Read the two sets of lyrics below and decide whether you are with me or not.

EXHIBIT ONE

Red Cadillac and a black mustache
Rings on my fingers that sparkle and flash
Tell me, what’s next? What shall we do?
Half my soul, baby, belongs to you
Oh, while I cannot frolic with all the young dudes
I contain multitudes

I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones
And them British bad boys, The Rolling Stones
I go right to the edge, I go right to the end
I go right where all things lost are made good again
I sing the songs of experience like William Blake
I have no apologies to make
Everything’s flowing all at the same time
I live on the boulevard of crime
I drive fast cars, and I eat fast foods
I contain multitudes

EXHIBIT TWO

If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I’m ready, my lord

Perhaps I am guilty of comparing chalk and cheese, apples and pears. But for the life of me I cannot see much beyond some clever, witty word play in the first set of sprawling lyrics taken from I Contain Multitudes, the signature song from Bob Dylan’s much-lauded latest release which has shot to the top of the album charts. Nor indeed from the other ten songs on the album which are in a similar vein of scattered, disconnected images linked by rhyming that often gets close to doggerel in its lack of meaning.

I search the world over
For the Holy Grail
I sing songs of love
I sing songs of betrayal
Don’t care what I drink
I don’t care what I eat
I climbed the mountains of swords on my bare feet

Compare that with Cohen’s tight, spare evocation in the second extract above of an old Jewish man’s lament for a God whom he will revere and chastise in equal measure till his dying day. Go on to the link below to a moving and impressive, almost impromptu interpretation of that song by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

That was Cohen’s farewell and final legacy. Dylan may yet make many more (and finer) albums. But there is an age parallel between these two albums in that both men were in their late 70s and enjoying as great critical and popular appreciation (greater even) as at the outset of their careers a half-century earlier. Dylan has clearly been the more famous name globally and may have sustained a more consistent and prolific output over the decades but, for me, there is no contest between late Cohen and late Dylan. Perhaps late Dylan is a wittier, quirkier observer of the zeitgeist but Cohen’s last album is closer to true art, the expression of fundamental and deep truths about the human condition. Even when dealing, in the less acclaimed song Treaty from the album, with a simpler, more straightforward theme Cohen manages in one inspired image from the battlefield to say everything about the sadness and tears of lost love. Dylan’s lyrics seem so banal in comparison.

And I wish there was a treaty we could sign
I do not care who takes this bloody hill
I’m angry and I’m tired all the time
I wish there was a treaty
I wish there was a treaty
Between your love and mine

On the face of it, Rishi Sunak looks like the big loser from the Cummings affair over the past few days. He has fluffed the opportunity of a lifetime to use his untouchable position to display serious political weight and to position himself a long way ahead of other contenders in the next Tory leadership election. He has enjoyed (and, to be fair, still probably enjoys, albeit in diminished form) the Lady Bracknell advantage in the political power stakes. To lose one Chancellor of the Exchequer is bad luck, to lose two would be careless. His one disadvantage at the time of his sudden and unexpected elevation four months ago is that he could have been portrayed as the poodle of Dominic Cummings whose machinations over political advisers ousted Sajid Javid and vaulted Sunak into the top spot. His obvious strategy was to stay focused on the nuts and bolts of the Treasury job and burnish his reputation as the one senior Cabinet minister on top of his brief, whilst awaiting an opportunity to flex his muscles and show that he was not a Cummings poodle.

That opportunity came four days ago. And has now gone. Whether or not Johnson and Cummings succeed in staring down the Durham story until it recedes from the media headlights and public awareness, there can be little doubt that a Cummings resignation this week known to have been forced by an ultimatum from Sunak would have played brilliantly with almost every part of public and political opinion, outside the tight circle of Johnson’s immediate aides. That opportunity has now evaporated with the tame, near-identical on-message statements from Sunak and his fellow members of the inner cabinet running the Covid crisis management.

It would have been a very brave move. The Tory party tends not to reward politicians who openly plunge the knife into the leader. Michael Heseltine being the prime example. A case of ingratitude against the leader who had made his career (for Johnson would have been the big loser from a Sunak-driven resignation by Cummings) might well have been spun successfully to the right wing media. And Johnson remains the man whose unique brand of populism dragged the Tories back from imminent implosion a year ago to an 80-seat majority in December.

So perhaps Rishi Sunak was wise to stay his hand on this occasion. The arrogance of Cummings may yet provide another opportunity for him to show his political mettle and weight. And that arrogance is only likely to increase if he and Johnson do manage to stare down the story. The only trouble for Sunak is that his fresh pair of hands are now sullied in the spin doctor’s dirt and, if the post-lockdown phase were to be undermined by negative public reaction to the Cummings episode (such as people feeling freer to flout the guidelines more overtly), then Sunak will share in the blame for that. On balance, I still think that he would have emerged stronger from a decisive blow to remove Cummings whilst declaring unstinted loyalty to Johnson himself. Plunging a dagger into the political adviser is not the same as regicide.

