Summer Gladness

Summer calm. Quiet corridors. Admin staff, relieved that the academics aren’t there.

PhD students, in their cluster In the basement.

 

Flower beds replanted for graduation. The lawn mowed in the old quadrangle.

New graduates in their fur-trimmed gowns. With mortar boards.

Foreign graduates posing for photos, holding the Newcastle teddy bear, making victory signs.

 

And roadworks in the campus. Pavement fenced off. General works, to be done when the students aren’t there.

Summer carparks, half empty. Summer security guards, with nothing much to do. The summer artshow of student work.

 

The summer. Work all day. Writing all day. Returning home, satisfyingly weary. Having Done Something. Having rolled the clock forward. Having rolled with the rolling days.

 

The bright world outside the window. The bright sky. The generosity of the sky. No sunglasses. Sun in the eyes. Gladly dazzled. And teeshirted. White teeshirts. Your brown darkening.

 

Taking a righteous pause. An earned pause. A stroll around town. Perambulate. Hit Beatdown records. Marks and Spencer’s, for snacks. Because you could. Because you were rich with time. Because things weren’t all urgent.

Time – you had time. Not postgraduate time, with the pressure of completion. Not skint time, with the pressure of finding a permanent job. The job had arrived.

Enjoying time – and enjoying that enjoyment; doubling up.

 

Productive time – is that the word? Time leaning in a direction. Time bent towards something. Time the bow and you the arrow – shot towards what? Into the sky. Into the sun.  

With no particular project in mind. With the thought of writing this paper or that one. With no plan of revising this monograph chapter or that one. With no thought of submitting this abstract to that call for papers. With no idea of working on a publisher proposal.

Enjoying the time. The openness of time. Enjoying potential, without plan.

 

The sky, higher in summer. Aspirations, vaguer. Plans more diffuse, more open.

 

A holy pause. A biding. A whiling. With books. With writing. Not entirely sure in what direction it will go.

Primed – but for nothing in particular. Paused in not yet philosophy.

 

Later summer. And the new term gathering you towards it. But happy about that. Happy that there was a rhythm to the year. That there were phases to the year. That there was order – a pattern.

The academic year, like the Christian year. With its academic feast days. With its days of remembrance. With its holy days. Or like the agricultural year. With its time of sowing, of growing, of harvest. The summer months of growth. Of tending academic crops.

 

The summer office.

Pulling up your chair to your desk.

Teeshirted work entirely different to wearing a jumper work. More optimism. More uplift.

 

And surfing the net in between work-bouts. Pausing to surf. To scroll. To follow developments on X. Favourite bands on Facebook. Album rankings.

Buying something from Amazon. Fridge-magnets, say. A spray bottle. Something to put beneath plant pots. Plant ties for tomato plants. Some lengths of bamboo. Dried flowers from Etsy. For your windowsills!

Shopping – imagine that. Little shot of adrenaline, or whatever. In between work-bouts. In moments of work-relaxation.

A temporary blanking of the mind. A brief defragmenting. A caesura. A pause. Part of the rhythm of work. A regathering. Being born again for the next bout.

 

Buying stuff between work-bouts. Surfing and buying.

Consumers: is that what we’d become? Is that what full-time work did to us? Is the kind of people we are?

Stuff for our homes. For our flats. Because we had flats now. We actually lived somewhere. We weren’t lost in the world. There was a place from which to leave for work. and a place to which to return. And we were actually going to be there for some time.

A home, that wasn’t nowhere. That was here – in our new city. In our adopted city. In a part of the city. That we were getting to know as we walked to work. As we walked back from work.

Part of the city. Part of the world. Part of its busyness. Part of the whole business of the day.

A base. A place in life. In the world. Security of some kind. Not cast to the four winds.

 

Phonecalls to our parents. Not worrying them anymore. Not vexing them. Not asking for bail outs.

Content in some large way. Unashamed in some vast way.

The calm of time. A calm that wasn’t even our. Like those Richard Scarry books we’d read as children. A busy world. Of which we were part.

