12 May 2020

This is the day diary I am submitting to the Mass Observation (MO) 12 May 2020 day-diary project. This is part of a wider series of posts I am writing about MO during this period. Here is my day diary, which is mostly reflective because I wasn’t feeling well and therefore didn’t do much:

I am 55 years old, a university academic and live in Aberystwyth with my partner ‘A’ (51),  and two of our three children, ‘S’ (27) and ‘a’ (13).

I didn’t feel good this morning at all: I didn’t sleep well and I just felt out of sorts, depressed and with a migraine-y headache (which I suppressed with painkillers). ‘A’, in contrast, was feeling positively bouncy in comparison with yesterday, when she was feeling down. It does often appear as though we are on opposed points of cycles that just keep swirling around with us occasionally meeting at the high points. I ended up taking the day off from work. I rested, I had a late breakfast and we did German (‘A’ is giving myself and ‘a’ a German lesson every day from a GCSE coursework book with the idea that we will sit the GCSE next year or the year after). Then I posted my #12May2010 MO diary – the day diary I sent to MO in 2010 when they first ran the annual call for submissions on 12 May – on my blog with an introduction and some afterthoughts. Thinking about it was quite emotional because although I only submitted 750 words (I think we were asked to keep submissions to that length), they touched on a number of very significant points of my life. For a start, that day was two days after my 45^th birthday (and today is two days after my 55^th) and 5’s and 0’s tend to be the ones that make you feel a bit more reflective (in my family, many of them also fall on years ending with 5 and 0: already this year my mum has turned 80 and my dad turned 85, my niece has turned 20 and my sister will turn 50 – this does help with remembering how old everyone is). 12 May 2010 was also 6 days after the General Election which, although we were happy in Brighton Pavilion with the election of Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, had been extremely depressing and eventually resulted in David Cameron’s Tories forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats (who the Guardian had unforgivably endorsed in a leader on polling day). While there have been everyday changes since 12 May 2010 – I, like many others, no longer buy a print copy of a newspaper every day; the release statement for MO in 2010 required no reference to the Data Protection Act – the profound changes across the intervening decade (the degradation of the welfare state and public life, Brexit, and the acceleration in the break-up of the UK) largely stem from that coalition and the decade of austerity it unleashed.

Aside from the recent birthday, that day diary from 2010 also touches other personal turning points. As I noted in introducing it on my blog, that turned out to be our last spring in Brighton because later in the summer ‘A’ was offered a job at Aberystwyth University and so we moved at six weeks’ notice. This changed our lives hugely (and generally for the better). It removed us from the blinkered perspective of the South East (although obviously Brighton is hardly typical of political outlook in the wider region) and led to us becoming voters for and, subsequently, members of Plaid Cymru. It meant that I was able to vote Ie/Yes with the winning majority in the Welsh Referendum in March 2011 on greater powers for the Welsh Assembly (now Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament), which has resulted in increasing material differences in the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and means that the conditions we will be experiencing under lockdown from now on will not be the same as those in England (which have attracted condemnation and dismay from around the World). Professionally, it was a great move for ‘A’ because it got her away from the aggressive and damaging neoliberal management style (then and now) of the University of Sussex and allowed her career to thrive. The professional downside was that my commute to the university in west London where I work, which was difficult enough from Brighton, became a nightmarishly long traversal of two different countries and required me to stay away from home (in a variety of B&B and hotel rooms) when working. The current lockdown does mean that I am relieved of this exhausting and draining weekly commute (not helped by the flooding that took place during February this year) and, in fact, this period is the longest I have ever spent without leaving Aberystwyth and the immediate region during the decade I have lived here.

12 May 2010 was also significant for me professionally because I did participate that day as a member of the closing plenary panel of a conference organised by Brighton University at the Jubilee Library: ‘Engaging Mass Observation: New Perspectives on Contemporary Material’. The inherent self-reflexivity of writing a day diary for MO on a day in which I was participating as an academic who works on MO at a conference about MO was too much to resist (and, of course, there is another layer of self-reflection in writing another MO day diary looking back at that day). I get that this might seem like naval-gazing to some, but this is my life. As I noted for a recent post on my blog, Why I Chose to Use the Mass Observation Project for My Research on Ageing, the 1937-49 incarnation of Mass Observation (MO) was central to both my MA dissertation, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Mass Observation’ (1996), and my DPhil thesis, ‘George Orwell and Mass-Observation: Mapping the Politics of Everyday Life in England 1937-1941’ (2002). Vastly expanded, this research resulted in my 2006 book, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), which was republished as an extended paperback edition in 2010 (although I think this was later in the year than May). Central to my interest in MO was their first book, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 (1937). I have a large colour photocopy of the iconic red, white and pink cover of this book framed on the wall on the room in which I’m currently typing. During 2010, I was involved with colleagues from Brunel University in a huge funded project on Ageing (see the post linked above) and I had major ambitions for my career across the coming decade (the one we have just lived through). By and large, I have been successful in meeting those ambitions but at some cost in a decade in which the working conditions in academia have worsened to a degree unimaginable back in 2010. I am privileged enough to have a senior full-time academic post but Higher Education as a whole is dependent on a model of exorbitant fees for students, mass recruitment of international students paying even higher fees, and thousands of part-time or hourly-paid staff (many on zero hour contracts) working precariously to keep the show on the road. The icing on the cake is the normalisation across the sector of an absolutely vile and toxic brand of neoliberal performance management which increasingly sees teaching and researching processes led by people who aren’t academics. For several years it has been clear that this system is utterly unsustainable and that fact has now come into sharp focus in the current pandemic with the refusal of the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to bail out the sector. It is easy to get side tracked by the huge expenditure of energy that university staff have made over the last two months in order to set up and maintain a system of teaching online virtually overnight but it is clear that there will be a savage restructuring of the sector in the months to come. At my university we have been told that the focus going forward will have to be on teaching and that research will be ‘streamlined’. In other words, there is an opportunity to force through yet more performance-managed measures in the name of extracting more labour from the workers in the system. One reflection that writing this diary has reinforced for me is that MO is far more important for my sense of identity and self-worth than being an academic is. That is why I am very happy that, after hearing last autumn that MO was open to new participants without demographic restrictions, I decided to join the project and have been writing for it since. Obviously, the value of MO has become apparent to many during the current crisis because I believe the Project has now swollen to over 700 volunteers (and is therefore closed again) and there are also significant numbers of people (including me) writing Covid-19 diaries for MO.

