WFH: DAY 64. 5.30 am: I could sleep no longer. The birds had begun their dawn chorus two hours earlier. For the reminder of the morning I was, in my head, one hour ahead of true time. 7.00 am: A communion. 8.00 am: I remembered a detail from a landscape:

At first sight, the instinct was to caress. I let the contours guide my slow fingers steep into the valleys’ curves; over planes from which smooth mounds arose; down, around, and underside; discovering the deep recess where no light had ever passed within.

While awaiting final marks and reports to be returned, I took up my writing once again and assailed the second draft. What an appalling opening paragraph. ‘Cut, cut, cut’, until the barebones of the idea are starkly visible. 10.45 am: A downpour of emails asking for information, of the type that needed to be answered in the moment. The weather didn’t change until noon, thus scuppering my intention to join with the MA contingent for an informal tea and biscuit natter. But on this occasion, there was no need a responsible adult to be present.

It is the shear multifaceted nature of one’s teaching remit that contributes most to the inevitable decline in personal effectiveness. As someone wryly remarked to me when I first became Head of School: ‘When you jump off the end of the pier, what strikes you first is not the depth but the breadth of the sea’. There is so much, and so many different things, that one has to do. It’s the curse behind the blessing of working in a small department. As such, the concept of specialism gets increasingly harder to sustain. Either you aim at depth or breadth; it’s not possible to do both across the board. Thus while some of a teacher’s provision will be like an iceberg, other aspects will be like thin-ice. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. It has nothing to commend it, and breeds only frustration and exhaustion.

After lunch, I pressed on with grim determination, hoping to get into the groove of rewriting far faster than during the morning. The bluebottles of incoming mail buzzed around my head still. My uneasy night’s sleep and early waking challenged my resolve to maintain forward momentum.

4.30 pm: I sallied forth on my daily gyration:

7.30 pm: I began what is, without a shadow of doubt, my most irksome administrative task of the year: the postgraduate research monitoring round. I am searching for a more efficient way of undertaking the task, while tweaking the requests for information in order to be more supportive and less judgemental of students.