Keeping regular hours. Going in for eight, maybe. 'I have to be in work early’. Nine. Finishing at seven. ‘I had to finish late’. Home to eat. To a cupboard full of tins. Of dried pasta.

And not thinking about apocalypse. About the real rulers of the world. About impending global government.

Not imagining bombs falling. Terror striking from the sky. Giant invading spaceships.

The sky was just the sky, that’s all.

 

Where’s our urgency? Where’s our madness? Where’s our hatred? We used to be able to count on our hatred. Where’s our immoderation? Where’s our lack of proportion? Where’s our apocalypticism? Where’s our madness, even. We used to be able to depend on our madness.

 

And the campus. Foreign students doing hula hoops. Playing ping pong on the tables. Foreign students, sitting on the eating steps, lunch from the sushi place. From the Chinese bubble tea place. Foreign students, here to learn English. Chinese girls, hand in hand. Walking slow, slow, slow. Just like we should walk slow, slow, slow.

And the campus – the old campus, at one with the town. Part of the town. Not far off, on its own. With town wanderers, passing through. With patients to and from the Royal Victorian Infirmary, passing through. With kids on their bikes, passing through.

 

Summer breaths on the summer campus. Could lie out on that lawn. Could have a cool pint on that lawn. But no – work instead.

The idea that you could do that stuff feeds the work. Irrigates the work. The thought of an evening pint. Cycle out to the Free Trade, maybe. To the Cumberland. Out to the Ouseburn Valley for a sundowner (but the sun sets late …)

 

Summer gladness. Summer gratitude. We have jobs. We’re being paid. We’re paid for this. For summer work. Paid to work on our philosophies. Paid to buy our books on expenses. To fill our bookshelves.

We have filing cabinets. We have vast monitors on our desks. We have noticeboards. We have a stationery cupboard to raid. To pick things from. Free blu-tack. And ball-point pens. And notepads. And post it notes (of all shapes, sizes – and one that opens like a concertina.) In purple, in pale blue. In yellow.)

Paperclips. Staplers and staples. Ours to do with as we will. White board markers. Board erasers. Highlighters. We’re stationery-rich. We’re kings and queens of stationery. And elastic bands. And HB pencils. We have to buy our Pilot V5s ourselves …

And paper, in whatever colours we want. Orange paper, if we want it. Blue paper, if we want it. Yellow paper – a whole ream of it. And green paper – what would we want green paper for? But it’s there, if we want it. And white printer paper, of course. And card, if we want it. In A3. A2, for posters.

We can print what we want. As much as we want. We can commit eco-crimes. Fell whole forests. Print out whole books. Put them in boxes. Line up the boxes. Write stuff on the spines. Uncollected Derrida, or whatever.

 

We’re ready for work. Ready to begin. Ready to launch. Ready to write our own stuff. But how will we go about that?

 

Who’s going to throw us out of this? Who’s going to expel us from Paradise? No one.

We want to stay here. We want year after year of this. We want to WORK, in capital letters. WRITE, in capital letters.

We’ll do what we’re told. We’ll do what we have to.

 

Of what will be capable, given a chance? Given a job? What will we be able to do? Will we be players, after all? Will we prove ourselves? Will we become people to watch? The up and coming?

Will we be known at conferences and guest paper-givings as ambassadors of that new department in the northeast. As coming from Newcastle, where Philosophy’s been born again – as European Philosophy.

Would we make its reputation? Would we become the Newcastle school of philosophy? Would there be a bit of a mystique about us. How did we get a job up there – at Newcastle, of all places. Not some shithole former poly. Not some lower league-table mediocrity. Not some university in some minor town thing. We were in a real city. A proper city. This wasn’t Bangor. This wasn’t Wolverhampton. This wasn’t Derby. This wasn’t Reading.

A job in a proper city. A proud city. With its history. A regional capital. Not nowhere. That wasn’t Insignificant. Wasn’t Marginal. Provincial – a bit. Far away from London – sure. But its own place. Capital of its region. A famous city. From which famous people had come. Jimmy Nail and so on. With a place in history.

 

We were People at last. We were Substantial. Real. We were Eligible. We were Attractive. We were Players. We were Up and Comers.