Musings – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Off my trolley

It seemed simple enough. It even seemed like a good idea. Something I had done before and not struggled with, an easy way to earn my Good Citizen badge for the day.

On my regular route to a local megastore, I pass a garage with a carwash. For some inexplicable reason, the footpath next to the carwash has become a dumping ground for supermarket trollies. Without fail, every time I make my way through this pass, there is an abandoned trolley, standing askew. I have puzzled as to why this particular place is where someone consistently no longer has need of the trolley that they apparently did need to take out of the supermarket carpark, but the logic escapes me. Still, given that I am able-bodied and on my way to the very megastore to which the abandoned trollies belong, I always take hold of the forsaken four-wheeler and push it back to its home.

On this particular occasion, in the hiatus between Christmas and New Year, I happened upon no less than four of them, nosing each other like abandoned dogs in the underpass. Can I manage four? I mused to myself. Of course I can, beamed my gym-going, over-confident self. Four trollies will be a breeze. Of course, I hadn’t factored in the treacherous nature of supermarket trolley-wheels combined with a sharp corner, heavy traffic and a steep slope: nevertheless, I eventually made it to the trolley park, breathless but triumphant. The park was completely empty of trollies. I kid you not, not one single person appeared to have returned their trolley to its rightful home on that day. In smiling possession of four, I was thus immediately set upon by multiple shoppers, all of them making a grab for one of the trollies I had brought. You’re welcome!

I grant you that it is all too easy to bemoan the state of modern Britain, but sometimes it’s the little things that get you down. I’m not sure if I can put a date upon when the shift occurred, but I’m sure that there were indeed halcyon days when people dutifully returned their trollies to the trolley park for the benefit of others. At the risk of sounding a little deranged, I’ve been pondering this for a week or more: when and why did people stop thinking that they had to return their trolley? After much musing, I think I’ve hit upon the source of the problem. It isn’t a symptom of poor parenting, it isn’t the state of our schools and it isn’t that people have somehow become inherently worse than they used to be. The issue, I believe, is that very few of us do our shopping in anything that even remotely resembles a community any more.

When my parents speak of their youth (a timespan ranging from the mid 1930s to the post-war period), both of them talk about local shops and local tradespeople. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, for better or for worse, and local businesses were at the very heart of the community. Shops and services were run by people you knew and that meant that those shops and services were places that expected and demanded respect and acknowledgement. Shop-owners were not a faceless corporation, they were members of the inner circle. If some local scallywag caused trouble for a local shopkeeper, there would be consequences and those consequences would have an impact on family and friends.

In such a community, it was shameful to be caught doing something thoughtless, because reports of such behaviour would be shared with other members of the neighbourhood. Both my parents recall being known to all the adults in their area and they can acknowledge both the privileges and the responsibilities that came with that fact. The privileges included feeling safe and looked after in their community, the sense that they could knock on anyone’s door at any time and ask for help; the responsibilities included knowing that any misdemeanours would get straight back to their parents! It suddenly occurred to me that very few of us feel either looked after or indeed feel judged and monitored in this way any more.

Very few of us feel vulnerable to any sense of shame about our routine behaviours, because we move through the world so anonymously, or at least we feel as if we do. Small acts of selfishness such as dumping our trolley at the side of the street will rarely if ever receive any kind of direct challenge or lasting consequence. As a result, people have gradually and unconsciously learned that they can get away with such thoughtless behaviour without an impact on their own lives. I honestly don’t believe that we are any less innately thoughtful than we used to be — it doesn’t make sense for such a seismic change in human nature to have happened so quickly; rather, it is the case that we operate in a world that does not expect us to be thoughtful and in which there are no consequences for our thoughtless behaviour.

There is so much to regret with the loss of local shopping: when I think of all the hand-wringing that is done about the state of the environment, so much of that could be solved or at least mitigated against if we simply went back to local stores. Out-of-town supermarkets started to become the norm somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s and I would argue that this caused a shift in people’s attitude towards buying produce. At one stroke, we started to feel like we were giving our money to big corporations, nameless and faceless profiteers that we all began to resent whilst at the same time demanding more and more of their wares. Within the next two generations came the internet and online delivery, meaning we didn’t even have to leave our homes to give our money to invisible people. As a result of all of this, retail as a concept has taken on an identity of its own and is completely detached from humanity.

When we do leave our houses to circulate around the premises that such corporations set up for their customers, the distate on all sides is palpable. Despite what the advertisements would have us believe, it is obvious that customers feel no liking nor obligation towards such corporations and likewise the companies themselves display barely-concealed disdain towards their customers. Buying and selling now operates in an open atmosphere of mutual contempt. If you think I’m exaggerating, then perhaps you’ve never shopped in a large megastore in one of the poorest parts of the country. To quote the words of Jarvis Cocker in his 1995 classic, Common People, “I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.” Nobody smiles and nobody talks to each other. Everyone beats a path to the automated check-outs so they don’t have to interact with a human being before they leave the store. Virtually everything is tagged because theft is so rife, another consequence of people feeling so detached from their store-merchants: research indicates that most people now believe shoplifting to be a victimless crime.

