Journal of the Plague Year: 2020 on The Sphinx

As I remarked in the run-down of my favourite posts of 2020 by other people, it’s now traditional at this time of year to bemoan the continuing, apparently inexorable decline of blogging, and to wonder whether it’s worth the trouble. Page views are down another 20% or so on last year – though the optimistic perspective here is that this represents a slowing of the decline in absolute terms, and the number of visitors is more or less the same (and might even be slightly higher, if this end-of-year review gets some traction…). Writing posts has at times felt almost impossible, as I struggled with the joys of Long COVID – but less impossible than any proper academic writing, so the result has been a reasonable level of production here, while my ‘to do’ list for the professional stuff gets ever longer. And this year, more than ever before, the pleasure of reading old posts is the rediscovery of things I genuinely have no recollection of writing…

January: ah, those fabled days Before It Happened, when we were all exhausted and alienated in f2fip mode rather than on Zoom or Teams. I seem to have started the year in a state of professional confusion, whether reflecting on Hunger Games at the SCS conference (something it now seems vanishingly improbable that I will ever attend in person) or on the laughable idea of having any sort of career plan. It is a direct consequence of having now had three or four decent nights’ sleep in a row, thanks to a combination of imperial stout and deranged insomniac cat being slightly more normal recently, that my angst is currently limited to the number of deadlines I’ve missed or will miss in the next couple of months, and the still ill-defined nature of next term’s teaching.

February: as evidence that I was still capable of thinking in joined-up sentences despite all my struggles with teaching Macedonian history, I enjoyed engaging with the ideas of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman as applied to C5 Greece in Weaponised Imperialism. I also finally managed to finish a piece on staff-student relationships in academia and why they are an unbelievably bad idea, only fourteen months or so after I first started thinking about it. But the major thing this month – the one thing I’d claim as an academic achievement this year, not an individual one but a collaborative project, was the Do What You Must/Melian Dialogues performance, and I’m not going to miss the chance to promote this again:

March: this, of course, is when things got interesting. On the 6th, I was sarcastically (but also opportunistically) developing a Grand Theory of the Whole of History. On the 7th, we get the first of many commentaries on how Thucydides can and can’t help us make sense of Coronavirus, and the first of a fair number of commentaries on the experience of teaching under these new conditions. What is striking, in retrospect, is how much energy I had at this point, whether because my inner Ballardian antihero was coming into his own, or in response to a new set of challenges, or simply because the deranged cat was in one of his better phases (to be honest, I’d forgotten how long this has been going on). Result: twice as many blog posts, determined making of kimchi and other preserves, and a sudden urge to make silly videos in a false beard…

April: it’s very difficult not to see this month’s posts through the lens of dramatic irony; still full of energy at the beginning, belatedly catching up with and offering snarky critique of dubious Thucydides receptions and misattributions, then some reflections on the start of the new term and the ‘new normal’ of teaching with the first hint of some flu-like symptoms, and finally an attempt at coming to terms with not doing too much after definitely succumbing to something nasty.

May: it was, in the first instance, a pretty mild dose of COVID-19, and by the end of the first week of May I was happily blogging again about the possible styles of teaching under pandemic conditions and, still more cynically, about the possibility that some universities were taking advantage of the crisis to put existing plans into practice. There was then a fortnight of silence, that I didn’t discuss at the time because I was feeling awful again, a pattern that was to repeat over the next few months. And then I felt well enough to comment on a truly astonishing US State Department paper on Huawei and state security.

June: if I recall correctly, I decided to take June pretty well off, rather than running myself further into the ground by trying to get some writing done – which is why I was posting quite a lot at the beginning of the month: continuing reflections on next year’s teaching, which I guess will date rapidly, and a comment on John Cleese’s take on toppling statues of racists. At the end of the month, I felt energetic enough to get furious about private schools fiddling grade predictions on UCAS forms. In between, I reflected on the beetles in the new pond.

July …was not great. There were posts, on topics from interactions with Thucydiocy deniers to reflections on the future of conference networking. But increasingly they were short, fragmentary, underdeveloped and distracted – I really would like to find an illustrator with whom to collaborate on a comic book Thucydides, but I could have done a much better job of selling the project if my brain was working better at this point in the year.

August: all a bit dark this month, from worrying about student mental health in the coming academic year, to sheer fury about the A-Level fiasco. It was necessary to go back to the 1950s, and the unexpected deployment of Thucydides to recruit nuclear weapons scientists, to find anything cheery to write about.

September: generally, when I do these retrospectives, it’s quite obvious which posts are worth trying to revive, or at least which ones I want to try to force people to read. This year, not so much. Yes, there’s an interesting discussion of the background to yet another Thucydides misattribution that opens up all sorts of fascinating aspects of 19th-century American political thought and the Civil War. But mostly this month was the start of a rolling diary of my struggles with teaching, from ominous foreboding to Welcome Week shambles to simply feeling old and useless, and while it’s a kind of historical record, and an important bit of my autobiography, I’m honestly not sure how much it has to say to anyone else.

October: and it continued… By the end of the month, try as I might to focus on the demise of Eidolon and the need for short scholarship, rather than ‘fast’ or ‘slow’, the predominant theme was my inability to think or write. Similarly, while I would probably have had thoughts about social media and teaching in any case, now it was impossible to detach these from my struggles with online teaching.

November: one of the genuinely positive things about this year were my online jazz composition courses, which offered valuable insight into the experience of being a student in these new conditions – most valuable of all, the experience of being useless. Perhaps because term was settling down by this point, if only in a ‘no one know anything, expect the unexpected and expect government policy to be gibberish’ manner, I found the energy to comment on wider academic developments, with the establishment of exciting new peer review opportunities and some reflections on Oswald Spengler and reasons for shunning him.

December: finally… As term began to wind down, I had some final reflections on student well-being through the lens of Thucydides, and found the time to write up something I’d been planning for ages on Thucydides as chocolate card, and even to deal with a lot of people on the Twitter getting angry about the incoherence of ‘indigenous British population’. And of course there had to be one more reflection on teaching through the lens of jazz composition, this time imagining the seminar as jam session. It’s been that sort of year.