Since moving from Swindon to Exeter at the end of August, I have filled the car up with petrol only 4 times – rather than the at least three times a week I was used to. That must be good. I am finding it a bit odd to find myself living in the same place as I work in, and I am trying my best to stop thinking it’s really exciting to be able to go into the office at the weekend. I am adjusting to the novel possibility of bumping into one’s colleagues in the supermarket (and of having to dodge one’s students while there too). I am spending more time working in my office, but I also find it difficult to work in silence, and I am aware that you can’t really sit in your office at work with the door open playing Bremen Nacht cranked up to 11 (not, I guess, without upsetting everyone else along the corridor), so I am refining my music tastes, learning to listen softly to Thelonius Monk or Glenn Gould (that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge of both jazz and classical music).
Amongst these new experiences of a more sedentary lifestyle, there are some things I am finding myself missing about my 2+-hour home-work and 2+hour work-home roundtrips. Mainly, I miss the people who used to accompany me to and from work during the working week:
1). I miss Karina Longworth, who’s You Must Remember This is just the best podcast ever.
2). I miss Courtney Barnett, and Taylor Swift, and Lucinda Williams, and Britt Daniels and all sorts of other people too, who one got to know by listening to whole albums in the car, all the way through from start to finish, as well as those friends one is more ambivalent about but who you only see once a year or so, like Supertramp or Psychedelic Furs, and who are good to listen to every so often, surely.
3). I miss Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz and the anguished liberalism of Slate’s Political Gabfest.
4). I miss the surprise of meeting old friends, depending on which playlist you happen to choose to put on as you speed down the motorway – could be Tangerine Kitty or Beyoncé or Kristin Hersh.
5). I miss David Remnick and The New Yorker’s Radio Hour.
6). I miss Eddie Mair and others on Radio 4’s PM programme.
7). I miss David Runciman and the Talking Politics podcast.
8). I miss Alec Baldwin and his friends.
9). I miss Adam Buxton (but not as much as I miss Adam and Joe on the radio).
10). And I miss those rare occasions when someone would be there with me in my car reading their own books out loud just to me – Barack Obama reading Dreams of my Father, Donna Tartt reading The Little Friend, and, back in the days of OU-audio on cassettes, Quentin Skinner explaining early modern political thought to me, just to me.
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A couple of weeks ago, LEGOVC (the real one, or the real pretend one, it’s difficult to tell) asked me whether there were any songs by a certain someone that spoke to the cause for which University staff in the UK have recently been striking (we go back to work next week, wiser and with our eyes wide open, while maintaining Action Short of a Strike). LEGOVC (the pretend one, who is plastic) has helped us learn in the last few weeks that it’s always good to laugh with other people and at yourself. And, now I think about it, I don’t think a plastic figure can pretend, which might mean that it’s real, but only real plastic.
Pop Theory 