But before we get too depressed, let’s all resolve to do better. While we might indeed be forking out our money to a giant company we don’t care for, in itself owned by one of the handful of global corporations that appear to own and control the entire universe, let us not forget that within those conglomerates there are hundreds and thousands of individual people like us, people who work and shop on their premises. Let us not lose sight of our individual humanity, which I believe we still possess in bucketloads: it is simply that we are operating in a world that makes us feel isolated and unmoored, disconnected from the sometimes bewildering number of other humans that move around us. As the population increases, there is a painful irony in the fact that we all seem to feel more and more alone inside it. But as just a tiny drop in what could be a potential antidote, how about this for a New Year’s resolution? Next time you see an abandoned trolley and you’re heading towards its homeland, why not pick it up and take it with you? You might be surprised how good it makes you feel.

New Year celebrations: a Roman legacy

While people around the world have been engaging in the tradition of celebrating the New Year, have you ever wondered where this custom originated from? To uncover the roots of New Year celebrations, we must (of course!) journey back to ancient Rome, where the calendar and many of the traditions we take for granted today began to take shape.

The Roman calendar initially had little resemblance to the one we use today. In its earliest form, the Roman calendar was a 10-month system that began in March, a month named after Mars, the god of war. The year ended in December, with a winter period left unaccounted for in the calendar — a gap that made the year phenomenally difficult to track. I have written before on the phenomenal mess that the Romans got themselves into with their calendar, so I shan’t re-hash it all here, but suffice to say they really did make a right old business of getting it wrong.

Back in 713 BCE, Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, introduced two additional months, Ianuarius (January) and Februarius (February), to bring the number of calendar months up to twelve. The month of January was placed at the beginning of the year and dedicated to the god Janus, making it an appropriate time for reflection and planning for the future. Janus was the god of beginnings, transitions and duality. Often depicted with two faces — one looking to the past and the other to the future — Janus symbolised the liminal space between old and new, making him the perfect patron of New Year’s celebrations. His domain included doorways (ianuae in Latin), thresholds and gateways, such as the beginning of a journey or a new phase in life.

In Roman religion, Janus was invoked at the start of any significant endeavour, whether it was the launching of a military campaign, the construction of a building or the start of the agricultural season. His presence at the beginning of the calendar year cemented the idea of looking both backward in gratitude and forward with hope. Naming the first month after Janus thus underpins the idea of the New Year as a moment for reflection and resolutions.

The start of January was a time for Romans to engage in rituals and festivities. Celebrations included exchanging gifts, such as coins or small tokens, which were thought to bring good fortune for the year ahead, and decorated laurel branches were also exchanged, symbols of prosperity and victory. The Romans adorned their homes with greenery and light candles, symbolising the hope for illumination and guidance in the coming year. Sacrifices to Janus were made, and prayers were offered for peace and prosperity. The tradition of making new year’s resolutions can trace its lineage back to this time, when Romans would pledge to improve themselves in the coming year, offering vows to Janus as part of their commitment. The Roman empire’s vast reach ensured that its calendar and traditions left a lasting imprint on the regions it governed. Even after the fall of Rome, the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, remained in use across much of Europe.

Caesar’s calendar reforms, which I discuss in my blog post on Roman calendars, was significant not only for standardising the length of the year but also for firmly establishing January as the beginning of it. This decision was partly practical and partly symbolic. By aligning the calendar with the solar year and by dedicating its beginning to Janus, Caesar reinforced the notion of January as a time for renewal. Over time, Christian Europe adopted the Julian calendar, and while some regions initially celebrated the New Year on different dates, January 1st eventually became the standard.

While many modern New Year customs have their roots in Roman practices, they have evolved over centuries and absorbed influences from various cultures and religions. For instance, the Christian Church initially resisted the celebration of January 1st as New Year’s Day, associating it with pagan rituals. However, by the Middle Ages, the Church had incorporated the date into its liturgical calendar, marking the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus.

New Year’s Day stands as a testament to humanity’s enduring desire to mark the passage of time and embrace renewal. The Romans’ choice of January, their veneration of Janus and their customs of gift-giving and reflection have profoundly shaped the way we celebrate the New Year. Though centuries have passed and cultures have changed, the essence of New Year’s traditions—hope, renewal, and connection—remains timeless.

So, as we ring in the New Year, we honour not only our aspirations for the future but also the rich tapestry of history that has brought us to this moment. In every resolution made and every toast raised, the spirit of Janus lives on, guiding us through the thresholds of time.

