2020. My God. Perhaps because I'm listening to Sun Ra's
spacey music as I type, the mere idea of 2020 seems positively intergalactic,
redolent of travel in rocket ships manned by Dan Dare and Digby, his overweight
sidekick with the kiss curl. Given what's happening on Planet Earth, anyone
with any sense should be off travelling the space-ways in search of a place
where life (in harmony) is possible.
Had fate dictated that I would follow a career, I would
be thoroughly retired in 2020. I'd be living off a pension, that thorny issue
that has provoked anarchy in France these past months. When I took our daughter
to the railways station in nearby Souillac at the beginning of the month, hers
was the only train running south to Toulouse that day. It was late and neither
of us – worriers both – believed in it till its sudden appearance, seemingly
driven by someone on amphetamines. Tilley the Kid fretted about missing her
plane back to the Yuke, but she made it in good time and I wasn't required to
drive her to the airport after all. The amphetamine-fuelled driver must have
picked up sufficient time on the journey south.
By then, her last-minute dissertation was almost in the
bag. Looking back, a career lecturing on some obscure niche subject in a
provincial university might have suited me down to the ground: the odd
tutorial, the odd seminar, the odd lecture, the odd academic paper, and plenty
of time to chew some rarefied intellectual fat with fellow wasters. The trouble
was, a Masters year at Sussex provided fairly conclusive proof that university
lecturers were a load of tossers. Their rarefied lives and their concerns
seemed to bear no relation to the reality of life. My marks plummeted from a
double A to a double D as my interest faded and my disenchantment grew. To find
a post somewhere, I would have had to go through another three years or so,
researching and writing a PhD. Foolish youth that I was, I wanted to get out
into the real world.
The real world of work opened up a can of mediocrity. Pretty
soon I came to the stark realisation that my glory, glory days were behind me
and the only cerebral stimulation I was going to find would be outside the
wonderful world of work. And then, of course, I began to think, Well maybe it wasn't such a bad idea, an
academic career. After all, the only thing I'd been really good at was
passing exams, so I could help the youth of the day pass theirs. But then came
the realisation that it was probably too late in the day to start all over
again.
Just as well, judging by our girl's dissertation. For
days, once Christmas had been digested, she sat in her bedroom with her laptop,
giving her parents the misguided notion that all was well, that she was getting
on with it. Then the Good Wife, for 't'is usually she, discovered that our kid
was well and truly blocked. She'd been doing more and more online research,
without getting down to the business of writing her 6,600 words or however many
it was. Why don't you go and speak to
your dad, Debs urged her. Despite all her best efforts, EFT had failed this
time to shift the blockage. She works miracles with clients, but her
nearest-and-dearest often put up the most stubborn resistance. No, I refuse to get better!
So she came to see her dad – for a dose of academic
Kruschen Salts. It didn't take long to figure out where the blockage was
located. All through her education, she has been hidebound by rules about what
she can and cannot do. I thought it would be better once she got to the
Disunited Kingdom, but apparently not. The introduction had to be xxx words,
the conclusion had to be xxx words; she couldn't use the shorter conversational
form of words like cannot, should not, do not etc. Anything personal seemed to
be frowned upon. Rules schmules! I reassured her that the best essay I ever
wrote in Academe was one in which I ignored all rules, lectures and what not
and wrote from the top of my head. That reassured her, but not much. The French
system has drilled it into her that she can't, sorry cannot, step out of line.
So, I worked within the parameters she gave me. I showed
her how she could structure her wealth of notes and gave her some pointers for
the introduction and the conclusion. That did the trick; it got her started.
For the next few days, she sat on her bed with her laptop and knuckled down to
the last-minute task at hand. I kept her nose firmly to the grindstone with my
intermittent visits to enquire how it was going or to throw in an idea or two.
'Dad, do you think I'll get it done on time?'
'You have to get it done on time. There's no alternative.'
'You have to get it done on time. There's no alternative.'
And she did. When I read through it to check her spelling
and correct a few grammatical tics, I was hugely impressed. It was interesting,
to-the-point and very well written – especially since she never learnt to write
English at school, only how to spick it
weeth a vairy shtrong Frainch acksonte. It was gratifying, too. She done me
proud. Perhaps I did miss a vocation after all, helping the youth of the day to
tailor their work to meet the stringent rules of Academe.
