I recall being taken off guard when a well-known and widely respected sociologist entering the third age seemed to be constantly fishing for compliments. I had considerable respect for him both personally and for his very real accomplishments within the discipline. But I quietly wished he’d desist. I didn’t want him to somehow diminish his… Read More »
I have just read Graham Greene’s final volume, comprising a selection of dreams culled from a ‘dream diary’ he wrote for many years. He contrasts events in the real world with those in his dream world. I suspect, having been psychoanalysed when younger, he attributed more significance to the contents of his dreams that this… Read More »
I recently posted a photo of myself on Twitter/X with the caption, ’on my way to the pro-Palestinian protest in London’. Unusually for me, it solicited quite some attention, with 7.6 thousand likes and 1.2 thousand retweets. It also provoked a considerable number of responses (which I didn’t bother to count). Many of these were… Read More »
I have increased my rate of reading since retirement. I now read a couple a week on average. For anyone with nothing better to do, here’s my reading over the last seven years. 2017 Dexter: Ted Dexter declares Simenon: Maigret, Longnon and the gangsters Talbot & Weaver: Flight of the martlets Rutherford: Unexpected Simenon: Maigret… Read More »
I have over time reached the conclusion that as a teacher I communicate best with undergraduates, and that as a writer I communicate best with academic colleagues. I rarely teach now, but I have continued to write a decade or more into retirement. Recently a colleague has quite rightly raised the issue of why we… Read More »
The chances of me being invited to choose eight records to pack away for the life of a castaway on an otherwise uninhabited island remain, well, negligible is to put it too positively. So I thought, okay, I’ll interview myself, if only for my own amusement. Like most ‘real’ invitees to ‘Desert Island Discs’, I… Read More »
Given time to dwell on the pros and cons of an academic career several themes occur as of significance, hence the obscure quasi-mathematical title of this autobiographical blog. Serendipity suggests events that crop up fortuitously and incur advantage; reflexivity denotes active agency; happenstance brings contingency to mind; career and cv are more straightforward. I will… Read More »
It may or may not be related to the fact that I’ve just turned 73 that I’ve found myself more often reflecting – or introspecting – on what it is I do when I write. I think fatigue has something to do with it. I tend to write in bursts, most notably in cafes on… Read More »
I have reflected before on my personal background. Briefly, I was born to parents whose middle-class lives had been disrupted by the WW2. My father had been in line for promotion to the board of a company specialising in German shipping. After a brief period in Hamburg helping wrap up what little was left of… Read More »