Essaying in the Old Music Room... An adventure in timekeeping, composition and conversation Kirsty Gunn Since the beginning of this strange year 2020,  as the Northern hemisphere has inched, day by day, out of a mild Midwinter into Spring, I  have been at Merton College in Oxford where, despite everything that has been going on in the wider world, life has continued in its calm unchanging way – much as it has continued, I imagine, since the College was founded in 1264. Bells have been calling me to Chapel, to Work, to Lunch and Dinner, to Study, to the Library, chiming out a day as in a series of Les Tres Riches Heures; each enclosed by borders of flowers and the patterning of quads and lawns within a medieval wall.

And every week, three times a week. I have been coming to a small but perfectly formed Georgian building – a grand sort of playhouse, I suppose is how I’ve been thinking of it - set at the end of a long path in the corner of the Fellows Garden.  This is The Old Music Room, where a group of us – colleagues and students – has been meeting to talk about a particular form of and approach to writing... An essay.

Or should I say, essai.  For the way we have been writing, reading, and thinking about this particular form of writing has been guided more by the ‘drawn from life’ observations of a Michel de Montaigne than those teaching and ‘Aims and Outcomes’ learning documents so beloved of educational bureaucrats  and politicians. For sure, the essays demanded by Humanities departments that are to be created in order to homogenise assessment procedures and regulate course content have little in common with the ... read more

Frederic Raphael The Pope delivers blessings to an empty St Peter’s square. The Archbishop of York talks with lengthy admiration about a rabbi who said something worth listening to. Churches are closed; clerics offer the pious no priority channel to the strait gate. Reliance on God’s mysterious ways is not prescribed. Before science became the measurer of all things, the plague and/or Black Death could be blamed on the you-know-whos who poisoned the wells etc., thus saving St Augustine’s claim that God favoured Christians. The stiffening of theology, in the Middle Ages, into hierarchical orthodoxy chimed with lethal epidemics. Centralisation of the creed and the Vatican’s treatment of the Albigensians rallied the apprehensive to Mother Church.

Isolation promotes heterodoxy. Sequestered in his Girondin château, Michel de Montaigne, soon an indexed heretic, advanced singular notions of tolerance while the plague decimated late sixteenth-century ... read more

Robyn Marsack

And time is torn from its rings, and the door of life
Flies open on unimaginable things

Edwin Morgan wrote this back in 1952, in ‘Stanzas from the Jeopardy’, and like many of his lines it feels uncannily apt.

He was determined to reach 90, which he did, despite a cancer diagnosis that suggested his years would fall short of that target. The Edwin Morgan Trust was determined that his 100th birthday should be celebrated appropriately, not just on 27 April but over the whole year. There has been so much planning, and so many willing partners, whose activities have been stymied by the pandemic.

So the Trust has had to swerve online; just as we were preparing to sit back and hand over responsibility, we find ourselves being the ‘ion engine’ after all. The University ... read more