We are trying to move again this summer, to Ireland. I am, in the way of life at the moment ‘at’ University College Dublin already, although that ‘at’ is an @ and I write this in the room where I’ve done most of my writing for the last few years in my house in Coventry. The house is unnaturally tidy, the bookshelves have space on them after repeated culls (and the closure of bookshops interfering with my usual habits). I still have more clothes than a person ‘needs’, but they all fit me and I have actively decided to keep each one. (I am still arguing with myself about some favourite dresses and what my mother-in-law accurately identified as ‘an evening coat’, which I had previously considered an expensive but glorious mistake since it’s too long to wear on a bike and has no pockets; to keep such clothes now seems either an act of stupid naiveté or a necessary assertion of faith that one day there will be parties again, depending on the mood of the hour.) My son has a school place in Dublin and we rejoiced when Leo Varadkar announced that Irish children will be returning to real-life school in August. I have an Irish social security number and a tax certificate, a long email explaining Irish health insurance that I need to read. We’ve worked out, we think, how to take a Siamese cat across the Irish Sea during a pandemic, and I have permission from my husband to buy a treadmill and take it with us so that I can run from the first day of the two-week quarantine with which our new lives will begin. My sons remarked that as long as there’s water in the taps we’ll survive fourteen days without food, but I’m working towards a better arrangement than that. (I did catch myself wondering if we could eat a lot in Wales before taking the ferry and then get 168 meal replacement drinks delivered, but for any readers with an interest in child protection I promise I won’t do that.)

We started planning this move in the wake of the Brexit vote. I went to the West Cork Literary Festival and shared an event with John Boyne, who spoke of the Equal Marriage Act and the difference between theocratic, conservative Ireland of his childhood and the progressive liberal democracy of today. Someone in the audience said something about living in a time of progress, everyone else agreed, and I thought how good it would be to live in a country where things seemed, by and large and with inevitable exceptions, with a glance towards the climate emergency, to be getting better. Over the following months, I went to more Irish literary festivals, made friends with Irish readers and writers, began to see that the idea that literature is valued more in Ireland than England is not just a stereotype. I liked the much wider range of ages and backgrounds at Irish literary events, and most of all I loved the sociability, the conversations over lunch and in the bar and in taxis and shops, the way almost anyone would chat about books and politics and history and ideas. I found myself staying up late talking to new friends and strangers in a way that I haven’t done since I was a student in England. I want to live in Europe. I want to live by the sea again. I want my kids to start their adult lives in a country more interested in the future than the past. I know Ireland is no eutopia – its environmental record is alarming, there’s a housing crisis that may or may not be solved by a Covid crash but certainly wasn’t solved by the government, it has all the disadvantages as well as benefits of a small country and despite exciting changes in law, the Catholic church casts a long shadow over healthcare and education – but I am excited about the move, and when the emigration bureaucracy feels overwhelming I think of all my conversations with Irish readers and writers, how it will be to teach literature in such a place. It’s embarrassing, but I think I might be moving to Ireland for the craic.

I just hope the craic survives social distancing.

For years I have liked to listen to science podcasts while I run. The English education system required me to choose very early; by fourteen the English are artists or scientists and two years later, often, linguists or social scientists or arts people. I wanted all the languages, because I didn’t plan to stay in England, and so my scientific education was over by sixteen. It took me longer than it should have done to realise what I’d lost, and I began, haphazardly, to fill some gaps. I’m not sure a person can be a critical thinker without some understanding of data and statistics. I rediscovered a childhood fascination for human biology, and in conversation with scientist friends remembered that ‘science’, after all, means ‘knowledge’, and it makes no sense to construct walls between ways of knowing.

Epidemiology is particularly interesting to novelists, whose characters imagine themselves autonomous but are in fact patterns in the author’s mind. Many real-life humans also overestimate their own autonomy (if you doubt this, drop a brick on your foot and see how much freedom of action you have in that moment, only don’t because the NHS has enough to deal with right now). For lucky people in lucky places, it’s possible to forget that we live at the mercy not only of our educations and our neighbours and whoever is in charge, but of our nervous systems, the electricity in our hearts, the bacteria in our blood and guts and, of course, any viruses looking for a new home, which is what viruses do (they have no autonomy either).

