For the first time in many weeks, Best Beloveds, I am typing on a train. As I wandered the aisles, trying to find a functioning power point for my laptop, it all felt very much like home. In fact, it felt very much more like home than my home currently does. As you may recall, I have for some time been threatening to redecorate my flat in a meaningful way and with professional assistance, rather than just running up and down a ladder myself armed with Polyfilla, misplaced hope and magnolia emulsion. Long-term exposure to my own residence, something to which I am not at all used, eventually made chaos and dust sheets inevitable.
Sadly, neither I nor the decorator had been able to guess that many, many layers of increasingly disturbing wallpaper were all that held my residence together. Remove the paper and – as we discovered – a radiator comes adrift in the hall and a huge crack appears in the living room, through which water merrily babbles every time it rains. I live in Glasgow – it rains a lot. The new crack neatly balanced the more well-established living room fissure, which was eventually large enough to allow glimpses of alternative dimensions and the occasional protrusions of alien plasma and fronds.
Meanwhile, I was sitting in on the recording of a radio sitcom, finishing the rewrite for a radio play, tidying a magazine essay and coordinating with the students who nominated me as their candidate for Rector of Glasgow University. So a quiet little spell for me, then. As the roofer (suddenly, I needed the roofer) and painter chatted, I lapsed in and out of consciousness, typed, and prayed that order would restore itself before I got enough rest to rally and become distressed.
Actually, distress was a relatively distant possibility, given that my study and the books were safe. If you're a writer and have ever undergone domestic disruption (been burgled, evicted, forced to renew your heating system, subjected to savage replumbing, joined by demanding and messy visitors) you'll know that scribblers, as a species, have curious priorities. The only thing I was able to find amusing about being burgled (on two occasions) was my instinctive rush to check that manuscripts and back-ups were okay. My priorities make sense to me, but might seem unusual to others. We all have something precious we'd rather not lose, that sustains us, that allows us to be ourselves.
As it happens, the roofer also has what might be considered unusual priorities by someone who perhaps knows little of roofers. Fred (that's not his real name, but roofers need their privacy) is a chum of mine and, apart from being a proper artisan and craftsman of roofs, he is also an artist. He paints – in the sense of producing paintings, rather than refurbishing window frames and coving – sells his work, and has recently been to Stockholm, taking in the qualities of light. Fred isn't the kind of guy who's supposed to take an interest in 19th-century European masters. If he was portrayed on telly, he'd drink too much, or be in some way criminal, because working-class people – like students, like the disabled, like anyone outside the tiny, perceived mainstream – only seem to merit public portrayals as blurry threats, or dysfunctional souls, lost among the deservedly helpless.
At best, a low-budget British movie might remodel Fred as the golden-hearted, but comfortingly stupid father of an attractive and upwardly-mobile youngster. According to our current culture, Fred shouldn't be widely- and well-read, shouldn't be capable of analysing newspapers with amused cynicism and disgust, and shouldn't be able to have coherent and interesting opinions on art, culture, politics, philosophy and spirituality, to name but a few. Fred would be great on The Culture Show, or The Review Show – he would be interesting, coherent and dignified. But he's an autodidact with a working-class accent. And he's a roofer.
If I think about it, I'd estimate that 80% of the human beings I know are appallingly misrepresented in the media. For more than a generation, reality TV has focused on increasingly freakish freaks, intelligent drama has withered, and the definition of current affairs has become depressingly literal, limiting itself to the coverage of car crash celebrities' couplings and media-induced meltdowns. It's unsurprising that public policy has meanwhile become less and less beneficial to the public and our leaders have been drawn from a smaller and smaller elite.
Fred comes from a tradition of self-education and personal dignity that's still lively in the west of Scotland but which is, of course, under threat. I've lost count of the number of people I know who didn't receive a great education, but who then simply went to their local library and started reading at A. This was possible, because they had a library nearby with an extensive stock of free books, free heating and reasonable opening hours. This was also possible because the culture surrounding them helped them believe that the getting of wisdom was worthwhile for its own sake and that it would help them to live better, not simply increase their earning potential – although it might do that, too. In the UK today, it's harder for those who want to become more fully themselves to even start their journeys into what could be a life-long process of education.
And, of course, universities and their students are under attack as never before. Students go into debt to pay for courses with decreasing levels of support from professional staff while greater and greater teaching burdens are placed on postgraduates. Emphasis on revenue-generation alters priorities in such a way that the reputations of institutions and qualifications declines, and a generation mortgages its future to emerge less fitted for adult life, less self-aware and less able to survive in a savage marketplace. This isn't about ivory tower notions and creating an intellectual elite – although the elite always seem to manage to get a very thorough intellectual grooming – this is about making the most of our collective abilities and ensuring our commercial survival, as well as allowing fellow human beings to achieve their fullest potential. The phoney internal markets and fake business practices which have broken the NHS, public transport, the BBC and primary and secondary education are poised to destroy tertiary education, too. They are the same business practices that have dragged us into recession.
Which is why a portion of my last few weeks has been spent trying to air some of these issues as part of the Rectorial debate in Glasgow University. The media found the idea of a Kennedy (Charles) versus Kennedy (AL) clash attractive, as the ingenious and admirable students who nominated me knew they would, and both Kennedys have been able to speak about the need for free education and radically altered priorities. Our team hasn't been playing to win – we won't – we've been playing to try and alter the agenda. The students would have made better speakers on their own behalf than me, but it has been an honour to collaborate with them. They will go on occupying the Hetherington Research Club in a spirit of cooperation and real education and they will go on opposing the Glasgow University cuts. They have no choice. They're fighting for something precious they'd rather not lose, that sustains them, that allows them to be themselves. In many ways, they're fighting for their lives. Onwards.
