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allowing ourselves to return to that inglorious past, or anything resembling it, is a certain mistrustfulness and vigilance, I happen to think it’s a price worth paying. Hence . . . well, hence my doing what I do. My ho humming, as the Divine Demelza calls it. I don’t spy on my students or my colleagues. I keep an eye open, that’s all. For what? Well, for anything or anyone – how can I best put this? – left over . For business dangerously unfinished. For matter out of place, as a famous anthropologist once described dirt. For recidivism. In any of its guises, recidivism is what we fear most. Hence a job of this sort falling to someone teaching at an art college. Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else. People can behave like savages when they are allowed to, but only in art do they go so far as to call themselves primitivists. And when the primitivist urge doesn’t seize them, the psychoaesthetic urge, the study of human evil – itself another form of primitivism, when you come to think about it – does. So portrait painting is a further recidivism that’s frowned on and discouraged – that’s in so far as one candiscourage anything in a free society. In the main, prize-culture does the job for us. When all the gongs go to landscape, why would any aspiring artist waste his energies on the dull and relentless cruelties of the human face? While not wanting to affect modesty, I suspect I wouldn’t be enjoying the favour and seniority I do – I omitted to say that I am Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky, FRSA – had I not from an early age followed nature’s laws in the matter of beauty. There are painters who paint more experimentally than I do, without doubt, but of my more troubled colleagues – those who still hanker secretly for the alien and the grotesque, even the degenerate (though they wouldn’t dream of pronouncing that term aloud) – I cannot think of one who hasn’t had to wait a long time to be given recognition, and even longer to be given tenure.
    But to return to the point from which I began, and I don’t apologise for my vagrant style – ‘Keep up!’ I tell my students when I sense they are losing me; ‘Keep up!’ I even have to tell my wife on those occasions when I catch her glancing at her watch – I don’t claim more for what goes into my black folder on Kevern Cohen than it’s worth. I say ‘I keep an eye open’ but I do so only at the lowest level – code name Grey. Think of those I watch as birds, and I am no more than a Sunday twitcher. The work of serious, scientific ornithology is done by others. For which reason, while I am conscientious in my observations, I have never imagined that what I see or what I miss matters a great deal. Until now. Suddenly, I am conscious of having to deliver. It is as though the common house sparrow, on which – to nobody’s interest – I’ve been keeping an eye for some time, has overnight become an endangered species and I am at a stroke indispensable to the species’ protection. I won’t pretend to knowledge I don’t have. All my reports are now more scrupulously monitored than they were before, so I can’t say with any certainty that Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen – one of the common house sparrows in question – has risen to the top of any pile. I have a feeling about him, that’s all. Or ratherI have a feeling that they have a feeling. I like the man, I have to say. He has for several years been coming in one day a week to the academy, teaching the art of carving lovespoons out of a single piece of wood. I admire his work, which is exquisite, but there are some who find him a little too good to be true. Not the students; they love his air of grumpy probity as much as I love what he makes, and I am sure that when their opinions are canvassed they will speak of him only in