Anyway, I listen to epidemiology podcasts, and a few days ago I listened to one from The Guardian exploring, among other matters, why it might be that men seem more vulnerable to Covid-19 than women. Since at that point it was being suggested in the UK and Ireland that people with chronic medical conditions and those over the age of 70 should be subject to indefinite house arrest – in Ireland this is sweetly called ‘cocooning’ but it’s the same thing – it occurred to me that the same logic would imply that men should be locked down longer and harder than women and children. I wrote to The Guardian wondering if anyone else had had this thought. I don’t, I emphasise, think it is a good idea, it just seemed no worse than several ideas that were apparently being taken seriously at the time. Since people of colour also seem more vulnerable than white people, fat people than thin people, poor people than rich people, the same logic would eventually liberate affluent, thin, young white women and all healthy children and leave everyone else locked up. Though I’d have some faith in a world run by children, I have no taste for the racist, sexist and sizeist implications of the rest of that arrangement. My point was that Darwinian thinking destroys some earlier than others but will come for everyone in the end, that ‘solutions’ to contagion that are solutions only for some people are not really solutions at all. Covid-19 in the UK reinforces and even exacerbates most existing social injustice, harming poorer, older, more vulnerable people and people of colour more and faster than it harms the traditional holders of power. The only moment when this disease seems not to conform to Tory priorities is in killing more men than women, and so I gestured in jest towards the logical conclusion of the Malthusian story of the plague year. I don’t want a world run by women or by men, I want a world run by decent human beings with an adequate grasp of social and environmental as well as medical science and a commitment to social justice.

(All that said, I’d rather be in Germany, New Zealand or Denmark than England this summer, but I dare say that’s just coincidence. And I still think school-aged kids might do quite a good job of running the country – it would give them constructive occupation over the summer while their parents get back to work.)

Not politics. I have nothing more to add. (That’s not true. Like most of my friends, I find it hard to talk about anything else these days but I have nothing new to say and most of the talking is despair. Left, always, if there’s a choice, but more importantly Remain and so there isn’t a choice. Vote Green, except that splitting the liberal vote risks letting a Tory in. Hold your nose and vote Lib Dem. Emigrate, if you can find somewhere not also in or near the grasp of right-wing demagogues, not that there’s much point because climate change and air pollution don’t stop at borders and anyway you can’t emigrate any more because you’re about to lose freedom of movement and reciprocal healthcare arrangements. Despair.)

No, I mean literal left and right. One side of your body or the other. One side of the road or the other. I have no idea which is which. Mostly I get by because I know that I wear my watch and my wedding ring on the left, but I still have to look at my hands as I approach the part of the sentence where I have to choose the word, and if someone else says ‘turn left’ I often guess and I’m often wrong. I don’t usually take exercise classes but in Pilates for Runners I have to wait to see which side everyone else uses when the teacher gives an instruction. I was hopeless in childhood ballet classes. I usually get it right when driving or cycling because I know that left is the easy one and right is across traffic, but I’m spending as much of this last European summer as possible in countries where the opposite is true and that makes me particularly scatty because I need first to remember that left is the easy one and then that I’m now in a place where left is the difficult one. (It’s all right, I never drive outside the UK and Ireland and I wheel my bike over junctions even in Denmark.)

I’m better at right and left on the road than walking or indoors because the easy/difficult distinction when driving or cycling makes right and left different experiences in a way that they’re not in a room or on a path. I can remember a qualitative difference where I have no purchase on an arbitrary binary. For the same reason, I know how many days February has but cannot retain information about the other months; if they were all different I’d have no trouble but though it’s my job to imagine and inhabit other people’s realities, I don’t understand how anyone remembers the 30/31 groups. (Yes, I know the rhyme, but it rhymes and scans just as well when the months are wrong so it’s not much use as a mnemonic.) I have to think of, or better, look at, an analogue clock to know clockwise from anti-clockwise, which means that without contextual data such as the name of the last meal or the position of the sun I can’t read an analogue clock that doesn’t have numbers because I don’t know 8 from 4 or 2 from 10 unless they’re written out.

