Ah, A-level results week, and how weirdly enjoyable it is when you’re not doing them yourself, have no children of your own in the game, and nieces and nephews who aren’t yet old enough. Out for a walk with my headphones, I listen delightedly as a triumphant candidate appears on the BBC’s World at One: Evie from Southend, who sounds as pleased as punch. What will she do now, asks the presenter, who also has a smile in his voice. She doesn’t miss a beat. It’s all sorted. In the autumn, she’ll go to Durham University to read… English literature.
This stops me in my tracks. What? Surely everyone knows that English literature is dying. Since 2012, the number of students reading it at university, as I once did, has fallen by more than a third; staff are being laid off, departments are closing, scholarship is missing in action. I’ve just read a “major” new study of the poet WH Auden, and, as I write in my review, its gargantuan size – you could more easily slip a hardback edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course into your handbag than this book – announces it as a relic even before publication. No, Stem subjects are where it’s at now, and my amazement at Evie’s “passion” for her course is going to take a full circuit of the park to fade.
