We asked writers and thinkers associated with Blue Labour for their reading suggestions for lockdown. The choices both reflect the strange circumstances we now find ourselves in and provide the intellectual and cultural backdrop to the wider politics of Blue Labour. The fourth selection in this series is by Liam Stokes.
You can read the first selection, by Jonathan Rutherford, here. The second selection, by Tobias Phibbs, here. The third selection, by Jack Hutchison, here. The fifth selection, by Paul Embery, here. And the final selection, by Maurice Glasman, here.
I can’t claim my lockdown has been terribly studious. I have been incarcerated with my daughter, who turned four during the crisis and enjoyed the controlled carnage of a video-conferenced birthday party with 20 other socially-starved preschoolers. Like parents everywhere, lockdown life for me has mostly consisted of an endless rota of work and childcare as I attempt to maintain my career, the little one’s routine and my sanity.
In the midst of this happy domestic chaos, what time I have found for reading has mostly been absorbed by Father Frederick Copleston’s A History of Philosophy. It was Brenden Thompson who put me onto the idea. Brenden stuck under my nose CS Lewis’ famous exhortation that ‘you cannot intelligently join a conversation at 3pm that began at midday’, and so I decided to use lockdown to join his Philosophy Reading Group. There are now 28 of us connected by Facebook and working our way through A History of Philosophy together, and whilst we have some 2400 years still to go until we’re up to date, it has been a mind-expanding experience. I have always felt that somewhere along the way I missed out on the great conversations that underpin so much of our political conversation, but every autodidactic attempt has been unsatisfying and ultimately unsuccessful. The key, it turns out, is learning in community.
Of course, man cannot live by weighty tomes of philosophical history alone, and a good deal of my other lockdown reading has been in the interests of escapism. Firstly, from the confines of the house itself. I’m a countryman at heart, but I actually live in a quiet street of a pleasant little market town. Which makes me one of the lucky ones, for sure, I can walk out to a park and down a little brook that passes through the town, but in those most restricted days at the height of lockdown I was pining for hills and hedgerows and the people who work them. Luckily, over the years many such people have written some wonderful books, their idiosyncrasies and curious blends of tradition and bloody-minded rebellion reflecting the unique paradoxical nature of the British countryside that they write about. My favourite such writer, if I had to choose, is RWF ‘Willy’ Poole. I have been re-reading his A Backwoodsman’s Year, the most hilarious and heartwarming tour of life in the English uplands that you’re ever likely to read. Of course, the fate of our hill farms currently hangs in the balance as questions of environmental management and global free trade threaten their existence. There are worthier treatises, perhaps, tackling food strategy and ecological degradation with a little more seriousness, but Willy’s book is pure joy. Food and farming, nature, community and love of place are not analysed and presented as any sort of abstract manifesto, instead they are lived. And through Willy’s delightful prose I have been living them right alongside him.
My quest for escape has not, however, ended in the Cheviot Hills of Northumberland. During the hardest moments, I have sought succour in that most postliberal work of fiction, The Lord of the Rings. I don’t know how many times I have read it now, but could there be a more appropriate moment to delve back into its mythology? Legends to live by, as someone smarter than me has called them. Right now we are all grappling with the nature of authority and the proper ordering of society. In the early days of lockdown I felt we spent time in the Shire of Book One, enjoying the warmth of neighbourliness and community yet menaced by some other-worldly evil. Perhaps later, some began to question the exertion of control, and wondered if it is possible for men and women to wield total power in the pursuit of our common good. Tolkien’s heroes, facing their own moment of ultimate crisis, say no. Whether we agree with them or not, in the time of Covid just as in the Third Age of Middle Earth, Tolkien reminds us that the final victory will always be won through the courage of ordinary people (or Hobbits) heeding the call of duty to the people and places they love.
The fourth and final book I have been reading of late is And Still The Music Plays. It might be very bad form to recommend this book, because it was written by my Dad, yet unforgivably until now I have never read it. The subtitle is Stories of People With Dementia, and I finally plucked it off the shelf after ten years because for once the care sector has been at the front of my mind. My Dad has spent his life working with the elderly, so I should be more aware than most that for the fortunate amongst us there is this ever-lengthening stretch of time waiting at the end of our lives, during which someone will need to care for us. The issue surfaces in our politics from time to time and is instantly swamped in ill-temper and partisanship (‘Dementia Tax’, anyone?), but mid-lockdown the grim statistical reality of Covid drove the care sector from the depths and has refused to let it submerge. Almost a third of Covid fatalities have occurred in care homes. Will attention now focus on the needs of those residing in care beyond the immediate crisis? Perhaps. To invert the only Stalin quote everyone knows, the tragedy is not in the statistics but in the individual stories. I won’t lie, I cried buckets reading the stories my Dad records in And Still The Music Plays. Maybe I’m biased. Maybe they move me so mightily because I see within these stories glimmers of tales he told me while I was growing up and I know I should have listened harder because this is important. But I think those of us who believe our politics should start with people, understood in their homes and with their families and communities and their real lived experience, this is the place to begin when we’re ready to think seriously about the system of care in our country once the immediacy of coronavirus recedes.