Felix Nativitas

Christmas did not begin its story in a vacuum. It arose within the vast and vibrant Roman Empire, a place where countless gods, rituals and traditions were already woven into the rhythm of everyday life. When early Christians eventually shaped their own celebrations, they did so whilst living among people who already marked their calendar with festivals, feasts and customs. Christmas was a celebration which developed in conversation with the pagan world around it, and echoes of ancient Roman festivities can still be heard to this day.

Before Christmas ever graced a church calendar, the month of December belonged to Saturnalia, the most beloved festival in the Roman year. Dedicated to Saturn, the god of agriculture, Saturnalia was a season of feasting, public merriment, exchanged gifts and an inversion of ordinary social rules. Slaves were permitted to dine alongside their masters, ordinary citizens dressed in colourful clothing and laughter filled the streets. For the Romans, Saturnalia was a cherished invitation to joy and generosity, when daylight was at its shortest.

As Christianity spread across the empire, its followers could hardly avoid the fact that they were living beside these exuberant customs. They worked, traded and travelled among people who had long found comfort in Saturnalia’s festivities. Even while Christians rejected the worship of pagan gods, the rhythms of the culture around them could not simply be dismissed. The earliest believers did not yet celebrate Jesus’s birth. Easter, with its promise of resurrection, held far greater importance at that time, and still does in many parts of the world. But the season of Saturnalia left a deep imprint on the Roman imagination, an imprint that would shape the Christmas period in centuries to come.

Another celebration, emerging later but carrying immense symbolic power, prepared the ground for what would eventually become Christmas Day itself. On the 25th December, the Romans honoured Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. This was the moment in the year when the sun, having reached its lowest point in the winter sky, began its slow ascent once more. Light returned, day by day, and darkness lost its hold. As a sufferer of mild Seasonal Affective Disorder, I am still somewhat obsessed with this, and track the progress of the sun’s re-emergence quite obsessively on an app on my phone. The emperor Aurelian was perhaps a fellow sufferer, for he elevated the sun god to renewed prominence in the third century, building a temple in his honour and giving the festival the stamp of imperial authority. The symbolism was unmistakable: the rebirth of the sun signalled renewed strength, hope and the promise of triumph.

The imagery of light returning to the world resonated with early Christians. Long before Christmas existed, the early Christian writers were already describing Jesus as a radiant presence — a light that shines in the darkness, a sun of righteousness. When the time came to choose a date to mark the birth of Christ, an alignment with the festival of the Unconquered Sun carried a poetic logic. Winter solstice celebrations already existed across many cultures and Christians, surrounded by a world that already rejoiced at the return of daylight, found in them a natural metaphor for their own faith.

Yet the decision to celebrate Christmas on December 25th did not happen quickly. For centuries, Christians debated whether Jesus’s birthday should be celebrated at all. Some early theologians went so far as to criticise such birthday celebrations as pagan excess. In the end, theological reasoning blended with cultural reality, and a compromise was reached. The celebration of Christ’s nativity was drawn into the orbit of Rome’s winter festivals.

Once Christianity gained legal recognition under Constantine in the 4th century, church leaders faced the challenge of guiding a vast and diverse population into a new religious identity. The empire still had the legacy of the customs of Saturnalia, the reverence for Sol Invictus and countless other local traditions. Abolishing such celebrations outright would have caused confusion and led to civil unrest. Instead, Christian leaders chose the path of least resistance: they recast familiar festivities with new meaning. They did not graft pagan worship onto Christianity, but they repurposed cultural habits — gift-giving, feasting and decorating homes — to fit the story that they wanted to tell. In doing so, they allowed people to continue the customs they loved whilst shifting the spiritual focus.

Christmas grew within this climate of adaptation and reinterpretation. Many of the customs that now feel inseparable from the holiday were once part of Roman winter traditions. The exchanging of gifts, once associated with Saturn’s festival, found a new home in the tale of wise men bearing offerings for a newborn child, and in the Christian emphasis on charity and care for the poor. Feasting and joyful gatherings continued, now wrapped in the language of celebration for Christ’s birth rather than Saturn’s agricultural blessings. Lights and candles, once meant to honour the returning sun, became symbols of the divine light that entered the world in Bethlehem according to Christian belief. Even the greenery that adorned Roman homes during winter — a symbol of life persisting in the cold — persisted in later centuries as wreaths, boughs and eventually the Christmas tree.

Such continuities do not make Christmas a pagan holiday in disguise. Rather, they reveal how cultural transformation naturally unfolds. Christianity, growing from a small sect into the dominant religion of a sprawling empire, had to find ways to speak to the hearts and habits of its people. In Rome, this meant placing the celebration of Jesus’s birth in a season already rich with meaning, then slowly reshaping that meaning through worship, stories and symbolism. As centuries passed, Christmas continued to evolve. Medieval Europeans added their own layers of traditions of plays, feasts and symbolic foods. Later still, modern customs from Victorian England and American culture reshaped the holiday yet again, giving us carols, cards, Santa Claus imagery and the commercial bustle that now defines the season, for better or for worse. But beneath all these layers, the ancient Roman foundations still flicker like candlelight. The joy of gathering with others in the dark of winter in anticipation of the increasing daylight to come; the encouragement to be generous and think of others in need; the glow of lights that promise warmth and renewal. All these traditions echo the old festivals that once marked December long before Christ was born.

