it less and less as time went on. In seminars he was aware that he was talking far too much himself because it was easier than straining to hear what the students were saying. Meetings became stressful too, for the same reason, and there seemed to be more and more of them in the 1990s - Departmental meetings, Faculty boards, Senate meetings, and subcommittees and working parties attached to all of those - as the bureaucratic octopus tightened its tentacles on academic life. More and more he found himself struggling to pick up the gist of an argument, falling silent, afraid to intervene in case he had got the wrong end of the stick, eventually giving up altogether and falling into a bored reverie - unless of course he was chairing the meeting himself.Then he would sometimes catch the ghost of a smile on someone’s lips or an exchange of amused glances across the table and realise that he had misunderstood something or made an inapposite remark, and some friendly colleague or the Departmental secretary would tactfully rescue him.
So when he was offered early retirement it seemed too good an opportunity to miss: a full pension straight away, and freedom to do his own research untrammelled by the duties of teaching and administration. It came about because of one of the periodic organisational upheavals to which the University’s senior management had become addicted. It had been decided that the Linguistics department, of which he was Head, was too small to be cost-effective as an independent unit, and that it should be merged with English. Staff in Linguistics were offered the alternative options of transferring to another department if they could find one that was willing to have them, or severance on enhanced terms, or early retirement if they were old enough to qualify. His colleagues in Linguistics were up in arms about the proposal, claiming variously that it was a covert way for the University to shed staff, or a cunning plot devised by English to boost their submission to the next Research Assessment Exercise. But he told them resistance was useless. He recognised the logic of the proposal, because several people on the Language side of the English department did work very similar to that of himself and his colleagues. Personally he had no objection in principle to working in an English department. His own first degree had been in English Language and Literature, and although he had taken all the language options in the course, and switched to linguistics as a postgraduate, he had always made extensive use of literary texts in his teaching and research, and he still read poetry for pleasure, which couldn’t be said for many people, including some who taught courses on it. There was however a certain loss of prestige and independence entailed in the plan which made the prospect uninviting.Though he was finding the responsibilities of being the head of his department increasingly irksome, he was not sure he would relish being just one professor among several in English. As a newcomer he would be obliged to be cooperative and accommodating about what he taught, so probably wouldn’t be able to give his third-year seminar course on literary stylistics because that was the speciality of Butterworth, the youngish professor who was the rising star of the English Language sub-department. Putting all these considerations together the conclusion seemed obvious that early retirement would be the best option for himself, and accordingly he took it.
At first it was very enjoyable, like a long sabbatical, but after eighteen months or so his freedom from routine tasks and duties began to pall. He missed the calendar of the academic year which had given his life a shape for such a long time, its passage marked by reassuringly predictable events: the arrival of excited and expectant freshers every autumn; the Department Christmas party with its traditional sketches by students mimicking the mannerisms and favourite jargon of members of staff; the reading week in the spring term when they took the second year to a residential conference centre in the Lake District; the examiners’ meetings in the summer term when, sitting round a long table heaped with marked scripts and extended essays, they calculated and classified the Finals results like gods dispensing rewards and punishments to mortals; and finally the degree congregation itself, processing to organ music in the Assembly Hall, listening to the University Orator fulsomely summarise the achievements of honorary graduands, shaking hands afterwards with proud