I used to be painfully ashamed of this confusion, convinced that it was a symptom of wider inadequacies to be concealed at all costs. It’s one of the pleasures of middle age to be able to write this. I’m also, by the way, terrible at verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests. There are small mammals out there, certainly birds, capable of higher scores in standardised aptitude testing; I have no idea which of the patterns I can see is the one recognised by the test. By objective measures, I am very stupid. All this leaves me deeply sceptical about the value of box-ticking as a way of assessing human beings, even for educational purposes where you might hope that particular competencies can be tested. I hope my own incompetence makes me a better teacher, because I know very well what it’s like to be the one at the back who doesn’t know the answer, doesn’t understand the question, and is hoping only to escape the seminar with dignity apparently intact. Students can’t learn and therefore I can’t teach as long as the fear of humiliation is in the room, and though I don’t know if the door is on left or the right I work very hard to expel the fear of failure. At least for other people.

As the likelihood of the UK crashing out of the EU with no deal increases, we are being warned to prepare for disrupted supply chains and shortages of food and medicine. (Quite why any country would do this to itself is a question I won’t try to answer here: I suppose the logical consequence of nostalgia for the Blitz is the wilful recreation of wartime conditions and we should perhaps be grateful that so far we know of no plans for the UK to subject itself to aerial bombardment, doubtless partly because we’ve sold all the weapons to Saudi Arabia.)

Those who can afford it are stockpiling, using repeat prescriptions at shorter intervals to accumulate a surplus, checking the country of manufacture of preferred toiletries and cleaning products, stocking up on olive oil and tinned tomatoes and good chocolate and thereby, of course, preparing the rich/poor divide to be even more obvious in the days after Brexit.

I do not want to feast while my neighbours starve. I do not want to internalise, or model to my kids, the idea that private hoarding is the correct response to collective suffering, but that was why I voted to stay in the EU, and why I have been marching and writing letters about it for the last two years. If the collective will is for Brexit, if the people have indeed spoken and they have chosen poverty and sickness and ignorance as matters of principle, I am not sure that I understand my obligations towards the people as I would in the case of war or natural disaster. Some people wanted this, others didn’t. It’s not hard to feel that those of us who didn’t want it might reasonably attempt to save ourselves from the consequences. We have bought a big freezer.

Still, the European produce this household would miss most can’t be stored and depends on exactly the just-in-time supply chains most likely to fail: salads, fruit and vegetables coming mostly from Spain and later in the year from Italy and France. We can’t stockpile lettuce. We could have planted some, but slugs and birds have eaten everything we’ve tried to grow in this garden and anyway the idea of suburban self-sufficiency has always seemed odd to me. Much of the point of urbanisation is that you don’t have to be out there at dawn digging holes and picking snails off things because you’re going to go to work and use your skills to earn money so you can buy food grown by someone doing it on a scale that allows us all to specialise. I like to have a tomato plant or two and it’s always nice to stand under the tree and eat a plum warm from the sun, but I never wanted to be a farmer.

So what should we buy, I kept asking, by which I meant, what scenario are we imagining, what is the setting of the story in which we find ourselves? Is this like the kreppa in Iceland in 2009, when food imports slowed and there wasn’t much fruit and veg, or are we looking towards North Korean-style isolationism? I’ve been teased since Names for the Sea came out for taking smoked paprika and pomegranate molasses to Iceland during the crisis, but the point was exactly that they weren’t necessities, like everyone else we used Icelandic necessities and they were fine, but dining on fish, potatoes and cabbage most nights is more interesting if you can roast your potatoes with paprika and steam your cod with tamarind. So we should probably stock up on spices, though it’s hard even for me to take seriously the prospect of a national shortage of sumac. Obviously we should be more worried about antibiotics (or medical staff, many of whom are EU nationals racing for the exits), but I can’t do anything about those, and that, of course, is the point of stockpiling: not that when the hospitals lose power an extra tub of peanut butter is going to make a difference, but the comforting idea that whatever civil disorder and shortages might happen outside my house, inside we can still have the Somali greens and rice from the Persepolis cookbook and the aubergine with walnuts and pomegranates. (I know that part of the point of the Brexit vote is that it should not be business or even dinner as usual inside the houses of the bourgeoisie. I know that the whole idea is that people like me stop thinking about sumac.) It’s not that I think the loss of ingredients is the most serious problem facing post-Brexit Britain, just that it’s one of few I might be able to mitigate for my own household, at least for a few weeks.