Returning to today’s activities, I can report that I didn’t do too much else apart from posting my 12 May 2010 diary other than rectify a problem with the hoover and then run it around upstairs. In the late afternoon I went for a walk along the seafront. Rather like this day ten years ago (only then in Brighton) it was sunny but unseasonably cold. It was noticeably busier than earlier in the lockdown on the south beach promenade. So possibly Johnson’s message that people (in England) can drive where they like has got through. Having said that, it was still possible to physical distance (although any more people and it will be difficult) and it might be just a coincidence that several groups came out at once. The fact it was the south beach (with more parking available) suggests people have driven but they might just have driven from the other side of town rather than further afield. I also suspect that some local people have not really been going out at all and it might just be people thinking it is now safer to do this. Difficult to say exactly but this might become clearer over the next few weeks. When I got home, I let the guinea pigs and rabbit out into their pen on the grass and then we had dinner. Afterwards, I took my cup of tea out to a bench in the garden, where it was actually quite warm because the sun had heated up the wall behind it.

The two big UK news items today – neither of which accord with the fake optimism of Johnson’s message on Sunday – are that Rishi Sunak extended the furlough job retention scheme until the end of October (so the Tories have obviously abandoned the attempt to ‘wean’ workers off it) and the latest ONS weekly updates have impacted the official death toll again, which is now just over 40,000 (although the Financial Times now estimate the actual number to be closer to 60,000). This is far in excess of anticipation at the beginning of the lockdown and far worse than elsewhere in Europe; the result of a catalogue of out-of-date pandemic plans, allowing supplies of ventilators and PPE to dwindle and become obsolescent, prioritising leaving the EU over preparing for the pandemic, flirting with ‘herd immunity’, sending 15,000 people home from UK hospitals in mid-March without testing (many to care homes causing outbreaks and mass fatalities), and fatally procrastinating for eleven days in March before reluctantly imposing a lockdown. An article in the Guardian that went online today describes the UK as ‘taking a pasting from world’s press over coronavirus crisis’. Die Zeit sums up the position well: ‘In Great Britain, the infection has spread unchecked longer than it should have. The wave of infections also spread from the hospitals to the old people’s homes, which could also have been avoided. The government is now trying to pretend to the public that it has the situation under control’. The public however are starting to see through this act. Earlier in the week I read that the Corriere della Serra described the situation in the UK as ‘like a nightmare from which you cannot awake, but in which you landed because of your own fault or stupidity’, adding that Britain seemed ‘a prisoner of itself’. I think this the most apt description I have seen for a situation that can only be described as demonstrating the complete moral bankruptcy of a nation and a ruling class. In this context the celebration of VE Day was obscene. As ‘A’ pointed out when we discussed it later over very weak gin-and-tonics in the living room at the end of the day, Britain is now once again ‘the sick man of Europe’, as they used to say in the 1970s. In the current circumstances, to go through with the final stages of Brexit according to the planned timetable, which would mean in effect a no-deal Brexit, would be an act of criminal insanity.

Looking forward to the next ten years, it is difficult to imagine anything less than extreme political and social change. There is every chance of the Covid-19 infection rate increasing in England as a result of Boris Johnson’s typically inept and incoherent statement on Sunday, with the genuine prospect of a ‘second wave’ and further spike in the mortality rate. I think the US can already be characterised as ‘a failed state’ in terms of the way in which the Trump administration have systematically failed to deal with the pandemic and instead are letting the infection spread while using it as a pretext to roll out an ‘America First’ programme. The UK may yet follow; there has been no evidence so far of any attempt to set up the kind of ‘test, trace and isolate’ programme that has been used in the countries which have successfully controlled the pandemic. Certainly, I don’t expect the UK to exist in 2030. Even if the pandemic is managed and an effective vaccine appears this year (the best case scenario), the social and economic consequences will still be immense and paradigm shifting. At the moment we are all concerned with more immediate issues of how to deal with the lockdown restrictions without succumbing to anxiety and depression and wondering when it will be safe to see friends and families, such as my parents. But we all know deep down that things are never going to be the same again and this is part of the peculiar stress and strain of the situation. On what basis can one even make plans for the future? Unlike 2010, I no longer have ambitions for the coming decade beyond very general ones for the continued well-being of family and self. I have some ideas of what I want to do over the immediate next few months, which mainly involve reading and writing, but beyond that I don’t know for sure what I’ll be doing. The only cast iron prediction that I will venture for 2030 is that I won’t be working in the UK HE sector. We’ll see when I submit my day diary for 12 May 2030.

I donate my 12th May diary to the Mass Observation Archive. I consent to it being made publicly available as part of the Archive and assign my copyright in the diary to the Mass Observation Archive Trustees so that it can be reproduced in full or in part on websites, in publications and in broadcasts as approved by the Mass Observation Trustees. I agree to the Mass Observation Archive assuming the role of Data Controller and the Archive will be responsible for the collection and processing of personal data and ensuring that such data complies with the DPA.