others – inevitably – are told that they will die very young. Some are even told that their death will be as a result of violence or self-harm. The rest of the novel is about the fall-out from this thoroughly alarming and unscheduled in-flight entertainment.

One of the ideas explored in the novel is the impact that such an experience might potentially have, not only on the feelings of those receiving the predictions but on their actions too. One of the passengers pays a visit to another “psychic” after the flight, and this “psychic” points out to him that he will not be the same person after the reading as he was before it. He points out that whatever he says to his client will make him act differently and that this will then potentially have an impact on the outcome of his life. Moriarty refers constantly to the idea of chaos theory throughout her writing – the idea that one small event in nature has a ripple effect that causes huge impact in other areas. At the point in the novel where I am right now, a mother who has been told that her baby son will die by drowning while still a child has elected to take him to swimming lessons. He takes to the lessons like the proverbial duck to water and it becomes clear that he is going to become a huge lover of swimming. As readers, we now sit with our hearts in our mouths and await the inevitable: will the mother’s decision to take her child to swimming lessons, sparked solely by the psychic’s so-called prediction, end up leading to the death of her child in the future?

The same thought experiment was run by a Greek playwright called Sophocles almost 3000 years ago. He wrote what I would argue is perhaps the most influential work of literature ever published, in the form of the tragedy called Oedipus Rex. Most people know the name “Oedipus” only as a result of Freud’s early 20th century ramblings about motherhood and sexual repression; very few people have any idea what a frankly brilliant and chilling story that of Oedipus was when it was written. It is emphatically not a story about motherhood, nor is it a story about sexual repression; to be honest I don’t think I can ever forgive Freud for making it so. Oedipus Rex is a story about destiny, about free will and about the extent to which we have control over either of those things. If you don’t know the story, it can be summarised as follows …

In ancient Greece, a king and queen are horrified to be told by an oracle that their baby son will grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Terrified by this ghastly prediction, they send the baby away to be exposed on the hillside and die. The kindly old shepherd gifted with the unhappy task cannot quite bring himself to do the dreadful deed, so he ends up passing the baby to another ruler and his wife in a far-distant land who are childless, and they bring the baby up as their own. The baby is named Oedipus. He has no idea that he is adopted.

When Oedipus grows up, like all curious young men, he too consults the oracle and asks his destiny. The oracle tells him that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he does the only sensible thing: he removes himself from his family home and goes off on his travels, thus removing any possible risk of somehow murdering his father and marrying his mother. Oedipus believes that he has taken control: he is the master of his own destiny and he has cheated the oracle. Trouble is, remember … he doesn’t know he is adopted.

Several months into his lonely travels, Oedipus gets into an altercation on the road with an arrogant older man who tries to tell him what’s what. Long story short, Oedipus does the only thing any decent red-blooded young male would do, he kills the old fool. Afterwards, he continues on his travels and eventually comes to a kingdom which is in a bit of trouble because it’s being harassed by a nasty monster. Clever Oedipus defeats the monster by solving its riddle and – would you know it – it turns out that the king of this particular dominion has recently died and they’re in need of a chap to take over. What a stroke of luck! Oedipus marries the widowed queen – who is granted a little older than him but still young enough to bear children – and becomes King of Thebes. The rest, as they say, is a truly horrible history.

The whole point of Oedipus’ story is exactly the thought experiment that Moriarty is playing out in her novel. To what extent does a sense of destiny itself predetermine our actions? To what extent do people inevitably fulfil the path that they are told lies in front of them? It is easy to point out that if the oracle had not said what it said – on either occasion – the story of Oedipus would not have unfolded as it did. In the ancient world, the story was taken as a morality tale about man’s arrogance: humans are convinced that they can outwit the gods and cheat their destiny, and that arrogance begins and ends with asking the question. If nobody had asked, would nothing have happened? Does the asking trigger the event?

It is easy to assume that these big philosophical questions don’t affect our lives on a day-to-day basis, but in fact this loop of thought is inescapable and resonates in daily life. During my career, a trend came and (thankfully) went of sharing what were laughably called “predicted grades” with students. These grades were not teacher predictions (although teachers are indeed asked to make such psychic predictions and that nightmare continues) but based on a crushing weight of data that looks at “people like Student A” and attempts to make a mathematical prediction about how “a person like Student A” is most likely to perform in an exam. All sorts of data get included in the mix, from prior academic performance to socio-economic background. The happy news that a bunch of data analysis that hardly anybody fully understands “predicts” that Student A is likely to get a Grade 3 or below was – until alarmingly recently – shared with Student A. What an absolute travesty. I will never forgive the system for sitting a child down and telling them that the computer says they’re likely to fail. Likewise, I have seen children who are “predicted” a line of top grades spiral out of control under the pressure. For heaven’s sake stop telling kids what “the data” (our new name for the divine oracle) says about their destiny. It’s a seriously grotesque thing to do.

