Sphinx

And so farewell then, the Thucydiocy Podcast. In seven episodes, stretched out irregularly over several years, you established in mind-numbing detail the different ways in which people have misattributed things to Thucydides, to an audience of many tens of people, two of whom once posted positive feedback… Wait a minute! There is a faint pulse! It lives, to be largely ignored for another day!

Yes, this was all set to be an obituary for my lacklustre foray into podcasting as part of my ongoing dabbling in different forms of engagement. Maybe if I’d managed to stick to a regular monthly schedule, as originally planned, I’d have built up more of a regular audience, but the combination of COVID, Long COVID and general work issues put paid to that – cf. the impact on this blog – and of course I’d have run out of misattributed Thucydides quotes a lot earlier.

Was it worth it? Yes, of course; I always like talking about stuff, and trying to raise the overall level of knowledge and understanding in the world by a minuscule amount, and experimenting with different formats. The more critical question was: is it worth it? Do I keep this going – if only as a legacy project? That’s partly a matter of how to deploy limited amounts of time and energy when I’m horribly behind with everything – cf. this blog again – though spending a couple of hours every couple of months to research, sketch out and record an episode isn’t a huge commitment.

But it’s also, bluntly, about money: Podbean subscriptions have crept steadily upwards, and more significantly the value of pound sterling against the dollar has plummeted, producing a 15% rise in the subscription from last year to this all on its own. It didn’t help that we’ve had over £1K of vet bills in the last two months and are facing an indefinite ongoing charge for pills… How much is it reasonable to pay to subsidise what is, at least in a sense, part of my job? Because, unlike this blog, podcasting isn’t fun enough to count as a hobby, and it isn’t offering incidental benefits (e.g. the ability to sketch out ideas that might turn into something else in future, or even just making a note of things I might want to refer to); it is no more and no less than an alternative means of disseminating research.

I did actually wonder whether, in that case, I might be able to fund it using my research expenses allowance. The answer appears to be no – ‘impact’ activities are an allowable expense, but for things that are intended to form a future Impact Case Study, which an intermittent podcast series is never going to do – and that of course raises further questions about the value of the whole exercise, since my university clearly doesn’t think it’s worth supporting.

On the other hand, this is why the podcast will be running for at least another year: while waiting for an answer as to whether I might be able to get the subscription paid by someone else, I suddenly realised that I didn’t actually have all the episodes saved separately, and so had to renew in order to download them. Which is deeply silly and aggravating – but, since we are where we are, I just have to make another episode to mark the occasion…

Podbean: https://abahachi.podbean.com/e/thucydiocy-episode-8-the-tyranny-athens-imposed/

Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/thucydiocy/id1468450689#episodeGuid=abahachi.podbean.com%2F73278821-23db-38da-b434-b8cacb215524