2020

March came, and with it the mind-bending news that we were going into lockdown; schools were closing; the kids would soon be at home with me, 24/7, while I attempted to continue working. WhatsApp sent off notifications every waking moment. We were all borderline hysterical. I went to my office to collect books and plants, and saw some colleagues at an awkward social distance. The pub that we went to after work was shuttered up, which provoked an end-of-the-world kind of feeling that would become weirdly familiar in 2020.

The kids and I were at home, flailing and failing in attempts to combine my work and their homeschooling. My partner, a key worker, continued to go to work, until he developed symptoms and we all had to quarantine. We couldn’t get a supermarket delivery slot so we ordered boxes of vegetables, eggs and milk from local providers we’d never before heard of, but found through Facebook. I peered into the backs of kitchen cupboards, reassured that we could survive for a while, if we had to, on old tins of coconut milk and out-of-date packets of beans and lentils.  

The sudden spatial contraction of life was destabilising but also strangely, somehow, also fascinating to me. Living in suburbia had hitherto meant that home was, by definition, somewhere you lived so you could go somewhere else - to work, to school, to the city for shopping and restaurants and cinemas, to the countryside for walks. Suburban living seemed premised definitionally on movement and mobility, on not staying still or staying put - just a satellite to the places you really want to be. And it is not somewhere to walk or explore - you drive somewhere else to do that. 

But the new spatial conditions of lockdown fundamentally changed the way I saw our area. I had spent the first week or so of lockdown doom-scrolling on my phone. Now, I became obsessed with reading about the local area and its history. What I had previously seen as featureless fields in the soulless sub-countryside, I now saw as scenes of complex and fascinating histories.

I read about ridge-and-furrow farming in medieval times, the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt, the enclosures and the rise of agrarian capitalism - much of which is still readable in the shape of the earth and the boundaries of the fields. I found out that the local Asda used to be a glamorous and exciting Woolco in the 1960s, one of the first out-of-town hypermarkets in the UK; the local undertakers had been a cinema.

Daily walks suddenly became ways of connecting with local and global histories, and I felt much more attuned to the local area than I ever really had before. On my weekly drive to Tesco for the click-and-collect shop, I took the chance to reappraise the nearby South Wigston, which, it turned out, was a Victorian ‘model’ town built by a philanthropic capitalist, somewhat akin to places like Port Sunlight and Bournville.

Ahead of the weekly Tesco trip, I would read about South Wigston’s beginnings as a town that housed the workers of brickyards, and was built from the self-same bricks. After loading up the car boot with groceries, I drove around and took photos of old shoe and hat and cap factories, churches, temperance houses, and a 1930s art deco cinema. 

My other lockdown obsession was the Leicester Line of the Grand Union canal. We came across a stretch of it near the hamlet of Newton Harcourt during a long walk in the spring, and we’d had a picnic by the locks.

Of course I was dimly aware of this part of the canal before, and occasionally we’d walked along other stretches of the canal, although never really intentionally - I had always thought of canals as depressing fake rivers, grim gashes of post-industrial, stagnant water. But now I found the canal to be full of wonderment and teeming with life.

As with so many canals, it runs parallel to the railway that displaced it as a transport route in the 19th century. Instead of seeing the canal as stagnant and artificial, I now saw it as a vector of connection, both to other places and to other times. I read about the Irish navvies who cut the earth to build the canal, and the fractious relationships with Leicestershire locals who were themselves impoverished and dispossessed by the recent land enclosures of the late 18th century.

On closer inspection, I saw that the canal water and its banks were abundant with life - shoals of roach fish, blue dragonflies, water-boatmen, squawking moorhens, butterflies, bristly bulrushes, pink willowherb, and even once a snake swimming along the outer edge of the water.

In June, a nest built by two swans became home to their five newly hatched cygnets. When we went for our regular picnics there, I took a tub of porridge oats in my bag so that we could feed them. We watched the cygnets grow, and glide up and down long stretches of the canal - we never quite knew where they would be on the canal, but they were always there, somewhere between a small flight of locks and a certain bridge.

One day, though, they were gone. Some other walkers asked me anxiously if I had seen them; a mangled carcass of a web-footed bird was on the towpath. It seemed like the worst had happened. A week or so later, we were overjoyed to see that they had re-appeared, and all seven swans were a-swimming on the canal again. On that same walk that day, the towpath and nearby fields were abundant with clover, and we found several four-leaf clovers, and two five-leaf.

As well as canals, I became fascinated by reservoirs and dams and the different ways that large-scale water engineering has so deeply shaped the landscape. I took us on trips to see Rutland Water, Ladybower Reservoir in the Peak District, and the Elan Valley in mid Wales; I read about the contexts of their planning and building, and became fascinated by the things these waterscapes could tell you about the history of modernity.

I read The Country and the City by Raymond Williams which transformed the way I saw the countryside and thought about rurality; I wrote about it here.

In Leicester, we have been consigned to what seemed to be a neverending lockdown, and we experienced crushing disappointments, as plans to visit loved ones were scuppered by the repeated failures to get the virus under control.

But in August, a few days after the five-leaf clover discovery, we were released from strict lockdown. We went immediately to Herefordshire, the place where I grew up and where my family still live, as well as many of my oldest and best friends. I took a pile of Raymond Williams books with me, and through them I saw that part of the country with what felt like new eyes - I realised that the land was not apolitical, ahistorical, “natural” or “unspoiled”, but that it was, in Williams’s words, “soaked with labour”.

