Alternative reality?
Sometimes everything just seems too much. As the non-existent summer rolls on – 14C mornings of rain or overcast, wool sweaters taken back out from storage – I find my stress level to be the only thing heating up. As I prepare the course I lead for its next academic year, there are also manuscripts to edit, review articles to write, grants and papers to peer-review, interim reports to file for current grants, collaborations to tend, talks to compose, PhD upgrade reports and final dissertations to examine.
And above all the relentless admin: pushing research agreements and material transfer requests through a reluctant quagmire of legal bureaucracy, wrangling finances, applying for ethical approval, seeking reimbursement for business expenses – the thousand natural shocks that academic flesh is heir to, culminating inevitably in spiritual death by tedium. Physically, I am finding the commute increasingly difficult: my joints ache from the amount of miles I need to walk, and when I get home, I want nothing more than to lie down, without the energy for all the creative things I used to do.
I turned down a family outing to the woods to stay at home this morning, seeking some inner peace in the rare sunshine. Here on the back patio, solar fountains trickle, flowers bob in their containers – cosmos, zinnias, mallows, marigolds. Wind shushes in the tall trees, and the metallic tapping of beaks on feeders lets me know without having to look up that the sparrows and tits have forgotten I’m here, not a few yards away and only partially screened by the apricot tree sagging under its weight of rose-gold fruit.
Although the growing season has been severely retarded this year, all around me the crops are steadily progressing: tomatoes and tomatillos, strawberries and blueberries, chokeberries and blackberries, courgettes and pumpkins, runner beans and beets, carrots and lettuces, sweetcorn and kale, spinach and chard, potatoes and garlic. The greenhouses are home to cucumbers, chilli and celery, pots of fragrant herbs. The cherries, gooseberries and raspberries are past, but apples, pears, figs, plums, hops and cobnuts swell in the wings; grapes clusters hang heavy amid groping tendrils that seem to grow meters overnight. It is the time of year when you can breeze round the garden foraging for your breakfast or dinner, returning with handfuls of produce whose “food distance” is measured in feet and inches, not miles. Our girls are working hard, too: bees filling their clever waxy combs with nectar, hens laying their daily eggs.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to end all this stress. Just to walk away from the job and do something else, something where the amount of effort you put in is reflected equally by what you get out, where the crushing uncertainty of whether you will get enough grants to carry on to the next phase is no longer relevant. Or even more extreme: taking early retirement, and being in the garden whenever I like.
I was chatting with some colleagues earlier in the week at a scientific conference, so I know that the idle fantasy of just stopping is almost universal, on and off, amongst academics of a certain age. What keeps me going is how long I have worked to be where I am, and how important the scientific cause is. I may be only a tiny cog turning on the fringes, and it may be a constant struggle for existence, but this wretched infection afflicting 400 million people a year is not going to just go away on its own. Grants-wise, I’m sorted for the next few years at least, with a good probability of new ones slotting in to take their places. I want to do what I can, for as long as I can, even if some weeks it feels like I’m going to break.
