Liverpool in September

A quiet day in the Department marking re-sit essays in the morning and walking down through Liverpool in the slow motion of multiple farewells to the city and the Mersey, the river especially it will be hard to leave, this is a real river said Jacob Meloe, as we watched the strong tidal swirl below us as we stood on its banks by Woodside pier, and his excitement was palpable, this Norwegian philosopher who knew about the sea and boats and fishing and brought them miraculously into philosophy as paradigms of knowledge, bringing him close to Socrates and his artisans.

Yes, a sense that it is now for others to carry the anxious burdens and urgencies of institutional neurosis, these forms of social control as Martin Hollis once called them, by which so many minds and their physical abutments are corralled and trapped and creativity quietly stunned and its carcase bled and skinned and prepared for a kind of consumption. I must not get too much like T in his rantings against his university, but one sees the point of the rant, sed et in Arcadia ego, not death this time, but anxious ego and demanding superego carried within the flesh wherever it travels. A certain detachment and self-distancing, a watching it all going on without being affected as much as before. But the sea is what I want to hear, waves and storm, a cathartic sublimity that depends on relative safety ... as Kant carefully noted. Meanwhile we are learning to accommodate ourselves to the logistics of travel to and from the islands, next Monday night a sleeper from Crewe to Inverness, a flight to Kirkwall, then by Loganair to the island, then on 23rd a flight back to Kirkwall, thence to Edinburgh, a night with friends, then a train to Liverpool ... and the start of teaching.