There are deer in the woods, my son says, we should get big knives for gutting them. You’re in the wrong book, I say, I’m not planning for Cormac bloody McCarthy, I was wondering more if we’re thinking dried pulses or parmesan, basics or luxuries. Are we preparing for A Provincial Lady in Wartime or just a return to the 1960s, say the scene in A Summer Birdcage where the cooking of spaghetti with wine in the sauce indicates bohemian sophistication? Little House on the Prairie (in the West Midlands) or Helen Dunmore’s Siege? How long are we planning for, anyway? There’s no happy ending in sight and we can’t store a lifetime of soft fruit.

It’s all silly. Stockpiling is just a performance of the illusion that we can individually save ourselves from communal folly. I’ve been helping out in the local food bank and it’s painfully obvious that cans of beans or even bottles of extra-virgin olive oil are no answer to this country’s problems. We shouldn’t be stocking our new freezer with frozen raspberries and spinach, we should be out on the streets giving everything to make sure nobody’s children need private stashes of food and medicine and water.

Even so, we’ve been out on the streets and will be again but it didn’t help, and come the end of March no moral principle is going to feed the kids. What harm does it do, to store a few bags of frozen veg at home rather than in some supermarket depot?

A few years ago, my students started to use a word I hadn’t heard before. They’d say a character or a situation was ‘relatable.’ Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester was relatable, but her friendship with scholarly and pious Helen Burns wasn’t. Lydia Bennett’s penchant for shopping was relatable. They meant that certain courses of action were familiar to them, that they could see themselves in the novels we were reading in class. To some extent, this recognition was useful to me, because I could use it to show how literary texts are complex, living beings that contain their own contradictions. Austen leaves us space to understand Lydia as well as her superior sisters. Like any first-person narrator, Jane Eyre is not wholly reliable, there’s some sly invitation to readerly irritation with the saintly Helen. I like readers to learn to trust their instincts, to see that their emotional responses to novels are anticipated by the words on the page.

But there is a problem with ‘relatability’ as well, especially when it’s used as a standard of merit. Naturally, the books that are most relatable to me are likely to concern the lives of educated women, probably mothers, probably white and heterosexual, in European cities. (There are some outstanding novels in this category: I don’t suggest that there’s any particular correlation between literary merit and identity markers.) It’s not very hard for me to find fiction that’s ‘relatable’, that mirrors my own assumptions and experience of the world, because people like me write books and publish them. I find that fiction and I read it, often with pleasure and sometimes with admiration, but I look for books of all kinds that are not ‘relatable’ to me, books that are windows more than mirrors. If fiction has a moral purpose – it doesn’t have to have a moral purpose – it’s in letting us see our shared world from places other than our own and through eyes other than our own, giving us versions of human experience and history and geography that are not at all ‘relatable.’

Writers of all kinds make windows not mirrors. We make stuff up, that’s our job. We imagine realities we have not experienced. I’m not suggesting that readers should avoid work by writers whose lives are like their own, because even within our tight little boxes of class and gender and national identity and ethnicity and religion and all the others, there are various and incompatible experiences. Some readers have told me that the relationship between Ally and her mother in Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children is implausible because ‘no mother treats her own child like that’, that Anna’s desperation in Night Waking misrepresents the experience of sleep-deprived parents, that there’s no way Adam in The Tidal Zone would be thinking about laundry while his daughter is in hospital. If the characterisation is at fault, if it seems that that fictional character could not behave in that fictional way, fine, the novel is flawed. But if the problem is that the reader’s own experience doesn’t include what she is reading about, that’s what fiction is for: a window into a world in which you may never (lucky you) walk.

‘Relatability’ is only ever a coincidence, but the kind of coincidence that happens to some people much more than others.

Like many novelists, I’m interested in the gaps and ghosts in the historical record, the people who flit through the background leaving the scent of untold stories on the air, the events for which the evidence is fragmentary. Prehistory feels different. Prehistoric experiences are by definition untold, but people were – probably, maybe – so different then, their experiences so far from and perhaps irrelevant to ours, that most readers and writers don’t go there much.
 
