In the last few weeks, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced a crackdown on ‘rip-off degrees’ as a key pledge of his election campaign, following on from proposals first made in July 2023 (though the issue of ‘mickey mouse’ degrees has a much longer history). The gist of the policy is to do away with ‘soft-touch degrees with high drop-out rates that fail to land graduates with a well-paid job’ (Rodger, 2024). More specifically, there will be limits on recruitment where providers fail ‘to deliver positive outcomes for students on HE courses,’ as well as reductions in ‘the maximum fee and loan limits for foundation years in classroom-based subjects… which cost less to deliver and in which there has been rapid and disproportionate growth’ (Department for Education, 2003, p. 1).

I’ve long been convinced that artists have a responsibility to work actively for the betterment of the world. I would go so far as to say that this must be a basic condition for all humans. Artists, however, are uniquely placed to challenge, disrupt, provoke, to slip through the defences of calloused minds behind which dwell ‘the better angels of our nature.’

We live in an age of stuff. In multiple aspects of our modern lives, we are confronted with an oftentimes overwhelming abundance, and an insidious demand for our attention: the colossal archives of services such as Spotify and Netflix offer more entertainment than could be ingested in several lifetimes, and this with only a superficial appreciation of the material; superstores and online merchants stock a consistently shifting and seemingly bottomless assortment of products, most of which you don’t know you need until personalised advertising hits you; out-of-sight technology graveyards overflow with discarded smart-phones and tablets, considered obsolete before a lightbulb has run its course; social media platforms open a window onto others’ lives, making a soap opera of the world around us, whispering promises of absolution and fulfilment with just a little more scrolling. The message is clear: more is better. That spiritual hole which yawns inside so many of us can only be satisfied by more stuff.

In the autumn of 2021, in the haze of a world reeling from the shock of a global pandemic, jazz faculty members at Leeds Conservatoire, myself amongst them, were offered a small bursary towards continuing professional development. After one lesson with the extraordinary Indian violinist Kala Ramnath, I decided to try my hand at something else entirely. Thus it was that my relationship with the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi (尺八), began, not altogether surprising considering my longtime fascination with the country and its rich culture.

This epistolary fiction, in the form of a first-person account written to an unnamed correspondent, describes the author’s recent acquisition of the Mellowdy implant, a futuristic technology which appears to function like a music streaming service wired directly into the brain (the mindstream, responding in real-time to physiological signs and shifting algorithmic trends).

As a student of Newcastle University, I am deeply concerned to learn of the new relationship between the institution and multinational defence firm Leonardo. The company’s role in several notorious conflicts, including in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, is documented, and there is speculation about the implementation of its technology in Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza.

In the light of the dispassionate response to the plight of the Palestinian people of the majority of mainstream British politicians on both sides of the chamber, I have never been more ashamed to be British. Israelis and Palestinians all deserve peace and compassion. I pray that we won’t have to look back on this sequence of events as one of the darkest moments in our collective humanity.

Anyone who spends time on Twitter and similar platforms will have noticed the recent uptake of ‘critical race theory’ as a popular buzz phrase, typically used by politicians and commentators to vilify those who make the case for wide-reaching societal, systemic change. The stuffy whiff of academia is conjured as a lazy refutation of legitimate — for many, life or death — concerns and calls for change.

Some of us go our entire lifetimes making only brief excursions into the unprotected outdoors, timorously scurrying from front door to car seat, from car seat to office, from office to car seat, and on and on and on, ad nauseam. For those brave souls who muster the courage to expose their smooshy flesh suits to the indifferent elements, airpods conjure invisible walls which travel with them where’er they may wander.

Plurality is our reality. We are the totality of our experiences, and those experiences are legion and infinite. We are consistently enriched and enlivened by our interactions and relationships, however small or seemingly insignificant. Change is the only truth; to fight against it is pure folly, like trying to hold back the ocean with an umbrella. Britain is a complicated and conflicted place with a muddled history in which ideas of purity, ownership and nationalism are misguided and ultimately groundless.

Glacially patient inhalations and exhalations, like some aquatic behemoth with slow veins, impossibly veiled, delicately breaching the surface to steal precious moments of moonlight. A broken siren song drifts dangerously, unheeded by ancient shore-side ceremony.

Tonight in the car on the way back from Leeds, I was struck by the force of vocalist Israel Fernández performing his composition El Anhelo. The overwhelming weight of times past, a gargantuan, writhing mass of experiences remembered and forgotten, flooded over me, staggeringly unexpected, catching me entirely unawares.

In listening, we allow ourselves to be moved, to be moved in turn, to be transformed together.

If you’re not saying anything, then why should I listen? Same shit, different day. Coercion and complicity. Give me some grit. Throw some dirt in my eyes. Call me out. Anything but this pantomime of rigor mortis grins, these obsequious slugs towing the line under the flag of creativity. Better frustration, better rage, better desperate confusion than this servile spectacle, this dreadfully delightful jolly.

Finger snapping. Eight fingers on eight strings. Black and white echoes of crooked cops and damply reflective midnight streets. Quicksilver flight. Ocean surge. Pedantic, relentless deformation, forward motion. Fifth mode of the melodic minor, major in the bottom and melancholy on top, the supposed dichotomy of existence. Pull the wool from your eyes. Wool from where, and who put it there, from which monstrous sheep? Stuck in a groove, mutation every 33 and a third revolution, not a line but a circle.

When in dialogue with others, deviation represents the locus of discovery, challenge and renewal, ultimately world-making or -unmaking. Such junctures can be small, necessitating only a slight change of direction, taking a side-road or diversion; or they can be paradigm-shifting, ego-eviscerating seismic convulsions, tearing up the map altogether (did the map even exist in the first place?). Being open, willing and prepared to learn from these pivotal moments is to begin to see through the fundamental delusion of inherent existence.

My Dear Fly, I do so want to co-exist with you, but you’re making it terribly difficult.

Allan Holdsworth, a human who was gone before I knew what I’d lost, and indeed what the world had lost. An enigma to the very end, an artist in the truest sense of the word, equal parts mad scientist, tidal instrumentalist, visionary composer and reluctant sage. Holdsworth’s alien landscapes, oftentimes jarring, disturbing, nightmarish even, belie a profound spiritual beauty and an unshakeable integrity.