The Future In Very Real Terms

It is a time of galactic unrest, of uncertainty and of high anxiety. It is a time of rumour and the absence of fact. It is the period of time between academic years and it is flux.

When I meet someone who doesn't work in higher education and I tell them what I do for a living they usually reply along the lines of 'you must have long summer holidays'. Not really, my summer is spent chasing elusive information, activities that I could have used dead time in January doing except that would not be possible[1].

This is also the time when every one of my colleagues, both support staff and academics alike, start to think of the future in very real terms[2]. And when we all end up in familiar literary scenarios.

Catch-22: We need X to do this, but we can't force X to do it and they might not get around it to themselves.
Dracula: They only come out at night[3].
Fahrenheit 451: It was a pleasure to burn, and emerge again as Lionel Hurtz's alterego.
Peanuts[4]: I will end up being the Charlie Browniest of HEI administrators, and the red head girl won't speak to me.
Sombrero Fallout: Correct all the information in this document and it will be left in a drawer taking on a life of its own.
Trainspotting: Choose mid-semester formatives and online submission, choose a presentations and interview skills set, choose professionalism (film version, obviously).

It isn't of course. Like so much of life, there is no way a fictional HEI could present the realities of working in one. Sure, science fiction makes the ordinary extraordinary, and erotic fiction delivers the thick, trusty thwack of leather on a leaning laid-bare behind, but these are the tips of the iceberg of all experience.

Fiction is great at tips, it doesn't do the endless, continuously interconnected, continuously expanding life below the sea level. Fiction isn't life.

As for me, my work is kind of like that done in Cambridge Circus, yep, I feel like a lamplighter most of the time.

Postscript. Actually, all the questioning, the desires, the need for acceptance and striking out for individuality, life is exactly like a book. The book is Fly Fishing by JRR Hartley.

Notes
1- That stop clock in Harry Potter would be useful, or Bill and Ted's phonebooth would be my office furniture of choice. That, and a Delorean in the underground car park.
2- At the time of writing I am eighty pages into book three of 1Q84, which is where I stole the idea for this blog post's title.
3- It has been difficult to fit in Smashing Pumpkins into a piece about academic years, and yet it came about so easily. Despite all my rage I am still just very easily amused by word play and paraphrasing.
4- What, sequential art not literary enough for you? Should I stick with eighteenth century and mediaeval poetry instead, no I don't think so myself.
X- 'In the modern world the mace is your only hope'.