Understanding this intertwined history should not diminish Christmas for anyone, Christians included. The holiday stands as a testament to humanity’s enduring desire to find meaning in the dark months, to celebrate hope’s return, and to bring warmth into the coldest part of the year. Through Christianity’s encounter with Rome’s festivals, the season became a bridge between worlds — between old gods and the new faith, between ancient customs and evolving traditions, between winter’s chill and the promise of returning light. In that sense, Christmas is not merely a date on the calendar, but a centuries-long story of cultural evolution, a process that is still unfolding each time December rolls around.

Little boxes, little boxes

Last week, I rearranged my tupperware cupboard. Do you have a tupperware cupboard? One whole kitchen cupboard dedicated solely to plastic storage boxes? If not, quite honestly, what have you been doing with your life?

Previously, all of my tupperware was at the bottom of a kitchen cupboard and the chaos was palpable. Like a flash of lightning on the road to Damscus, it suddenly occured to me that the bottom cupboard was an inconvenient location for items that I use so frequently. Whilst crouching down to retrieve the relevant box was definitely adding to my daily squat count, it was also extremely annoying. Add to this the fact that I could never locate the matching lid for said box and the whole thing was becoming something of a nightmare, the kind of ridiculous domestic trigger that can tip you over the edge.

Not only was the cupboard inconveniently located, it was also a total mess. Is it only my plastic storage boxes that multiply like gremlins? One day I’ve got a tidy little stack of three, the next morning they’ve somehow birthed a blended family of seventeen, none of which are the same size or shape. Most infuriatingly of all, they all look like they are the same size and shape, but when you try to marry them up they suddenly declare irreconcilable differences. I shudder to estimate how many hours of my life I have spent hunting for the correct tupperware lid. Tupperware lids are treacherous liars. You pull one out with confidence, thinking finally, this is the one, only to find that it’s a centimetre too long and wobbles on top of the box like a toddler’s drawing of a hat. Meanwhile, the lid that should fit has vanished into the void along with odd socks and your sanity. You try every single lid in the pile, and somehow none of them are right, even though you definitely own at least four of that exact same box. I mean, what is going on? How many versions of a plastic box can there be in the world?!

I am not the only one with this problem, I assure you. I recall having this conversation with a colleague several years ago. Like me, she would often bring her lunch into school in a tupperware box. One day, I noticed that her box was labelled with a letter of the alphabet and asked her what that was about. She told me that she had labelled all of the boxes and their lids, in the hope that this would help her to match the right box with the right lid and thus solve all of her tupperware-based problems.

“Has it worked?” I asked.

“No,” she said, grimly.

Now, I tell you, these anxieties are in the past. Since I dedicated an hour’s planning and labour to my tupperware management, I am in a brave new world. I have taken back control. Boxit means Boxit and there will be no more stray migrant lids entering my sacred space via any route, authorised or unauthorised. My borders are tightly controlled and every single box — not to mention its lid — has its own ID card and legitimate address. I police the area with sniffer dogs. Every single box knows its place and there will be no rebellions. When it comes to tupperware, I’ve gone full authoritarian. The area is laid out with military precision. China is taking note.

It’s quite remarkable how tackling a domestic problem that’s been draining your energy since time immemorial can feel like a kind of therapy. My life is genuinely improved. I mean, obviously, this is all relative. When I lie in bed at night, pondering the value of my existence and my contribution to the world at large, I don’t actually comfort myself with the thought that I can at least look back on some well-managed tupperware. We’re not talking the enlightenment here. What we are talking is that a stupidly annoying little thing that has been winding me up on a daily basis has now been sorted out, with quite remarkable ease given how long the problem has been niggling at me. Now, I can locate exactly the right box with exactly the right lid whenever I need one and it’s genuinely bizarre how much of a difference it has made to my daily irritation levels.

In all seriousness, this daft little episode has made me wonder just how many other minor domestic hassles I could improve with a little thought and application. We are creatures of habit and it’s amazing how long we can continue to go about things in a way that causes us a degree of low-level stress when it isn’t really necessary. I am now pondering what other minor bugbears I can eliminate from my life and thus resolve further daily headaches. I might even get through less Nurofen.

On Fish

Some local lads have started fishing on the canal. The likelihood of these young scallywags having a licence to do so is slim, but likewise their level of success when it comes to catching anything seems equally dubious. I have observed them occasionally, waving rods across the water to no success, but this week I came across three of them at the side of the water, making loud retching noises and shouting.

As someone not long out of the mainstream classroom, it is something of a habit to pause and query the antics of young teenagers, so I stopped and observed the melodrama.