But prehistoric lives have always fascinated me. I knew from childhood that literature was my first love, but I wish I’d been educated in a system that let me study more than one subject because I’d have done archaeology too (and textile arts, and ceramics, and biology, and human geography and history and lots of languages, Italian and Greek and Japanese). One of my early memories is finding a nicely-weighted flint with a sharp edge near the top of a mountain in the Lake District and insisting that it was a prehistoric hand-axe and we should take it home with us; my parents later let me take it to an open day at the Manchester Museum where a curator confirmed my story. I remember holding it, hefting it, thinking about the hands that had made it and the fingers that had rested where mine were. 
 
I spent several childhood summers with my grandparents on the Orkney islands, where in those days all the prehistoric tombs and chambered cairns were fenced to keep the cattle out but otherwise open to anyone at any time. I used to wriggle through the low doorways and climb down into the dark hollows where bodies had lain for centuries, often with strange company: dead eagles and dogs, jewelled swords, pots of grain. I was afraid of what was (not) there, and drawn by the physical proximity of these unknowable lives and deaths. I returned as a teenager, roaming further, pacing around standing stones and trying to intuit the geography of people who were like us and yet utterly unlike us.
 
The fascination persists, shaping my new book Ghost Wall. Foundation myths live in prehistory, back just before the inconvenient truths of the historical record, and foundation myths feel very relevant at the moment. I live in a country where xenophobia and nativism have become normal in the last couple of years, where the rights of people perceived not to be British, or not British enough, are routinely denied.  If the legal right to a British passport doesn’t make you ‘British’, what does? Is it enough if both your parents were born here? How far back do you have to go? The idea of hereditary nationality is odd, mixing blood and land in a way that you’d think we’d know can only end badly, and yet here we all are, many British passport holders scrambling around in our attics trying to find Granny’s Irish birth certificate or some proof of great-grandpa’s loss of citizenship in World War Two, while others who have lived and worked and paid taxes and raised children here for decades are more desperately scrambling for evidence that they should be allowed to stay. That question from two years ago, to leave or remain, who is in and who is out, takes personal and violent form in houses, streets, schools and hospitals across Britain.
 
We’re told that those who wanted to leave the EU two years ago now want everyone else to leave Britain (I suspect it was more complicated than that). In this story, the country was better before the immigrants came, when all the inhabitants were native British. When, I wonder, was that? Before the Windrush? Before the Empire brought people from India and Ireland and parts of Africa to live and work in Britain in the nineteenth century? Before the transatlantic slave trade? Before William and Mary came from Holland to rule us? Maybe before the Norman Conquest, before all those French people brought wine and made us stop speaking Anglo-Saxon? No, because the Angles and the Saxons came from the Nordic countries via France (Saxony, in fact). Before the Anglo-Saxons we had the Romans, bringing underfloor heating and literacy but definitely not British and not even, actually, very Roman; there were Syrian and German troops in Yorkshire and Northumberland two thousand years ago, coming over here and making the roads run straight. And writing things down: there were runes and bits of script before the Roman conquest of Britain but our historical record begins with the arrival of those foreign troops. The ‘Britons’ who experienced that invasion had come, a few generations earlier, from Ireland and Brittany (Britain is named after part of France), their material culture distinctively Celtic. There were people in these islands before the Celts came, and they left some stones and bone fragments, just enough for us to know that they, too, came from elsewhere. 

Go back far enough and we all came out of Africa, or Eden if you prefer a foundation myth to archaeology. Either way, according to the logic of national blood, none of us belong on these islands.

I’ve been running for a few years. I don’t usually write about it because running talk is boring, often even to runners, and I’m sceptical about the frequent suggestion by writers-who-run that there is some causal connection between the two activities. Writing can be compared to almost any other activity; washing up (persist until it’s properly done or you’ll regret it later) or driving (you won’t be able to see your destination when you set off, only the road in front, but you should still know where you’re going) or cleaning out a septic tank (get in there, do what you came for, get out), so there’s no particular need to reach for the self-aggrandising similes of running marathons or giving birth. There are lots of good reasons to make a habit of going for a run, but mostly I do it as self-soothing. I wouldn’t say running makes me calm but it makes me calmer, more patient, more tolerant. It’s much easier to sit through a time-wasting meeting or walk at the pace of a small child if you ran ten miles first.

