More than 40 years ago the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien published August Is A Wicked Month. I haven’t read it, but I’ve always remembered its rather memorable title. It sums up for me that August is not, if these things are possible or jus simply make sense, my favourite month by any stretch. But I don’t know why.
I’ve never much liked August and quite often feel out of sorts for its full four weeks, and only perk up with the beginning of September. It helps that I like the autumn season (fall season) but that is not the reason. In fact there is no reason: I have long — and I mean long – always dislike August. But as I say, I don’t know why. I think it might have to do with August, however, hot (and remember that I live in the United Kingdom where are whether is very inconsistent and seems to follow no pattern) being often the tail end of summer.
We look forward to spring, summer and autumn, but August heralds that summer is slowly over. I’ve admitted that I like autumn, but that autumn is on its way doesn’t much mitigate that summer is ending. Here in Britain we are so unaccustomed to consistently good weather, which is one of the reasons — the other is far cheaper booze — that every year millions pack their bags and head of to the Med countries.
We do get periods of sunny weather, but a mark of how irregular they are is the fact that we always talk about them. I doubt whether Greeks, Italians and Spanish spend part of their time commenting ‘well, isn’t it lovely weather!’
Today is August 12, the ‘Glorious 12th’ when Brits with more money than sense are legally allowed to take to Scottish grouse moors and try to kill as many birds as they can. More to the point, we have now had 11 days in August and all 11 have been pitiful as far as the weather is concerned: overcast, very wet sometimes, quite wet at others, grey, damp, even a bit chilly.
To make matters worse this ‘bad weather’ comes on the heels of some rather hot weather a few weeks ago. I always feel wistful in August. Maybe its the light. Light can create many moods. But I really don’t know why.
Writing this, I can think of one particular August which was decidedly strange. It was the August of 1969. I had just completed my first year at Dundee University and had failed all my first year exams, for the obvious reason that throughout the year (of three semesters) I attended perhaps five or six lectures at most and did very little, if not any, of the work I was expected to do.
At Dundee in those days — the late Sixties, when I was enrolled in the Department of Arts and Social Sciences, ‘social sciences’ being the flavour of the decade, in our ‘foundation year’ — we studied five subjects: Psychology, Political Science, History, Economics and ‘Methodology’ (a kind of precursor to philosophy). My problem was simple, straightforward. We had what were called ‘resits’ at the end of summer and if I did not pass a certain number (I think it was four of the five subjects), I was out on my arse.
But let me be honest: it wasn’t that I was desperate for a university education (totally free in those days here in the UK, with ‘travel expenses’ also payable if you could fiddle them which I could) so that I could make my way in the world with my head held high and forge a grand career for myself in some field or other. It was far simpler than that: if I didn’t make it into second year, I would lose my grant and have to — Jesus, the horror! — work.
The task was straightforward: make sure you get that bloody grant! So once the summer term ended, I did not go home or to stay with a friend (although we then lived in Paris, the atmosphere at home was not very good — the previous Christmas had been awful — so I didn’t fancy that, anyway) but remained in Dundee and set to work learning the curricula of all five subjects on my own. That’s when I discovered, although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, that I can be quite disciplined and if I put my mind to something I can get it done.
But Dundee became a strange town in August. None of my friends and acquaintances remained, the university more or less shut down (although I believe the Students’ Union remained open with a skeleton staff as other students, mainly post-grads I think also remained in Dundee for the recess) and it was just odd. Dundee is a lot further north to where I now live, 573 miles north of where I am now in the far South-West of Britain, and the light was very different. In mid-summer the sky was always light to the north and in mid-winter daylight didn’t last long. And in August the light made me feel even more wistful than usual. But I carried on, took my ‘resits’, passed four out of five of them (I failed Psychology, but was able to take it again at Christmas — still necessary to ensure my university ‘career’ continued — and did pass).
That’s August. I never much like it and it is something of a relief when September comes around.
My university ‘career’ was not otherwise distinguished and in many ways I had a lot of luck. I had originally applied to study philosophy, though not really having much idea what philosophy was. At school I took A-level chemistry and came across the concepts of ‘entropy’ and ‘enthalpy’ and was taken, as one often is at 17, with how we can discuss ‘concepts’, that is what doesn’t actually exist. I eventually linked the idea of ‘discussing concepts’ to philosophy and thought I might find out a bit more of what philosophy was.
In the school library I found a book on Greek philosophy and started reading it, only immediately to be discouraged when in the preface the author (this was in 1967 and the book was at least 50 years old) warned that
no one could begin to understand Greek philosophy without a full understanding of the the Greek lyre and the kind of music it produced. ‘That’s me out of the window, then’ I thought and returned the book.
In my second year I took English, Philosophy and German. Then, at the end of that year I applied for a the four-year Honours course in English and Philosophy rather than the three-year Ordinary degree course on the pragmatic grounds that it would mean an extra year of free money and postponing the dread business of earning a living a little.
The problem was that it was made very clear to us that selection for the Honours course were rigorous and that certainly not everyone was accepted. I was not hopeful, but I kept my head down.
Then, I can’t remember when or why, we were asked to fill in a form as to what we would be doing in our third year. I wrote down ‘Honours in English and Philosophy’ — and didn’t hear another thing. I had somehow greased into the Honours course, though how I don’t know. I was certainly not a model student.
I enjoyed Philosophy and contributed a great deal (though I don’t remember going to many lectures but I was rather more reliable attending tutorials and seminars — I enjoyed them. English? It was all too much — though they would certainly deny it — akin to learning by rote: ‘Fielding’s Tom Jones is a faux-epic something or other’. Note and repeat when asked. What it actually meant I had not a clue, though, relax, I do now.
I might as well finish this account as I’ve now started although it has little to do with August and what a wicked month it is. In my third and fourth years there were no end-of-term exams (another plus point in my book) and the first time I was called to account as in my finals. I’ve mentioned them at length and what happened in an entry I wrote (
you can find it here) when I learned that a Professor Neil Copper had died. But the upshot was that I produced dismal papers for the English department but (I was told) did quite well in my philosophy papers.
Thus although the English department wanted to fail me, the Philosophy department insisted I should get some recognition. I was not awarded an Honours degree but the compromise was that I should get an Ordinary.
In hindsight, my degree was pretty pointless. In those days ‘graduates’ were viewed with suspicion in the newspaper industry, and almost all reporters were school-leavers who had wanted to ‘break into journalism’ (a bloody silly phrase dreamed up to add spurious glamour to an otherwise bog-standard job) from a very early age. And in those days, sub-editors had all once worked as reporters and were not, as increasingly now, recruited directly into the job.
NB There’s only one thing more miserable than spending three days at the local flower festival digging up ‘stories’ and collating ‘results’ than subbing those bloody results. In those days it meant going through the goddam lot and marking them in up in the appropriate style — bold, italic, roman, 12pt, 14pt, this font or that or whatever — for the compositors to set in print. You didn’t and don’t need a degree for that and non-graduates, then the vast majority, thought we graduates would immediately go for glory.
No my degree has been of little use to me, though four buckshee years of living off the taxpayer is not to be sneered at. And that as a much to do with August as nothing else.
Pip, pip.
