Sphinx

Time, and Money. One of my most concrete achievements so far this summer – besides winning first prize for ‘a truss of cherry tomatoes’ at the local garden show – has been getting the front of the house painted. Does the money saved by doing it myself, and the sense of satisfaction, actually balance out the fact that a professional would have done it at a much lower hourly rate than one might calculate mine to be, so I could instead have devoted more time to working on all the chapters and articles I’m supposed to be writing / have written – with substantially less potential satisfaction? I do tend to revert to an autarkic ‘why pay someone if you can do it yourself?’ attitude, especially as I like doing practical things, rather than spending money to make everything but the research go away?

Of course it’s never just time and money (both direct expenditure, and the fact that some of my time has been paid for by the university). Even when I have days or weeks free from other commitments, sometimes the research and writing goes nowhere, if the energy and/or inspiration aren’t there, whereas doing other stuff sometimes gets everything moving. And there are issues even if I just think about how I distribute time and effort between different work-related tasks. How to balance a chapter for a conference-derived publication (no longer fired up by topic, not REF-able, but feeling of obligation to the organiser) against a journal article? How much time can I justify spending on the blog when there are so many other things I ought to have done? Is it worth writing yet another funding application that won’t get anywhere because no one seems to like my ideas, because it’s expected and because maybe, just maybe, this time..? Or writing a considered response to peer review reports when it’s already clear that one of the reviewers has put the kibosh on the whole enterprise…

Put another way: it is rare that I do anything, however obviously necessary and justifiable (teaching prep, for example), without a nagging sense that there are other things I could be doing that perhaps should be more of a priority. I’m honestly not sure how much this is a symptom of higher education under late capitalism [carefully chosen phrase, since I recall someone getting very cross about the idea of ‘the neoliberal university’ last time I used it] and how much it’s my own ineptitude at prioritising, lack of focus, and terrible time management. It’s nice to feel wanted and get invitations to speak or contribute (I think I still have the ECR mentality of being delighted that anyone’s heard of me, so this might be the last invitation I ever get…), it’s nice to have ideas at the moment, and I know that I can’t do everything, but I don’t have an effective process for deciding which things can’t be done.

The other thing with money is that it’s not just a matter of calculating the value of my time; some things need actual funding or they can’t be done at all. Hence the funding applications; I can pay for the occasional research or conference trip, just as I could pay for someone to paint the house, but I can’t afford to buy out six months of my own time, or pay for a postdoc, or organise an entire event. Hence the need for funding applications, and the frustration at their lack of success, because I don’t do it just because it’s expected, but because I sometimes have ideas that can’t be done in the traditional lone scholar manner but need serious resources, and if they don’t get funded they just don’t happen.

Which does mean I feel enormous gratitude when someone does give me the money to do something I really want to do – which is actually the point of this post, despite the melancholy direction it’s taken so far. Last year, in one of the many meetings related to Impact stuff, someone mentioned the idea of a TED-Ed video on Thucydides, a short, accessible introduction to him and his work. Yes, one more one more thing to fill the already full day, but it was such an obviously good thing in itself, besides being potentially very useful as a resource for our work with schools. So, I pitched the idea to TED-Ed and had a Skype conversation where they seemed very enthusiastic about it; wrote the first draft of the script, waited, waited some more, sent a polite email because it was now well past the time they said they’d respond with comments on the script – and got a brief reply to say they were no longer pursuing the project.

Of all the knock-backs I’ve had this year, I think this was the second worst, as it felt so arbitrary; yes, bad peer reviews and being turned down for funding can also seem arbitrary, but they are always priced in as a possibility, however much you polish the application, whereas I thought this project had already had the green light. By this point, I was really devoted to the idea – but how could I come up with the money that would be needed to do it myself? I’m very grateful to Ray Laurence (who has of course produced that brilliant series of Life in Ancient Rome animations) for the suggestion of approaching universities/colleges where students might be looking for projects. I was delighted to find MAYN Creative, a creative agency at Falmouth University, who quoted a price that was potentially affordable, and organised the process of advertising the project and collecting pitches for me to consider – once I’d managed to confirm funding; this would never have been possible without the support of my Head of Department Barbara Borg and our College Associate Dean for Research James Clark (both of whom doubtless have specific hopes for the outcome, which I hope won’t be disappointed), and a grant for public engagement activities from the Institute of Classical Studies.

But above all I have to thank the creative team, Bee Jamieson (illustration and direction) and Matt Hawkins (animation), who have been simply brilliant; if you have any sort of project like this, these are the people to get. They grasped the idea and tone of my script immediately (you just have to look at their portrait of Thucydides above, which I will now be using everywhere), they interpreted it imaginatively and added lots of their own ideas (the visual presentation of people believing any old nonsense about past events is completely theirs, and works perfectly), and they were excellent to work with – including showing great patience when I produced yet another version of the soundtrack when they’d just finished incorporating the previous one.

And here it is…