Being a Zoom Student

Being a Zoom Student Many months ago, I signed up to a summer art history course at the Courtauld Institute: a week’s intensive study of Manet and Cezanne. The course would include guided time looking at works by these artists in the Courtauld’s gem of an art gallery in Somerset House. Alas, the suffocating blanket of Lockdown fell on us all. The Summer School was in jeopardy. The Courtauld decided to move some of the courses online, including mine, discounting for the lack of the real art. So it was, in mid-July, that some 20 students filed into a virtual lecture hall via their “devices” (the preferred, rather old fashioned, word for all our phones, tablets, lap and desktops).

The Covid Trolley Problem

The Covid Trolley Problem

 

 

Every student of modern Anglophone philosophy is familiar with the “Trolley Problem”, a thought experiment designed to tease out our moral intuitions when confronted with life-and-death dilemmas. 

Hobbes's Leviathan in the time of Coronavirus

 Hobbes’s Leviathan in the Time of Coronavirus

Thomas Hobbes’s famous treatise on political philosophy, Leviathan (published 1651) has been the subject of a couple of recent articles (May 2020). In The Guardian the political philosopher David Runciman writes that the imposition of national lockdown displays the raw power of governments over their subject citizens, in ways that Hobbes would have recognised and indeed advocated.

Spanish Walk Before The Lockdown

Before the Lockdown – a Last Hike in Spain

Long ago – you must forgive my faltering memory; age and distance make things so blurred, and ancient events hold on by their fingertips, and then drop away. It must have been March 2020 (can you remember then?).

Well, in those times, I went walking in the sierra behind Nerja, guided with friendship and expertise by professional guide, John Keo.

Cars in the Lockdown

Cars as Garden Sheds and Other Uses

In these days of sparse traffic, even if volumes are slowly increasing, I’ve come to note certain features of the vehicle use that still persists.

I leave to one side the obvious – the great numbers of delivery vans chasing after their time slots, and the ghostly empty (at most times of the day) buses.

Lockdown and Boarding school

Lockdown and Boarding School

The tiresome cliché is that prison holds no terrors for anyone who has been to a British boarding school, at least of the type prevalent up to the late C20. It would be trite to adapt the cliché for the current lockdown, but I’d like to stand it on its head. Certain aspects of the lockdown, far from being immunised by a boarding school experience, insidiously recall some of the traumas of that experience.

Lockdown - cinematic echoes

Lockdown – Cinematic Echoes

Sean of The Dead is a comedy zombie film set in North London, using locations near to my place of lockdown. One of the conceits it indulges in is the notion that it is not easy to tell a zombie apart from the ordinarily decrepit, or from an exhausted bus passenger gurning in semi-oblivion.