You don’t have to read particularly far between the lines to get the clear sense he was a
bleeping nightmare as an employee and for his students in every academic institution at which he was employed. He didn’t live full time in any city in which he was employed and didn’t last at any of those institutions for very long. You get the sense Liverpool JM, Leeds Beckett, Glasgow etc were just thrilled to see the back of him, particularly as it’s evident that all he gave a
duck about was himself and his own self-promotion.
It’s also particularly telling that in 260 pages he spends the first 220+ of them going into great and no-detail-too-mundane detail about his Ma, including her taste in laundry detergent (Dreft) and umbrellas (cheap ones from the corner shop), his own impeccable yet quirky tastes in music, cinema, television and clothing as a teen, his expertise in singing karaoke, football, snooker etc as a teen, the sartorial elegance of Savile Row he visited as a teen, humbling visits to the less fortunate as a teen, meetings with great sages who hand down their personal wisdoms to him or evil trolls who tell him he’ll never amount to anything (the race/ethnicities of all these people are always noted), what he wore everywhere he went, all the Strong Black Women who basically did
bleeping everything for him (Ma, long-suffering Deb, his mate Angela at college who it’s pretty clear he glommed onto and who carried him through that degree he scraped) his multitude of diabolical ailments as a child and teen, all his various diagnoses and great sufferings throughout his life, that his ‘university lectureships’ are all flown through and glossed over in about the last 40 pages.
And that 40 pages includes LUDICROUS levels of detail about the events surrounding his viva (which it’s clear when from his own telling was not initially going well for him), as well as a whole host of other utterly nonsensical bollox about his life outside academia. His job at Liverpool JM warrants three pages (and you’ve all seen that), Leeds even less. Thankfully tho, he ‘had a hunch that he thought like a sociologist’ which ultimately led him to Cambridge.
Will try and copy as much of this
rit as I can because as amusing as the rest of his snooker playing karaoke nonsense it, this ‘academic’ stuff is staggering.
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