“We’ve caught a carp!” one of them shouted, somewhat unnecessarily, given the fact that I was standing less then a metre away from the unfortunate creature. It looked more like a pike to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. Whatever the species, it was very, very dead.

“Okay,” I said, cautiously.

“It STINKS!” said another boy, in between making gagging noises.

“Well, boys,” I said. “If it smells bad, I wouldn’t eat it if I were you.”

“We’re not going to eat it!” said the first boy, his tone making it clear that the very suggestion was utterly ludicrous.

“So what are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“Take a picture of it and then throw it back,” said one of them, like this was the most obvious thing in the world and I was from outer space.

“Well, I’m not sure I approve of this,” I said, in my best middle-aged woman voice. “You’ve just killed a creature for no good reason.”

“We didn’t kill it!” said the first boy, incredulously. “It was already dead!”

I sighed. Of course it was. The boys had somehow dragged a long-dead, semi-rotten fish out of the canal and were very excited about the whole business. How else does one spend a Sunday afternoon when one is thirteen, I suppose? Ah, those halcyon days. I decided I had little to contribute to the situation and I left them to it.

Pike or carp? I pondered absent-mindedly, as I made my way home. Fish names are something of a sore spot for me. There is an interminable list of them that crossword setters like to make use of in their clue-constructions. Whenever I see the word “fish” embedded in a clue, my heart sinks. I swear, you can string any handful of letters together and it will turn out to be an obscure species of fish: from ayu to ziega, amur to zingel, if there’s a fish involved in a crossword, then I’m on a hiding to nothing.

Whether the unfortunate beast was indeed a pike or a carp, it seemed obvious on reflection that it had been dead for some considerable time. Not only were the boys’ fishing skills and equipment highly unlikely to have extended to such a princely catch, the creature itself was stiff and motionless. Do fish go through rigor mortis like mammals? I wondered. Now, there’s something to Google. In a flash, I remembered that the treatise on which my PhD was based at one point likens something to “a fish out of water”. I recall going down something of a rabbit hole, as I found myself pondering how much the ancient writers knew about what happens to fish when they’re out of water. Sure, they would have observed what a fish does when this happens, but what did they conclude was going on? I remember asking Professor Bob Sharples, an expert in the field of ancient thought and something of a walking encylopaedia, whether he knew of any mentions of the topic in the Greek and Latin corpus. “Indeed!” he said. “In fact, Theophrastus wrote a whole treatise called On Fish. I wrote an article about it five years ago.” Of course he did. How foolish of me not to know this.

There seems to have been something of a discussion in the ancient world about how fish respire. Aristotle observed that fish died quickly when removed from water and inferred that water must contain a life-sustaining substance that was analogous to air on land. He noted that fish possess gills instead of lungs and correctly proposed that these organs play a role similar to breathing in humans and other land-based animals. Aristotle also distinguished between different aquatic animals, and seems to have understood that creatures such as dolphins and whales have to surface for air, whereas fish use their gills to extract what they need directly from the water. The much less famous Theophrastus (the subject of my Professor’s article and Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum) seems to have taken quite an interest in fish. He observed that fish depend on the continuous flow of water through their gills and that stagnation or poor water quality can harm them.

Roman naturalists, including Pliny the Elder, inherited and popularised this understanding. They also observed that gills serve as the essential respiratory structures of fish and that water somehow provides the equivalent of atmospheric air. While none of these men could have known about oxygen or understood the biochemical processes of respiration, they did accurately describe the observable mechanics: water passing over the gills. These observations laid the groundwork for the later scientific recognition of the fact that fish extract dissolved gases from water. The ancient thinkers demonstrated a surprisingly advanced understanding for their time, the kind of understanding that comes from empirical observation and underpins the modern scientific method.

To conclude my canalside meanderings, it is coincidental that fish are something of a hot-button topic inside our own household this week, as my husband is currently resurrecting our long-disused fish tank. It already looks marvellous, a veritable panorama of underwater plants, but is yet to welcome its piscine resident as the water quality needs to be perfect and the tank needs to be a properly functioning eco-system before it can sustain life reliably. My husband is not the kind of man to bung a fairground fish in a plastic bag: he takes his responsibility as the prime mover very seriously. I am told that we will have one solitary fish, because it will be one of those fish that likes to fight other fish. A pugnacious pollock. A bellicose barracuda. I am looking forward to seeing it, staring out of the tank like a prize boxer eyeballing his opponent before the fight.

The waiting room

“How was school today?” I asked my young student at the start of her session.

She paused, considering her answer.

“Long,” she said, eventually.

“Oh really?” I enquired. “Did you have extra commitments before or after lessons, then?”

“Oh no,” she said. “It just felt long.”

“Ah,” I said. “I remember that. Time passes so slowly at your age. An hour can feel like an absolute eternity.”