We’re on holiday in Scotland at the moment, mostly climbing mountains which is mostly what we do on holiday, and it’s been raining rather a lot even by the standards of Scottish walking holidays. I’ve been getting up early to run so it doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s day, and a couple of days ago I found myself in my running clothes at 6.30 am, looking out into heavy rain and remarking piteously to my husband that I wished I wasn’t the kind of person who feels driven to run a long way in the rain before breakfast while on holiday. Well then, he said sensibly, don’t be that person, I don’t know what you think you have to prove, I’m going back to bed. I laced up my shoes and went out, telling myself it was fine if I just did 10k since we were after all going to climb a mountain after breakfast, that I could always turn back if it was too horrible, but of course, as I’d known I would, I ran for an hour and a half and, as I’d known, really, I would, came back grinning and glowing as well as wet and muddy.

I still never really believe it before I set off, but running in the rain is the best running. You don’t get cold because you’re running, but also you don’t get hot because of the rain, which means you can go further and faster in greater comfort. Even the dog-walkers prefer to stay in when it rains, which means that when not on the West Highland Way I can run along the canal and in the park and other places normally off limits to anyone afraid of dogs and their owners. It took me a while to learn that you want to wear as little as possible for rain-running, because a thin layer of lycra feels like a swimming costume while any addition layers are just a cold compress that will chafe and make you chilly, so I run in shorts and a vest and feel rain on my skin and in my hair, feel myself almost fully in the weather and moving fast and strong through mud and puddles and not scared of what’s out there but part of it. When we went up the mountain later we were, quite properly, wearing waterproof layers over our thermal layers over our base layers and I had padded hiking socks and wool socks under my hiking boots and all of that kept us safe if not comfortable for a long day high up in wind and rain, but I remembered my bare-shouldered early morning run with a small thrill.

We have just moved house. I know I said I wouldn’t, ever again, but it’s like giving birth, one says that every time while the pain is fresh and then it begins to seem that although the process is a nuisance, the end result would be such an improvement, would make the lives of all concerned so much pleasanter, that it’s just mindless conservatism to stay put. Ah well, said one of the removal guys, they say we all move house eight times, which prompted me to count and realise that one of my purposes in life is apparently to counter the couples – our new neighbours, mostly – who’ve lived in the same house since 1963. Counting all my student houses as one, I’ve moved house 17 times in my 41 years. If you count them separately, it’s 23. Can you imagine, said my husband after talking to some of those lovely and sessile neighbours, living in one place for fifty years, and we looked around at our new kitchen which is very fine indeed, especially first thing in the morning when the sun’s on the garden, and reckoned we might just about have fifty years, maybe, or at least one of us might just about have fifty years if we make the rash assumption that healthcare will still be available in Britain in the second halves of our lives. Nope, we said, let’s not. We’re already talking about the next house, about how we’ll arrange the next move, which won’t be for a while, probably not until the kids have finished school which gives us eight years here which is twice as long as I’ve lived anywhere else.

Plainly, I like moving on, don’t much want to settle. It’s partly the same reason I tend to work quite fast: life is short, the world is wide, there’s a lot to learn and see and say and do and none of us knows how much time is left. (‘Second half’? Maybe, who knows.) But I have opposing tendencies too. I don’t like e-books and I read a lot, less than I used to when I didn’t have kids and a house and a full time job but still two or three bedside novels a week, plus whatever I’m reviewing, plus whatever I’m teaching the following week, plus research for whatever I’m writing which can mean another ten books in a week, easily, if it’s not a teaching week and I’m in a research phase. I use the university library, of course, and all teaching preparation is re-reading, but nonetheless books come into this house faster than most even before you allow for the other bibliophiles who live here. I also knit, which means both that visits to bookshops sometimes result in the purchase of books about Fair Isle patterns or Japanese lace as well as the latest literary fiction, and that I buy yarn considerably faster than I knit it. We have a family mantra, aimed mostly at the well-meant advice of the generation for whom it was the other way around: stuff is cheap and space is expensive. I repeat it to myself at knitting festivals (yes, of course there are knitting festivals, and they make much more sense than music festivals: I promise no-one at a knitting festival will try to sell you mud to put on your face or a mindfulness workshop under a tree), but I still buy too much yarn. Well, frankly I’m at the point where any yarn is too much.

