Having just had to move The Pequod blog away from FTP and across to Blogspot, now seems a good time to reflect upon my blogging more generally. As is clear from my postings, the word that most aptly describes this activity is: erratic. After Christmas, I managed a few posts every week, some even on sequential days. Inspired by reading snatches of Antonia Fraser's memoirs of Harold Pinter, and Alan Bennett's London Review of Books diary, I thought it would be great if I could keep track of my reading and cultural encounters by keeping a daily record. Hence began my series of posts headed "Daily Diary."

Well, it worked for a while, but the "Daily" element quickly became a misnomer. Weekly, monthly, and non-existent have become increasingly applicable epithets to that section. The trouble is - as ever - my workload.

Whilst doing my PhD, I was generously funded by the AHRC, to the tune of £12 000 a year tax free. Earning anything like the equivalent as a post-doc has been challenging, and time-consuming.

Luckily, last Summer, I got a part-time job with the Open University. I also had quite an amount of teaching allocated to me at my old university. I already had a job working three afternoons and evenings a week in a university library. I did a bit of web work for my old department. Since Christmas, I also took on a second OU tutor group, and a four-month project to write an annual report for a research institute. Overall, then, I am earning about as much post-tax as I was as a PhD student, and although my income will probably go down next year, as I lose some of my teaching, for this year at least I am going to be able to pay the rent.

The trouble is, with five different jobs, I work more than the equivalent of full time. On a typical week during term, I expect to work from 8.00 to 8.00 on weekdays, and then generally pick up some more work over the weekend, including the afternoon I spend working in my library job. I work, then, for around 50-60 hours a week, although my sheer workload is tempered by the fact that I can often work from home, so mix up household chores with my main jobs.

After days or weeks like this, the last thing I want to do is to continue to sit in front of a computer, and blog. I am, to put it bluntly, knackered. Luckily, the long academic vacations come along to revive me somewhat, during which I drop my library job and also some of my teaching load. Over Easter, for the first time since the summer break, I was able actually to do some research (something I hope to blog about soon), although unfortunately my partner broke her leg early in the holidays, meaning I've taken on a caring responsibility to eat up any spare time I might have had, hence leaving me unable to blog over the last few weeks also.

I met a student late last term, who is always invariably enthused with his course, and the chance to read freely, a chance this student (unlike many others) takes full advantage of. I joked that I was envious. Not untruly, I said that the only times of day I get to read are over my breakfast, and in a half hour in bed at night before I fall asleep. For someone whose profession is supposedly literary criticism, I get barely any time to do any of the two key activities that should be both pleasurable, and productive: reading literature, and writing about it.

The sad thing is, until I can move into a full-time teaching and research post, I can't see anyway out of this milieu. I need to work in all my jobs, so that together with my partner we earn enough to keep my house, drive a car, and have a few niceties like meals out and weekends away. But in that position, tied to the necessity of paid teaching, I have little time to do unpaid research, read, blog, or generally keep up my core skills that should have peaked with my PhD. I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I need to keep my portfolio of jobs, in order to keep myself in the manner to which I am accustomed, but this means it will be a struggle to find the time to boost my research output, including looking for a publisher for my PhD, which I will need in order to get a full-time research and teaching post.

Still, I should not moan too much. I am still employed, independent, not forced to rely on my parents, and I do have a little loose change in my pocket, which makes me feel smug when I spend my own earnings. I'm off to Amazon, to buy some books...to stand on my shelves, unopened, until I can buy some time.

Labels: Daily Diary, University Life

In the internet equivalent of the town crier's voice, "Hear ye, hear ye, for this blog has moved." Previously, I published The Pequod blog using Blogger's FTP system, which was neat, if a little slow, allowing me to published the blog as a subdomain of the main Pequod website. But, for reasons best known to themselves, Google have decided to scrap the FTP system, forcing me to switch the blog to a Blogspot domain.

Hence you will now find future posts from The Pequod will be located at http://thepequodblog.blogspot.com/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://thepequodblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

You should not see any changes on the surface, except for a different location in the address bar. Apart from the annoyance to myself, the odd thing is that, since switching, my web browser, Google Chrome, no longer works on the Blogger compose post page.

This is a story of a man in a hurry, in a hospital, and a brief encounter with homeopathy. I intend to follow up my experience more fully soon, when I go back to said hospital, but for now, and from memory...

...I had cause today to visit Lytham St. Anne's spanking new Primary Care Centre, which brings together doctors, pharmacists, X-ray facilities, minor surgery unit under one shiny, PFI-financed roof. The centre was developed by the Medic X group, who also run the pharmacy. In the waiting area for the pharmacy is a health care library, where you can buy books on all sorts of ailments, written under the auspices of the BMA. Also in the waiting area is a snazzy, touch-screen computer.

Geek that I am, I could not help sidling up to have a play. There, nine colourful buttons were arrayed, promising advice on healthy eating, stopping smoking, and other digital versions of those infinite advice leaflets that clutter surgeries. And, at the bottom, was a button for "Natural Medicine." Now since I have blogged on bad science in the past, regular readers will not be surprised to know that my interest was piqued, and I clicked through.

There, a list of further options appeared, including herbal remedies, acupuncture, and - you guessed it - homeopathy. In a hurry, because the surgery was about to close, I scanned the further options with horror. I clicked on "First Aid" and was advised that if I got a splinter, I should take 30C of (insert obscure name I can't remember), which would "gently expel the intrusion from the wound" (I paraphrase, but that's more or less it). I clicked on "Stings" and was instructed "to take 40C of Hypericum." Under "Heat Stroke," a similar set of options was listed. Now I am no medical professional - the Dr. in my name professes to my ability to read books, not bodies - but I know damn well that heatstroke, and even splinters, can be serious, carrying the risk ultimately of death in the case of the former, and infection in the case of the latter, and need cautious and pragmatic intervention, not a vial of magical mineral water.