“Oh my God,” she squealed, warming instantly to the subject. “We had double maths at the end of the day. I tried not to look at the clock as it’s the worst thing you can do, but I couldn’t resist it when I thought that surely it must have been at least half an hour gone, and we’d only done ten minutes!“

Oh, how I remember that feeling. For me, it was double geography. Poor Mrs Winslow’s descriptions of the savannah were so boring, I almost cried before each lesson, just at the thought of it. The time I had to spend listening to her stretching out ahead of me felt almost unbearable. I told my young student this and she nodded, fervently. For the young, time passes unbelievably slowly: it stretches into plains as wide as the savannah itself. Waiting for the end of the day feels like crossing a continent.

The immense sluggishness of time is perhaps our earliest companion, a constant presence, crouched in the corners of long afternoons, humming softly in the background. In good times, such as a long summer holiday, the seemingly endless stretches of the future to come are a welcome wonder; at the beginning of double maths, the lethargic passage of time feels like a yawning chasm, a charybdis that will swallow us whole. Each day feels both monumental and tedious. Each hour feels like an an arctic expedition.

Birthdays are essential, bright markers in that vast childhood abyss. To turn six, ten, thirteen — these are grand ascents and each new age feels like a gift. We count down the days, the weeks, the yawning months leading up to the celebration. The anticipation stretches out: slow and sweet but painfully long. It hangs in the air until it became almost unbearable. The day of arrival is luminous, the moment we finally get to unwrap the future we’ve been waiting for.

The way that the young perceive time can perhaps explain why so many of us remember those apocryphal long, hot summers. Lengthy school holidays feel truly colossal for children. Long mornings in pyjamas, drifting from cereal bowls to cartoons, then out into the world of bikes and sun-warmed pavements. Forts built out of sticks and blankets, bedroom kingdoms whose borders shift each day. Tadpoles in rivers, catching time in our hands. Summer inhabits a place where time is measured not by the clock or the calendar but by how many ice lollies we can melt along our wrists, how many bugs we can catch before dusk.

It is easy to forget how profoundly we once lived in these slow hours. As adults, we compress our days like folders, stashing them briskly into the cabinet of our memory. We hurry, we rush, we tick things off our to-do list. Children cannot constrict their days in this way. The agony of double maths is matched only by the ecstasy of free time, each day of which is immense and sprawling. Watching raindrops slide down a window feels like an event. Waiting in the car while a parent runs into the local shop is an adventure. Sitting at the dinner table, politely bored, feels like a vast eternity. We do not know that those minutes are brief and precious: we only feel that they are ours to endure.

Most of us forget, or remember only faintly, the extent to which childhood is a seemingly endless world of waiting. Waiting for the weekend, waiting for your turn, waiting for your parents to finish talking, waiting for the world to move on. Waiting, when you are young, is not the subtle impatience of adulthood: it is tangible, heavy, unbearable. Sat in a hot car seat, legs sticking to the leather. Time pools around you like syrup.

Then there comes a moment — unnoticed when it happens — when time begins to accelerate. Maybe it starts in late adolescence, when school is suddenly over. Or maybe it happens after we leave home, when greater responsibility claims our hours with a firm hand. The days fold in on themselves. A week becomes a blink. Summer vanishes before it begins. We look at the calendar and feel genuinely startled that entire months have passed. We ask where the time has gone, though the answer is always the same: somewhere unimportant, somewhere ordinary, somewhere we did not think to look. As John Lennon said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Time speeding up is not merely a trick of perception; it is a change in how we function. With the familiarity of life, novelty fades and we no longer pause to savour each moment. Instead, we move efficiently, sliding from one experience to the next without pause or comment. We stop noticing the play of light on the wall, the smell of rain on the pavement. We stop counting down the days until our birthdays and start dreading them. We forget what it felt like to wait and we believe that things will always come soon enough. Too soon.

Being reminded by my young student of how time felt when I was younger makes me reflect upon how I spend it now. Perhaps, if we try, we can learn to cultivate that profound slowness again. We can take long walks, not to arrive anywhere, but to experience the act of moving through space. We can sit outside at dusk. We can allow an afternoon to lengthen lazily away. And sometimes, in such moments, time stretches like it used to. Not quite as far, but enough to remind us that it’s still there. Perhaps, if we pay attention to it, the slowness of childhood never truly leaves us. Perhaps it waits patiently, tucked into our memory like a pressed flower. Perhaps we carry it everywhere, even if we rarely take it out to admire it. Perhaps a scent, a song or a certain angle of sunlight can return us to that early, languid world. Perhaps we can find ourselves lying in thick summer grass once again, listening to the buzzing of invisible insects, watching clouds drift lazily overhead. Perhaps we can feel those hours stretch out, and feel ourselves stretched inside them.

Taken out of context?

