What Do I Miss?

There isn't much that I miss about my previous life as an academic. It seemed that every time I managed to get something good going, the University management took it away. I fought tooth and nail to keep the visiting industry lecturers budget, because that was the only way to inspire the students by introducing them to people who looked and sounded like them. Those sessions inspired and energised me, too. They kept trying to take the budget away every year, and every year I explained that the visitors were standing in for a co-lecturer that had left two weeks before the module started, and that they could employ someone to do that job instead of the industry speakers, but that would be more expensive. Every year they backed down. What a waste of energy it all was, but how worth it to hear the experiences of terrific speakers and watch them excite the students about their future.

One year, in the gap between the end of the lectures, their attendant tutorials and leaving work for the very enjoyable drum-kit evening class I'd enrolled on at Camden Working Men's College, I would sit in my office following all sort of Northern Soul links on Youtube down an exciting wormhole of the imagination. A passing student heard what I was listening to and came in for a chat. He was a fan too, and ended up doing a placement as a Northern Soul DJ at an internet radio station.

There was something really luxurious about sitting listening to fabulous music in solitude after a day's work, and knowing that I was heading off to drum. I drummed for three years; we had a great teacher, Alan McCullough, who was eagle-eyed and could spot a slacker or a missed beat even in a class of thirteen students whacking practice pads. Every week I used to feel too tired to go, but as soon as I got there, I'd sit with everyone else for two and a half hours, reading the drum score and playing in unison until it was time to go home. It was Shanne who first persuaded me to go, and I'm so grateful to her for that. Alas, it all was ended by the pandemic. 

What I remember best was the feeling of bliss on a Friday morning when I woke up: drumming is good for your head, not because you're repeatedly hitting something really hard (you're not, you're manipulating the bounce of the taut drum-skin), but because by the time you've co-ordinated four limbs to create a rhythm, there's no room in your head for worries.

Maybe they should re-brand drumming as 'no worries'.