What really scared me was that the glossy presentation of these "medicines" or "remedies" (and they were labelled as such) lent them a degree of unwarranted authenticity, that could only have been enhanced by the context in which this advice was found: beside a pharmacy, within an NHS building. All of the homeopathic options, like the advice pages for mainstream medicine, contained the usual disclaimers about seeking advice if symptoms persist. However, they equated doctors - those miracle men who worked in that building - with "Homepathic Professional" as the further advice to seek. There were no hyperlinks back to more mainstream medicines or advice elsewhere in the system.

Labels: Bad Science, homeopathy, MedicX, National Health Service

The Language of Aspiration
Stefan Collini lays into the Blairite (or, as he puts it, "blahite") language of "aspiration," which seems to be the coin of the realm across the political spectrum. Alan Milburn, one of Blair's most loyal talking dogs, recently wrote a report on Unleashing Aspiration. This report neatly encapsulate the faux Orwellianism that has regulated New Labour thinking and rhetoric since the mid-'90s: all are equal (but just don't mention that some are more equal than others). As Collini puts it in relation to the example of parental "rights":

In one of those phrases we have heard so frequently that we no longer register their absurdity, the Milburn report says we need to see how parents 'could be empowered with a new right to choose a better school for their children'. What does this actually mean? A 'right' is something universal, something everyone in the relevant category – in this case, parents – has. But if all parents have a right to choose a 'better' school for their children, won’t we have to maintain in each locality a number of ghostly 'worse' schools to which no children are actually sent, whose function is to show that some schools are ‘better’ than others? This rhetorical pattern has become depressingly familiar: each individual has a 'right' to something 'better', where 'better' tends, in practice, to mean 'better than someone else's'.

It is quite depressing. Nobody would want to deny that aspiration or social mobility are positive things. The question is the extent to which we acknowledge that you don't get something for nothing, and that for another class, race or other social group to move up, the existing wealth has to budge somewhere else. Recently, David Willetts' attention has turned to the entrenched wealth of the baby boomer generation that is leaving a social support, jobs and housing burden on the younger generations; Baroness Neuberger, meanwhile, has argued persuasively for allowing older people to work for much longer. In both cases, enabling social mobility for the young or old, or for the lower classes, is a good thing; but since one cannot conjure jobs or housing stock out of thin air, some groups are going to have to give these up. Hence the use of the term aspiration, which sounds good, egalitarian, democratic, but which does not actually require the party to tackle the root problems. Let's focus on encouraging people to aspire to social mobility, education, professional jobs, or housing; but let's try to avoid the awkward difficulty of them actually attaining these things.

As Collini sharply analyses, the solution is not to promote aspiration, which is rhetorically vacuous, but to redistribute wealth from those who can genuinely afford it: not the baby boomers or the old, not the middle classes either, but from the staggeringly small percentage of people who own a staggeringly large percentage of the national's wealth. For example, within the top ten percent of earners, the 91st percentile :

have approximately four times the median total net wealth of the population, but the top 1 per cent have almost 13 times that median figure.

Not only are some people rich (the average ratio of CEO to employee pay has gone up from 47 times in 1999, to 128 times in 2009), but a few people are so super-rich they don't even fit on the charts of the Report of the National Equality Panel:

It is repeatedly (and laconically) recorded that the income or wealth or other advantages of the top 1 per cent cannot be properly represented visually in this report because they would be 'off the scale of the figure'. All the distribution charts and bar graphs have this absurd appearance, with a huge chimney at the right-hand side disappearing off the page.

When not even bald statistics can incorporate the wealth disparity that is the greatest barrier to social mobility - and, if you like, aspiration too - you start ironically to understand why the mainstream political parties have desperately resorted to the rhetoric of aspiration in a kind of wishful thinking. How does one possibly distribute the wealth from this elite micro-percentage of the population, when they are precisely the ones most able to avoid any tax measures through offshore bank accounts?

National Insurance
OK, so the super-rich are pretty hard to touch, whether for Labour or the Tories. But I am glad to see that the real Tory party has at last stood up with a clear policy divide from the former. The Conservative's plan not to raise National Insurance for those earning above £20 000 is utterly, utterly absurd. Having spent the last month condemning Gordon Brown for failing to tackle the deficit, they now decide that they are not going to raise this tax, and will instead make efficiency savings.

What is an efficiency saving? It sound suspiciously like job cuts to me which leads, oh, that's right, to greater pressure on the benefits system that National Insurance pays for. Raising taxes produces a guaranteed additional income, that can be used to pay off the deficit. One might also note that with the country's median income at £21, 000, and the income scales so skewed at the top end such that this median is equally stilted above what many will actually earn, raising taxes above £20 000 will be a less painless measure for the many than cutting services.

In contrast to guaranteed tax income, efficiency savings are unpredictable in scale, and are ultimately disguised rhetoric for cuts in the public sector. At last, in an otherwise touchy-feely nascent election campaign with very little to choose between the two parties, here is a clear dividing line. And though big business may have come out behind the Conservatives - quel surprise, those same CEOs who earn hundreds of times more than their employees - I know my allegiances lie in any shade but blue.

Labels: Alan Milburn, aspiration, Daily Diary, National Insurance