A few days off, to stretch my tense little brain.

I am trying to take a few days off work. I am trying to relax. I am trying to make space for my poor little tensed up brain to stretch out a little. I'm not doing great, but I'm trying, and I think I am starting to get somewhere. Well, when I say I am getting somewhere I don't mean that I am actually going anywhere: this photo that I took at Nottingham airport yesterday is as close as I expect to get to international travel this summer!

Because I'm not actually going away for long at a time this summer, and because a lot of my work is by e-mail and I use the same e-mail address for both work and personal stuff, it's hard for me to stay totally away from work even if I try to take a few days off. In amongst the welcome e-mails from friends there is a constant flow of purely work-related e-mails that I find hard to ignore. In my inbox today I have a former student needing a job reference, a current student needing help with a summer assignment, a colleague needing to check whether I'll be able to cover some teaching when they need to be away in the autumn and a publisher wanting to set up a meeting about a book project. If I wasn't actually here checking my e-mails these things would just have to wait, but once I see the e-mail I find it hard to keep the person at the other end waiting. The upshot is that I tend to do a little bit of work dealing with issues like these almost every day even when I am taking days off, which is what I am trying to do just now.

I am lucky, I suppose, in that I find it hard sometimes to separate some of what I do for work from what I do for fun: I guess that means I made a good choice of career - a lot of what I do because they pay me is stuff that I would want to do anyway even if they didn't! Look at the picture on the left: me underneath a glacier. That's work, of course, but it's also exactly what I'd like to do for fun if it wasn't already part of the job. Right now for example, I have a pile of books to look at "for work" that I wanted to explore anyway just because they look interesting! I'm teaching a new module next year that considers how art, science and landscape influence each other, especially focussing on the inspirational value of landscape in both art and science. It's a big subject, and although I've been working on it subconsciously for years, now that I have to get my head around a few specific examples that will work well for the students I find I need to go into the literature and explore more carefully. I won a £2,000 prize this year that I can spend on things related to my teaching, so I have put a little of it into buying some books, relevant to this module and my other teaching, that I have been meaning to read for a while. By coincidence, the arrival of these books has coincided with the arrival from Routledge of a book that I have been commissioned to review, and I find myself not quite, but almost, overwhelmed (physically as well as psychologically) by the small mountain of new texts that is here waiting for me to start poking around in it! I have been worrying recently (recently as in for the last five years or more) that I never find (or make) enough time in life for reading, so perhaps this will force (help) me to start doing just that.

Any of you who have been following the predecessor to these blogs, my online "letters to friends and family" web pages, will be familiar with my perennial complaint that there's not enough time and that I am constantly running to keep up with everything I am trying to do, but I'm not always very specific about exactly what it is that I am not finding time for. Thinking about it recently I have come to the conclusion that I have gradually fallen into the trap of allowing superficial tasks to blot out the time I need for the more essential and fundamental activities of contemplation, reflection and exploration. I have not been making time to seek out new ideas and I haven't been making time to think about anything in any great depth. I am determined now (yes, yes, I know I've said it before) to do something about it. I think that's one of the biggest and most regrettable of the differences between the way I am now and the way I was, say, 25 years ago (the picture alongside this paragraph was me about then). Of course I know the problem arises largely because I allow myself to take on a lot of different projects and I have a lot of different time-demanding interests, and because I manage my time quite poorly, so it's my own fault, but this also means that I should be able to do something about it! By letting somebody teach me to sit still, perhaps, if I remember my T.S.Eliot.

As usual, once I start thinking about something it crops up all over the place, and somewhere in the last couple of days I read a perfect encapsulation of what I had been thinking about the importance of spending time not preoccupied with superficial tasks. Typically, I cannot now remember exactly what it was or where I read it! Essentially it argued that if you keep your mind busy with little things all the time, is it never going to see the big things. I probably saw it in one of those new books, so I am hoping that I will re-find it as I start to work more methodically through the pile. It serves me right for not writing it down when I first saw it. Another lesson that I frequently teach but evidently still have not learnt.

So, work (or at least the "real" work of writing research papers and devising teaching programmes) has been deprioritized this week. I've been exploring the big pile of new books, playing chess online with a friend (and with a bunch of complete strangers, too, courtesy of Facebook - of which more later), starting this blog, pottering about the house and garden, and having all sorts of different trips out with Debbie and the new dog! It turns out the dog loves trainspotting, truckspotting and planespotting: we should have called him "Spot" instead of Gust! Here he is watching the runway through the perimeter fence of East Midlands Airport yesterday.



I was wondering at the start of the summer whether I was making a mistake planning a summer at home with no exotic field trips: especially as the people I work with have all jetted off to the oxymoronic corners of the globe, with postcards now due in from Iceland, Australia and even Outer Mongolia (yes, really). However, as Debbie with her usual instinctive wisdom pointed out, it's sometimes a lot more relaxing to have nowhere much to go and nothing much to do, for a change. Hence, for a few of these weeks over the summer, my aim to do nothing much and to go nowhere special, so as to stretch my mind back into a usable shape. While doing so, I snapped this photo of a plane taking off from Nottingham, en route to... who knows? Click the picture to see it bigger, and let your mind wonder, or wander. Suggested reading to accompany this picture: The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel or St.Exupery's Wind Sand and Stars (yes, both were in my newly delivered mountain!).