We failed to go through all our stuff before we moved. Term-time, my new book taking shape, the busiest phase of my husband’s working year, school runs and work trips and an on-again, off-again property transaction that meant we didn’t really believe it was happening until it was almost too late. We did sift the books, lugging piles off to Oxfam, but found as we unpacked that we were handling a lot we’d never read again. Who bought this, we demanded of each other, and why? I read it as an undergrad, we said. I really loved it twenty years ago. Or, I hated that, it made me so angry, I can’t think why I’ve kept it so long. Or, oh, that, it was OK, I quite liked it, slow in the second half though. I used to want to keep all the books, to believe that my powers depended on them, that they were a kind of memory bank. Some of them are. I wouldn’t be without the version of the English canon that the Oxford English Faculty gave me: Chaucer and Langland, Shakespeare and Marlowe, Spenser and Milton, Donne and Marvell, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Arnold and Tennyson, the wild battalion of dead white male poets to whose rhythms I walk when comfort is scarce. Break, break, break/ On thy cold grey stones oh sea. The melancholy long withdrawing roar. Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course/ With rocks and stones and trees. Where Alph the sacred river ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea. I hope they’ll be the last words I forget but meanwhile I need them on paper, at my back. (I always hear/ Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near.) I like my bashed old student editions, with my witless pencil notes in the margins – did I think my older self would go through with an eraser one day?

I wouldn’t like to face the world without Austen’s complete works on my shelf, or Charlotte Brontë’s, or George Eliot’s. (You can take Hardy. And Henry James.) I disagree with Virginia Woolf quite a lot but I still need her to be there. And TS Eliot, nostalgic old git. And Auden and definitely Derek Walcott, I like reading him alongside Donne. I’ve outgrown Plath, she could probably go to Oxfam now and anyway I’ve got her in my head (Love set you going like a fat gold watch), but I’m holding disloyally on to Ted Hughes; I don’t care, I find, now, if people were wrong as long as they could write.

Do you think, I said to my husband, that if we went on continually packing and unpacking the books we’d eventually lose all of them? No, he said, you’d get down to about five shelves and you’d stop, they’d be the ones you really do want.

I want, it turns out, the canon. I want the tradition I inherited, which is also, increasingly, the one I try to pass on my students. There are few women’s voices on this course, I say, let’s talk about why that is, and then I go ahead and give to them what I was given. Look, I say, a heteronormative discourse, isn’t it beautiful? There’s the homophobia: isn’t it a fine rhyme scheme, do you see what he did with the stressed syllables there? As my country accelerates into a world I recognise only from the darker pages of the history books, I find myself less and less interested in ideological forms of cultural criticism. I want the words we’ve had for centuries, the beautiful ones that tell some truth.

Of course I was a Remain voter. I’m an academic, well aware that most of the research in this country is funded by the EU. Most of my friends and many colleagues are EU but not UK citizens. I once spoke fluent French and German, can get by in Italian, understand some Spanish, Dutch and Icelandic. I am more bothered when we run out of olive oil than when we run out of milk. I’m the descendant of middle-European refugees, educated at private school and Oxford (the clue was in the languages). I blame those in power for manifest social injustice, not immigrants. I donate to charities helping refugees and campaigning for human rights and have probably not, honestly, paid similar attention to local need, not beyond talking a lot, making a fuss about libraries and putting the odd tin of soup in the food bank. Come the revolution, I’ll be up against the wall. For the first time in my life, I find myself wanting things the way they were.

The serious study of history is probably the best protection against nostalgia. It helps if you’re a woman working in a profoundly conservative field; the gender pay gap in academia is apparently intractable and surprisingly wide. Many of the senior men earning fifty per cent more than I do for the same work are loudly nostalgic for the golden age of academia in which their working lives were unregulated and unaccounted, which also happen to be years in which academia was even more white, male and upper-class than it is now. These men’s outrage at the end of the university as gentlemen’s club is unceasing, and often dressed in the language of Marxism in which, despite six-figure salaries and hours arranged to suit their convenience, some professors are able to imagine themselves as the oppressed proletariat. I have always been awed by the privileges of academic life, grateful to be well paid for work I enjoy and in no way able to imagine my position in the world as unfortunate or oppressed. Any turning back of a historical clock would give me fewer opportunities and a harder time, because however much I might enjoy resenting the baby-boomers for their free education, ride on the property market and final salary pension schemes, the women of that generation opened doors for their daughters and the women and men leave us equal opportunities legislation that makes it harder for racists, misogynists and homophobes to order our society.

