November 2025

Bathing in high culture and lowering the tone

With a campus job that requires me to be up before 7am most mornings, I haven’t spent as much time as usual brainstorming creative ideas. But I still have a few things to show for the past month.

I released music that was a mixture of highbrow and lowbrow. Averaging over one open mic per week, preparations for next summer’s festivals are going well. This being the second full month of the One Year No Beer challenge, I filled the days with language study, reading and weightlifting.

Output

As with every month, I recorded a large variety of new music. I uploaded a classical guitar rendition of ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’, which was composed by Ennio Morricone for the 1986 film ‘The Mission’.

I also released the 2025 edition of ‘Hope It Might Be So’. It will be available on all major platforms in December.

On the same YouTube channel, I uploaded ‘Childhood’, quite possibly my most tasteless song yet. I also got a lyric video made of ‘Household Wares’, a song by publisher and old-China hand Graham Earnshaw that has always enchanted me.

Activities

In early November, I thought about writing an end-of-year retrospective on this Substack. But as soon as I started, I realised the finished piece would be at least a fifteen-minute read, so I broke it into subcategories. So far, these have included a year in literature, a year in musical comedy, and a year in productivity habits.

Like all months, I read over a book a week on average. ‘The Bad Girl’ by Mario Vargas Llosa is an epic, continent-spanning, unrequited love story. I’m glad Llosa’s political career failed, otherwise he probably would have been shot before he had the chance to write this masterpiece.

‘The Housemaid’ by Freida McFadden is a thriller that I binged in a day. Like most contemporary thrillers it was gripping but forgettable. Now I am reading ‘The Way Back, Erich Maria Remarque’s follow-up to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. Trench warfare is arguably the worst life available to a human, but reintegrating into civilian life is no fairground ride either. Here is an excerpt:

‘Eternal sleep? They’re lying in the filth at the bottom of a shell-hole, shot to pieces, ripped apart, sunk down in a bog … a hero’s death! What do you think that means? Do you want to know how little Hoyer died? He was caught on the wire the whole day and lay there screaming, and his guts were spilling out like macaroni. Then a shell took off a couple of his fingers, and two hours later, a bit of his leg, and he was still alive and trying to stuff his guts back into his belly with his good hand, and it wasn’t until nightfall that he was finally done for…Why don’t you go and tell his mother how he died, if you think you’re brave enough!’

This month was poppy season. And now that World War 1 is out of living memory and World War 2 is getting there, commemorations seem to be higher on pomp and lower on understanding of what happened and how.

I am reminded of a quote from ‘The History Boys’: “There is no better way of forgetting something than commemorating it.”

Wider World

This month it was reported that Sheffield Hallam University refused to publish an academic’s research exposing Uyghur forced labour in China. Laura Murphy, Professor of Human Rights, described the university ‘explicitly trading my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market.’

This is not the first time the university has been accused of unscrupulous business practices. In 2005, it purchased a building that contained a much-loved recording studio and was also a thriving hub for artists, intellectuals and activists. It boarded up the building and surrounded it with razor wire and had no specific redevelopment plan.

The man who ran the studio told me in 2007 that the university was ‘a glorified property developer’. Being a student at Sheffield Hallam from 2002-2005 was my first phase of adult life and what a phase it was.

At the end of the second year, there was a Hawaiian-themed party where one guy was described as a ‘legend’ because he pranced around and shouted a lot. The same circle of people loved to film themselves getting drunk, performing ‘Jackass’-lite acts and then watching it back later. I sometimes suspected the footage they were making was intended as a recruitment video for Al-Qaeda.

Arguably, the main purpose of a university education is to churn out ‘successful’ people. And that university experience taught me many important things, including that success and scruples are often in direct conflict. Universities are businesses, and what business in its right mind wants to piss off the Chinese Communist Party?