It felt so revelatory that fields and farms and earthworks could be thought about politically, sociologically and historically - not as retreats from, or antitheses to, the urban centres of power, but as inextricably connected to them. It felt like a paradigm shift in the way I saw the world, the kind of intellectual enrapturement that I probably hadn’t felt since being an undergraduate. 

While we were in Herefordshire, we went to pub beer gardens and met old friends. One day we went to an outdoor party, and four old friends of mine and I took our drinks to sit and gossip in a stubble corn-field. It was like being a teenager again, in the best way.

I drove by myself to Pandy, in the neighbouring county of Monmouthshire, on a pilgrimage to Raymond Williams’s birthplace, and into Abergavenny where leftist luminaries like Terry Eagleton and Tariq Ali had been to attend his funeral wake. Through my newfound love of Raymond Williams, I felt that my two worlds of cultural studies scholarship and my rural upbringing in the Welsh Marches were not so irreconcilably opposed after all. 

We went on holiday to Llandudno in north Wales - mostly because we booked it so late and it was the only place we could find in Wales with hotel vacancies. Visiting this place for the first time also felt like a revelation - I couldn’t believe I’d never been before. My grandparents had honeymooned here in the 1940s.

I read Gwyn A. Williams on the history of Wales, and Googled endlessly to read articles about Welsh nationalism and identity, and more widely about Wales’s constitutive and complex relationship with England (and, in Llandudno’s case, specifically with Liverpool).

We walked out onto the pier every evening for a drink at the Ocean Bar, looking out onto the Irish Sea. We walked up the Great Orme; we drove to Snowdonia to clamber up soggy mountainsides. We went to see the mighty medieval spectacle of Conwy Castle.

I read more Raymond Williams, and about how he came to see his persistent sense of being on the border - of not being really Welsh - not as a marginal experience, but actually as characteristic of what it meant to be Welsh at all.

This was another revelation to me, and it helped me make sense of my own experience of growing up on the Welsh borders, of lacking a sense of stable cultural identity or belonging, of loving Wales but never able to feel truly part of it. It turns out we are all teetering ambivalently on some kind of border. 

That was the summer. Now it is December, and the past few months have felt swallowed up and sucked dry by screens, by trying to navigate online teaching, by feeling exhausted at the end of a long day of recording lectures or running seminars, and not even knowing whether you are doing anything like a good job; not seeing your students’ faces (or even, often, hearing their voices); desperately trying to construct a sense of a learning community, and social connection, without having any real idea of whether it is working or not.

I have thrown myself into work, trying to make the most of the new possibilities for connection, conversation, and the sharing of research that this new online world can bring; I’ve helped organise events and have attended many more. It’s nice to be able to hear brilliant speakers while sitting in my slippers drinking wine. But I wonder if we will ever be able to have proper in-person conferences again.

I meet friends and family for chats online several times a week, but I still miss seeing people so much. I miss the conversational happenstance and secret asides that Zoom meetings can’t allow for. I miss long, meandering conversations in the pub. I miss gossip and unexpected chats on the stairwell at work. 

I still walk along the canal, but I have to admit that don’t feel the same kind of wonderment and sense of connection now that it’s winter - or maybe it’s just because lockdown seems so grimly unending. The water is still and brown and cold; the cygnets and the dragonflies are gone. The towpath is churned up so much that it’s hard to walk through the slippery mud; it’s hard, in any case, to get out of the house when work has finished at 6pm, and it’s pitch dark already.

In the wet and cold winter weather, a canalside walk cannot double up as a picnic adventure with the kids. But the dog needs walking still, so we go. Recently, we have taken a flask of hot chocolate and a leftover mince pie to have in the car afterwards. Sometimes a heron careens into view; and the little moorhens are still there, darting in and out of the reeds.

At the beginning of lockdown, it seemed to me that the topsy-turvy new world was the kind of ruptural change that was necessary to jolt us all out of our neoliberal sleepwalk. Through reading about the seismic social change that came after the Black Death, and the ways that workers gained more bargaining power and better lives, I became convinced that coronavirus might also somehow show the way to a better world.

It seemed that the brutal, stark exposure of inequalities must be followed inevitably by large-scale transformation to rectify them. In the spring and summer, I wrote some pieces that, reading them back now, are clearly propelled by a breathless but genuine kind of utopian hope - that out of the crisis would come a new and better world.

That sense of hope feels a long way off now. Brexit is about to happen and will surely bring new crises, both expected and unforeseeable. Cruel and chaotic Tory rule seems like it will be unending, like a mutating virus that we will never be rid of.

I have avoided news and politics a lot this year; I’ve much preferred to try and understand the world through history and philosophy. Part of this has been about self-preservation, but I’ve also come to worry that it might also be a form of retreatism, a sign and symptom of the wider privatisation of life and care that, in many ways, has intensified under lockdown.

Some historians suggest that the spectre of the Black Death which haunted Europe led to an increased desire for private and quarantined living, and to self-perceptions of humans as autonomous and self-reliant, rather than as interdependent and collective beings.

But this last week or so I’ve felt the itch to re-engage with politics, which also feels connected to the longings to see people, and to forge and re-forge social connections, both old and new. And that, I suppose, is a good sign, and a small sliver of hope that we can take as we careen into the new year.