There are plenty of less individual, less class-specific, reasons to disdain nostalgia. I am not suggesting that the apex of progress is the admission of half-Jewish middle-class white women to the professoriat. Here and now we have clean water, indoor plumbing, sterile surgery, antibiotics. Contraception, dishwashers. State education. The Clean Air Acts (at least we know how to deal with air pollution now, and please note that all of these useful things come to us through academic research of the sort for which this country now has no plans). If I could choose to live anywhere in the world at any time in history and could not choose my position in the hierarchy or my state of health, despite all the rage and despair of the last few weeks and months and years I would still choose to be in northern Europe in the early twenty-first century. Probably not in Britain, though for a British writer being here still has some fairly obvious advantages because writers make and feed on national stories and local languages, but not very far away.

So I would really like to find a way to move away from my newfound nostalgia, from my persistent sense that things are worse now than they were and that my children’s lives will be harder than mine has been and that the students whose graduation I will attend later this week have been exploited and betrayed by those whose deepest human instincts as well as professional responsibilities should have been to protect and inspire. I do not wish to spend the second half of my life pining for what I did not recognise at the time as an era of hope. I do not want to despair of England now and I do not want to become conservative. I would like to find intelligent reason for hope and to remain progressive.

Someone, another writer who wanted me to do something for which he thought himself too busy, recently said ‘Goodness me, you are prolific.’ I was, perhaps unreasonably, annoyed. He sounded like the lord of the manor talking about an fecklessly fertile peasant (male poets do sometimes have that air as they speak of female novelists). I came home and expressed my views, perhaps at some length, and was reminded that I have published eight books in the last seven years and that, however irritating the conversation might have been, that’s quite a lot. Yes, I said, but one of those books is very short and co-authored (with Alec Badenoch, who did at least half of the work), and one is an academic monograph whose research predates my career as a writer, and anyway the point is that ‘prolific’ makes it sound easy, as if I just fart and another book comes out. Now, compared to almost every other way of making a living, of course there’s a sense in which writing books is easy. You can do it in cafés while sipping something nice, at home wearing pyjamas with a cat on your lap, in a beautiful old library where silence is the rule and no-one’s allowed to bother you. You can stop at any moment to go for a walk in the sunshine or get your hair cut or nip round the shops on a weekday morning while it’s quiet. This is not nursing or mining or primary school teaching. It’s not general practice or banking. There are no hours, no dress-code and no line-managers. I am not suggesting that in those terms, writing, or for the matter of that most other creative practices (we might exempt dance, perhaps), are ‘hard work.’

Writing may not be hard work, but it is difficult work. I have trouble imagining reading or writing an ‘easy’ book that is not also a bad book: predictable, formulaic, derivative? The difficult part of writing is making a new thing – the creative act, in fact – so if it’s not difficult, it’s probably not writing in the form that interests me. None of my books was easy to write, and if I make books fast I’d say it has more to do with being driven than being ‘prolific.’ With taking life fast, because it’s short. With glimpsing mortality standing always behind the curtains, and having things to say before I meet it face to face. Kathleen Jamie, one of my favourite writers, in one of my favourite books writes:

Once, I asked my friend John–half in jest–why we are so driven. By day, John counsels drug addicts; by night he is a poet. He wrote back, half in jest: “You know, my job isn’t to provide answers, only more questions. Like: why are we not more driven? Consider: the atoms of you have been fizzing about for a bit less than five billion years, and for forty-odd of those years, they’ve been pretty well as self-aware as you. But soon enough they’ll go fizzing off again into the grasses and whatever, and they’ll never, ever know themselves as the sum of you again. That’s it. And you ask me why we’re driven? Why aren’t more folk driven? Whatever are they thinking about?”

That said, I’m going to try to be less driven this time. The new book having gone away, I am bereft of the other world in my head and my impulse is set to and make another one, fast. I don’t remember how to manage daily life without the parallel world of a novel-in-progress running at the same time, and I don’t know why I would want to do so anyway. But for six months I’m going to try to reallocate my writing time to reading. I’m going to try not to write, and we’ll see what happens.