News From Amphipolis 27/7/26

This will be a shorter newsletter than usual, so I’m glad that I’m not attempting to charge anyone for it… Long-standing readers of this blog, especially those who stuck with the ‘Twelve Days in the Year’ series, will be aware that I’ve been struggling for some years with chronic fatigue of some sort, which was if not caused then certainly exacerbated by my second bout of COVID in 2020. Well, I now have that AND a regular tendency to fall into a black pit of despair at any thought of my job. The great thing about a redundancy process is that one is simultaneously confronted with the possible loss of the role and activities that give life meaning and forced to think about those activities in a way that makes them feel pointless and inadequate. Can anyone fill in a form that asks you to justify your continued employment over other colleagues without a sense that, if I was actually any good, I wouldn’t be in this position? I did manage to finish one writing project over the weekend.…