Edward Clarke considers life in a packed Fiat

I was sitting in the back of a packed Fiat the other day, an angry cat in a cage at my neck, an angrier toddler to my right, a rucksack full of nappies, oat milk and toys on my knee, when my mother-in-law turned to me and said, you should write about this in your local newspaper.

Several things dovetailed in my mind. What has this to do with the quads of Oxford? I thought. Now’s the time to stop writing about my mother-in-law, at least in things that she could read online. She’s clearly just let me know that she’s become one of Turin’s new readers of The Oxford Times.

We were travelling through the most expansive countryside on our way to the foothills of the Alps. I had been surveying the fruit plains of Saluzzo from my cramped position and wondering how much land I could obtain here in exchange for my rather narrow house in Oxford.

It was an effort to forget how much I have to do in the next few months before I can return to the same region for a longer vacation holiday. I was having a Macbethian ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ moment as I contemplated three or four impending summer courses, a few sets of exams to mark, a couple of articles to rewrite for publication by July, as well as the usual business of Trinity and a semester somewhere else.

My mother-in-law was right, I concluded. This packed Fiat has a lot to do with life in Oxford.

But please don’t think I’m complaining. I love my work, even if I am continually alive to a horrible discrepancy between William Wordsworth’s celebration of ‘Long months of ease and undisturbed delight’ and having to teach that passage of The Prelude between a revision class on The Duchess of Malfi and Measure for Measure and a lecture on English Baroque architecture.

Then again, when Wordsworth retired gloriously to the Lake District in his late twenties, he’d really just resigned himself to failing to write his projected epic masterpiece, The Recluse, and 40-odd years of gardening.

That’s not quite fair, and probably not all that bad a prospect in any case. Wordsworth did write The Prelude (to The Recluse) first and several other masterpieces of English literature. But I do have a suspicion that rural retirement might lead quickly to my ultimate stagnation. Perhaps I love Piemontese wine and cheese too much, and I’m not that much of a gardener.

In fact I’ve been reading a lot of John Webster and Shakespeare out here in the Alps (in preparation for a revision class) and it occurs to me that their superior works must have been fitted in among 1,000 schemes. Webster was a cartwright as well as a playwright, Shakespeare, not only a shareholder in the King’s Men, but a dealer of corn and the owner of a pub in Stratford, among other things. I’m not as busy as all at that.

Perhaps Pura the landlord of my local pub, or Andy my cleaner, or Tom who delivers my vegetables, all assume that I live a life of leisure. For I keep the oddest hours. While most of my research seems to take place between four in the morning and 10, which probably accounts for its rather pious earnestness, I find myself reading classics of world literature or taking tours of Blenheim Palace when most people are at work.