The Great Lockdown of 2020
Being forced to stay at home for weeks on end allows the energetic and self-directed to invent new ways of filling their time with productive and satisfying activity. This would be an interesting topic for Marxist thinkers to develops in terms of alienated labour.
However, for someone as basically idle as me, these considerations are somewhat irrelevant. I have however undertaken a sorting out of various journals/papers/magazines which I have not looked at for decades: the decades covered are the 1980s/1990s. The majority of the material kept is that which contains articles by, letters from or reports about me – which I suppose shows immense, but probably not uncommon, egotism. However, there is also material preserved accidentally which is of contemporary interest in one way or another.
I have therefore come back to this blog (the resurrecting of which was a tedious process) so that I can preserve and publish these items. In respect of my own writing, I have resisted making any changes beyond the grammatical. I find there are 2 ways of looking at this material…
- From a political and intellectual perspective – how much have my views changed? How do the arguments stand up now?
- From a psychological perspective – the leap back into a period of my life which was so different and ended over 20 years ago due to Mental Health issues.
The second of these would need some hard thinking about and personal evaluation which I am not sure I wish to do, but at a superficial level, there is that sensation of looking at a very different ‘Nick Hay’ – testimony to how our identities are constantly in a process of construction.
Moving Toyshop 