For similar reasons, I know parents who are understandably jumpy about their children being labelled as anything. Who doesn’t remember well into middle age having “he’s shy” or “she’s anxious” being said over their head, while they were going through an entirely normal phase of being wary of strangers? Before you know it, the label of “shy” or “anxious” or whatever the grown-ups have decided befits you becomes you. I am absolutely in support of my friends who will not have their children referred to in this way: if history teaches us anything, it’s that people tend to fulfil their destiny. So be careful what path you pave.

In Praise of Idleness

When I was around 13, my grandfather advised me to read an essay by Bertrand Russell called In Praise of Idleness. I don’t recall what his point was at the time, but it was probably a side-swipe at what he rightly saw as my privileged middle-class upbringing compared to his own. Well, better late than never, so almost 40 years later and 30 years after his death, I have taken my grandfather’s advice and read the essay.

Since giving up my full-time career at the chalkface, I have been plagued by more or less the same question from everyone. “What are you going to do with yourself?” asked my mother. “What have you been up to?” asks my sister, almost every time we speak. “Doing anything today?” asks my hairdresser every six weeks. “What are you doing for the rest of the day?” asked the fellow tutor I met for a Zoom coffee yesterday. Now I am not working in a job that is universally acknowledged to be all-consuming, people have suddenly become fascinated by what I must be doing with my time. The pressure is on to come up with something life-affirming that I can cite as evidence for the validity of my existence on earth. Usually, I come up blank.

Partly, I think, it’s because I struggle with this kind of small talk. While I literally cannot bear to outline to someone else the uninteresting activities that will, inevitably, form part of my day, most people seem only too happy to share the most mundane aspects of their lives under the apparent the assumption that everyone else is fascinated by them. In the modern world, this is evidenced by the quite remarkable plethora of social media posts in which people inform everyone else of every single unremarkable act they perform. Doing was always the point … if you recall, when Facebook first came up with the idea that people should post updates on their own lives, the status bar read “Emma Williams is …” and you had to fill in the rest. There was a huge campaign to remove “the mandatory is” and Facebook listened. The rest is history, if you can bear to read it. I can’t.

You see, I simply cannot be bothered to say, “well, today I’ll go to the gym, then I’ll come back and write my weekly blog post, then I might do 5 minutes of mad dancing because that’s what I do for my regular dose of HIIT to get my heart rate up, then I’ll make coffee and I might treat myself to an episode of The Mentalist on Amazon Prime as I’m really into that, then I’ll finish my work on the last OCR set text, which I need to translate and put onto Quizlet for my students, then after lunch I’ll make sure my evening’s lessons are prepared. Oh, and there’s a load of washing to do, Sainsbury’s are coming with our groceries and David wants me to put the lawn sprinklers on and I might also go to Morrisons at some point. Are you bored yet? I mean … who gives a rat’s ar*e? And that’s all before I actually start tutoring in the evening, when I will do the work I am paid to do. See, I am perfectly happy with my day today, indeed I am really quite looking forward to it: that does not mean it’s interesting to anybody else.

Russell would argue, I think, that I have not had sufficient education in order to make the most of my abundant leisure time. According to his essay, an education is required for the wise use of leisure and without it then we are prone to time-wasting, examples of which include watching the football. Despite this, Russell is actually trying enormously hard not to be a snob, and I love the fact that the whole point of his essay was to challenge the assumption that “workers should work” and to float the idea that everyone, including the working classes, should be working significantly fewer hours: his model actually argues for everyone working four hours per day instead of eight. He attacks the futility of unfettered capitalism (although, by the by, he’s got some spectacularly naïve views on the equity of Russia’s economy) and takes a very pleasing swipe at the way in which the Christian work ethic has been used as a mechanism of control, to keep the workers in their place. He ruefully observes that “Athenian slave-owners … employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system”, although he later goes on to show some insight into the fact that not all of intelligentsia are deserving, remarking that – for every Darwin, “against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting.” Bravo, Bertrand.

All in all, I really enjoyed the essay and am drawn to read the next one in his collection entitled “useless knowledge”. I am still not sure what reason my grandfather had for recommending it to me, but it is rather nice that his recommendation has come in handy some 40 years later in order to help me express my current thoughts on my relatively free and easy life compared to the one I was leading a few years ago. One of the things that I have taken back with both hands is the opportunity to read, which I all but lost during my busiest times. Would I have found the time to read a philosophical essay when I had a full day’s teaching ahead of me? Like heck I would. Such time in itself is a luxury and one which I value enormously.