Sphinx

Sometimes, however much you need to take the weekend to rest and recuperate, just do a bit of reading or music and spend time with loved ones, there is a task that simply can’t wait. Actually it should have been done last weekend but you were then too tired to do more than a bit of preparatory work, and of course there was no time during the week with all the regular demands of teaching and meetings and seeing students; so, regardless of the consequences for Monday, it’s bye-bye Saturday and much of Sunday…

I’m referring, of course, to the pressing need to press this year’s apple harvest into juice, for cider-making and pasteurising, before it all rots. I’m honestly not sure which leaves me in a more exhausted state the next day, several hours’ of pounding chopped-up apples and turning the press, or trying to write academic stuff when I really just want to sleep. Certainly the deadline for submitting AHRC reviews or that overdue chapter is never so biologically absolute. But I am very conscious of how it can seem like it, that if I don’t get something done NOW then I will become mouldy and bloated and entirely useless.

I’m promoted to think about this theme this morning (the reason I’m bothering to write a blog post is that the WiFi is down on my train) because of a post by a Facebook friend and the subsequent discussion; he was explaining to one of his children why he couldn’t get all the work he needed to do done in Monday to Friday and so had to work weekends as well, and got the response “But they can’t ask you to do more work than you can actually do in the week, can they?” One of the key questions in the comments was how far this is actually all about research, and being a research high-flyer – the familiar “you do it to yourself, you do” of academia – or whether doing the regular termtime teaching and admin stuff, conscientiously but not obsessively so, always in practice exceeds the time allocated to it.

I’m honestly not sure about this issue. On the one hand, I am managing this term to keep most weekends free, except when I suddenly realise that I’m booked into an online conference, while keeping up with teaching and other duties; on the other hand, all three of my current courses are things I’ve taught before so there’s a lot less preparation involved, and I really have no spare time or energy so goodness knows what happens when eighty second-year source analysis exercises turn up for marking; on the third hand, I am very conscious that I’m not fully fit, with lingering effects of plague, so this can’t be taken as typical of my working week in more normal circumstances.

Pacing myself when it comes to the research – a euphemism for “not actually doing much” – is a rational strategy for trying to recover; as I regularly have to remind myself, to give myself permission to take things a bit easier and not feel bad about it. And I am very conscious that this is a privilege, that I can pause my research without major consequences; I’m unlikely to be disciplined for unsatisfactory performance just yet, even if going up a pay grade seems improbable, the next REF is a good few years away so I’m not yet letting the department down, so basically I just have to deal with guilt at letting editors and colleagues and publishers down and with frustration at the fact that I do genuinely want to write at least some of the things I’m supposed to be writing. I do not have to worry that my lack of productivity will prevent me from getting a job or lose me the one I have because of the criteria for progression and promotion.

There is a case, however, made in the Facebook thread mentioned above, that possessing such privilege is not grounds for trying to hide it or refusing to exercise it, but on the contrary for making the most of it, as an example that academia is not an should never be the whole of one’s identity and life. If established professors can’t (or won’t) take weekends off or leave their work email alone for a microsecond, it sets expectations of everyone and so perpetuates an increasingly toxic working culture. I agree, so long as this doesn’t displace work onto more junior colleagues (academic and administrative) – at least in principle, as I am conscious of the hypocrisy involved when actually, left to my own devices and fully healthy, I probably would be working evenings and weekends to try to ‘catch up’ on everything that’s fallen behind in the last few years.

One of my brothers is a GP, as is his wife, and it was striking when we last met that he said he now honestly wasn’t sure, if he had his time over again and knew how things would turn out, that he’d have chosen the medical profession, given current working conditions. I occasionally wonder the same – qualified by the facts that (1) I’d probably have been useless for anything except academia and (2) on the other hand I was lucky to get into it in the first place. When I started, I remember older colleagues complaining about deterioration in the nature of the job, and wondering what they were moaning about; whereas of course the deterioration since I was in my early thirties is unmistakable…

My brother is actually pretty good at managing the work-life balance thing – in order to go off and do things like the Marathon des Sables, a six-day ultramarathon in the Sahara. To be honest it’s hard not to see this as either masochism or as a psychological justification – yes, I’m having time off rather than helping people with their varicose veins and possible plague symptoms, but I am clearly Not Having Fun. In my own, much safer and more boring way, I’m clearly doing the same thing: the apples have to be pressed so I have to take time off to do it, the beans need to be picked and dried, the quinces need to be jellied, and so forth. ‘The articles need to be written’ has, for the moment, not got quite the same leverage.