Public discourse relies on the assumption that quotations accurately represent not only what someone has said but also what they meant. From traditional mainstream journalism in particular, we have the right to expect and assume that quotations on the news reflect both the intention and the context of the person being quoted. Quotations can be manipulated — intentionally or inadvertently — through selective editing or splicing separate statements together. This can exaggerate or change the meaning or the tone of what somebody said and in some cases it can completely invert the meaning from what the speaker intended. I know this, because it’s happened to me.

Back in the mists of time, I was embarking upon teacher-training. This would have been in around 1999. During the year in which I was training, the government suddenly realised that there was a teacher shortage and that the extremely recent decision that trainee teachers should pay for their own training was, shall we say, something of a mis-step. They announced that from the following year, not only would new aspirant teachers have their training paid for, those applying for what were classified as “shortage subjects” would be given extra cash: it was called the Golden Handshake. Given that there were no plans to remiburse the current year group of trainees for their costs, I was around £6000 out of pocket and I was pretty cheesed off, to say the least. I wrote to the Times Educational Supplement and received a response that they would like to use my letter. I gave them permission to do so and to be honest I felt rather chuffed about it.

They did not publish my letter in full. What they did was to take a few words out of it and included it in a wider article by one of their journalists. In itself, that would have been disappointing but acceptable, were it not for the manner in which they butchered the tone of what I said. In the context of my long letter about how I felt mistreated by the government, I mentioned that — as someone in possession of a PhD — I was one of the highly-qualified individuals that the government was saying it wished to attract into the profession. I referenced the amount of blood, sweat and tears that it had taken from me, all for the dubious honour of being able to title myself as “Doctor”, and made a joke about the fact that I was now choosing to enter a profession in which the generic title for women was — and always would be — “Miss.” They quoted this. They then jumped to the very end of my letter and took another quote, in which I summed up my rage at the fact that the government had forgotten about our year group and were happy to leave us in debt, whilst banging on about how important the next generation of teachers was to them. What therefore ended up being printed in the paper was something along the lines of this (although I cannot remember the precise wording): “I’ve worked really hard to gain the right to call myself “Doctor”, only to enter into a profession in which I will always be referred to as “Miss” … and I’m really angry about it.” This, my friends, is what it means to be quoted out of context. They made it sound like I was narked that my title would not be used in the classroom. Not only was this untrue, it was completely irrelevant to the purpose of my letter, which was to point out the fact that our cohort had been unfairly overlooked.

I complained. The TES acknowledged my complaint but said that they “didn’t agree that it made me look bad” and that I had after all “given my permission” for them to use my words, which is exactly what they had done. Of course, nobody actually reads the TES anyway, its sole purpose and use being the main medium for schools to advertise vacant positions, and within minutes of its production it was no doubt the next day’s proverbial chip-paper, but it gave me a small insight into what it feels like to be misrepresented in the press.

When someone speaks — in an interview, a lecture, a letter or a speech — the meaning behind their words depends on the full set of ideas they express longform. A quotation extracted from the larger discourse can lose the clarifying details, caveats, or reasoning that surrounded it. This practice is called contextual omission. For example, imagine someone says the following: “It would be terrible if people stopped participating in elections but, hypothetically, if no one voted, the law provides that the system would choose a winner.” A selective excerpt quoting them as saying “If no one voted, the system would choose a winner” removes the warning that voting is important and could even imply that the speaker is advocating for a system other than democracy. The quote remains “factual” but loses the speaker’s intended meaning entirely.

Equally powerful, in my opinion, is splicing. It’s what happened to me and what the BBC appear to have done with the speech made by Donald Trump after his election defeat in 2020. Splicing refers to the process of editing together separate audio, video or textual remarks into a single statement so that it appears continuous. This can create the impression that the speaker said something that they never actually said. Such manipulation is particularly powerful because viewers tend to trust the evidence of their eyes and ears — most especially if that evidence is presented on the BBC, that most trusted of British institutions, one which supposedly prides itself on its impartiality.

Whilst I often wonder the extent to which we suffer from this problem when looking at fragmentary quotations in our possession from the ancient world, it must be said that digital technology makes splicing easier than it’s ever been. Scholars can ponder the fact that fragmentary evidence of one philosopher’s beliefs will give us a frustratingly narrow and possibly misleading glimpse of his thinking, but audio and video editing software in the modern world can rearrange sentences, soften transitions and hide cuts completely: none of this was possible to do so seamlessly until recently. Thus, even when individual words and phrases are genuine, connecting them out of order can create an entirely new meaning. Despite all of this, I do wonder whether those at the BBC were even aware of what they were doing. People — hardened journalists very much included — tend to believe information that confirms their existing views: this is called confirmation bias. If a journalist already dislikes a politician or a public figure, they will read everything they want to read into whatever that that person says. For most of those working at the BBC, Trump is frankly beyond the pale and was unequestionably stirring up resentment among his followers after his election defeat: so they took what he said and magnified it, since they believed it’s what he meant. This, I submit, is not okay.

In an era in which both the reality of “fake news” and the chilling effect of accusing anyone we disagree with as peddling “fake news” are a genuine threat, I find it absolutely inexcusable that someone at the BBC made this decision and I believe that they have serious questions to answer. I am no supporter of Trump, indeed I find his rise to power bewildering in the extreme, but I resent being misled and manipulated by an institution that wears its own claim to impartiality like a badge of honour. In my opinion, there are numerous other issues that the BBC report on (or choose not to report on), on which I also believe that their bias is palpable, but those issues are far too contentious for me to address on this blog. All I will say is that people genuinely believe in the BBC and therefore if something is reported or indeed not reported by them, that has a tangible impact on what people will accept as the truth.

As our global world grows ever more complex and mass-communication continues to become even more fast-moving, it is essential for all of us to question what we are told, even (or perhaps especially) when we are being told it by an institution that we trust and hold dear. Things, as the saying goes, are not always what they seem.

Unpredictable penmanship

I’ve just finished a novel about a superhero. I’ve never been a connoisseur of comics and haven’t bought one since around 1983, when as a small child I did indeed partake of the occasional copy of The Beano, but I never found myself particularly drawn to comic-based superheroes and their universe.

My brief foray into the world of Marvel came as a result of the fact that Lisa Jewell, a well-established contemporary novelist and one of my personal favourites, has been commissioned to write the first book in what has been billed the “brand-new Marvel crime series for adults, introducing fans to a grittier, street-level side of the Marvel Universe.” Whilst characters with superpowers are not my usual bag, I frankly didn’t care: if it’s written by Jewell, I’m definitely in. I placed the book on reserve immediately.

Responses to the novel have been predictably varied and it’s been a great deal of fun to watch people flailing with panic as the classifications by which they like their world to be defined take a superpowered punch to the gut. POW! BAM! BOOM! Comics and superhero stories seem to divide the world like nothing else can, inspiring cult-like loyalty and adoration from their fans, matched in intensity by the sneering contempt from non-fans, who consider the genre to be nothing more than commercialised tat, a world which has nothing to do with literature. As with all divisive topics, the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle. All in all, Jewell’s authorship of Breaking the Dark, a Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel seems to have annoyed absolutely everybody: an excellent reason to read it.

For me, there is something genuinely remarkable about a novelist who can turn their hand to a variety of writing styles. Jewell is pleasingly unpredictable as an author, and has penned stories in a variety of different genres, from poignant kitchen-sink dramas through coming-of-age novels up to dark, psychological thrillers. You never know what she’s going to write next and I absolutely love that about her. I punched the air with a BIFF when I discovered that Marvel had selected her as the wordsmith for their radical experiment with the genre of the adult novel, and I sincerely hope that she was renumerated to the extent that one might expect from such a potentially lucrative commission. Even if everyone hates it, the book will no doubt sell in the millions. KER-CHING as well as KER-POW.

Novelists that can turn their hand to a variety of genres make people a little uncomfortable, I think. Unless they are spectacularly successful, I suspect they make publishers uncomfortable too. When a writer has a success, most publishers want them to produce more of the same, and it can be a leap of faith for them to back a change of direction. Sometimes, authors write under more than one name, to indicate that change of direction. JK Rowling writes her Cormoran Strike novels under the name of Robert Galbraith, and indeed she approached the publisher under this pseudonym in a quest for genuine feedback. Ruth Rendell wrote psychological thrillers and crime fiction, whilst also writing more introspective, character-driven mysteries under the pseudonym of Barabara Vine. Some novelists, however, write with enormous range under their own name, leaving their fans guessing as to where their imagination will take them next: John Fowles, Kazuo Ishiguro and Lisa Jewell are three authors that exemplify this remarkable talent. While there is security in picking up the novel of someone predictable, there is real joy and adventure in entrusting yourself to an unpredictable penmaster. Jewell is one of those rare authors who writes so well in such a range of styles that I will try anything she produces: hence, this week I found myself immersed in the world of Jessica Jones, superhero, friend of The Avengers, who has superhuman strength, enhanced durability, rapid healing and the ability to fly (although she doesn’t like it). WHOOSH!

Not being in any way familiar with the Marvel universe, I read Jewell’s novel as a standalone and the character of Jessica Jones — a household name to die-hard Marvel fans — was new to me. A large number of those fans are infuriated by the imposition of Jewell’s writing upon their familiar world and an equally large number of Jewell fans seem to be incensed by the novel’s easy prose and youthful characterisation. “It reads like a YA novel!” wails one critic on GoodReads, as if the very notion of writing for a younger audience is an insult.

Is it a literary classic? Of course not. Was Jewell setting out to write one? One presumes that wasn’t the brief. What she has done is to produce a highly entertaining read, one which this relative newcomer to the world of the superhero enjoyed immensely. And let’s be honest: there’s nothing quite so pleasing as a successful book that infuriates almost everyone.