We took the privileged middle class route of leaving London in early March for our house here on the Sussex coast between Rye and Hastings. Thinly justified by distancing our older selves from two millennials then sharing the house and braving the tube to work in central London. With just sheep for company in the fields surrounding our sizable garden, we suffer none of the restrictions facing those in tight urban flats. Breakfast and lunch on the sun-dazzled terrace looking out to the Channel can make it feel like an endless holiday. Living carefully well within an old fashioned defined pension removes us from the financial stresses facing enterprising (and not so enterprising, even more so) young things just putting together their futures in private sector jobs directly affected by the lockdown. At the fitter, younger end of the at-risk group, we can venture out once a week for a careful socially distanced shop at the local butcher and quaint family run supermarket which survives in Rye despite being a tad pricey for its limited but perfectly adequate range of staple foods and household items.

So l record our perverse enjoyment of this tragic and worrying period whilst aware that I’m edging into that smug and tin-eared territory occupied by the purveyors of the dreaded Christmas family round robins and Facebook entries about their holidays on there Algarve. We do all the obvious things. Gardening. Zooming. Admin via internet. Online lecturing and exam marking and conference calls. The latter are more of a challenge than is sometimes realised and thus not quite the cure-all for future business operations. I’ve only had to chair one so far and, despite careful advance planning, it reached its decisions rather more painfully and slowly than I had expected. I’ve just been tuning into the others and have found them somewhat languid and tedious affairs at times from which my clumsily multi-tasking mind has all too often wandered.

Relations with children and grandchildren are arguably improved by the need for more precise structures. The daily history lesson with four out of the five grandchildren is the main focal point now. Pretty time consuming as I struggle to stay half a chapter ahead of the class (how did old fashioned generalist school teachers survive before Wikipedia?) but I seem still to be getting away with it. No walkout or rebellions yet. And Laura does a weekly Zoom round all the cousins on the Greek side which can be a bit chaotic but is loads more regular contact than we all had before this restricted period. I haven’t seen so much of Katherine’s Canadian nephews and nieces for ages.

That side of life will probably survive the current crisis and become a more regular feature. But I’m not writing off the airlines. Unlike Warren Buffet against whom it’s risky to bet and who has clearly decided that a mixture of Zoom and fear had sealed their fate. This is probably the biggest single unknown outcome from the pandemic. Predicting how institutions and individuals will adjust their travel behaviour on a permanent basis. Most other activities will simply accelerate the trends that were already up and running. Hence the resilience of share prices in the FANG group of digital giants even though they will all record big drops in their profits this year. The new normal will favour them even more than before. But whether we shall find the internet and Zoom an adequate substitute for personal contact is more doubtful. At the start off this, I predicted that universities are going to struggle long term with marketing their campus-based degree against the online alternative which more and more students are currently experiencing. That remains my view for the lower end of the university food chain, but the top end will strengthen its hold on the premium market. Whether that (and its equivalent in other service markets) will produce sufficient volume of inter continental travel to keep the airlines going is a massive guess. Deciding whether to buy shares in Ryanair and easyJet will be an interesting test of my appetite for gut instinct risk.

South Korea and Germany feature prominently as the standout performances by medical authorities through the coronavirus pandemic. For good reasons since South Korea nipped a terrifying early spike in cases at the end of February (yes, two months ago) in the bud with its rigorous testing and isolating policy. So much so that its deaths per million population stand at only 5 or 1.25% of our rate in the UK. Germany has not kept its grim statistic at quite such a low number but it still stands at just 20% of ours. By far the lowest amongst European countries.

Bar one. Eight years ago, Greece was being dismissed as a dysfunctional state incapable of persuading its people to co-operate in the fiscal discipline (i.e. paying taxes) required to keep its economy in sufficient shape to remain within the eurozone. Today, it stands out as a beacon of well managed and self-disciplined behaviour through the coronavirus crisis which has (so far) kept its grim statistic down to only 13 deaths per million population or 3% of our level.

The one balancing item is that regional neighbours such as Cyprus, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and Macedonia have managed to keep their rates within a similar range of between 10 and 30 per million population. So perhaps there is an element of geography and climate to explain the significant difference from the western European countries. Yet the contrast with nearby Italy seems strange and stark. They must all have been doing something right (taking the statistics at face value) and Greece in particular must take a bow for having implemented its control strategy with a ruthless efficiency which defies the cardboard cut-out caricature.

And for acting early. My own anecdotal slice of contact with this early action came from the academic world where a colleague from the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki e-mailed me on 6th March to say that he could not visit students in the UK that week and again on 10th March to say that all face-to-face lectures had just been banned by the Greek Ministry of Education. Only a fortnight, to be fair, before we switched to online delivery but at that stage every day of lockdown counted. My other anecdotal point of contact comes via friends and family in Corfu who relate a life of tight restrictions on movement imposed with quite draconian methods by the local police.

And finally my Greek colleagues regale me with their admiration for Professor Sofiras Tsiodras, the epidemiologist who is in charge of Greece’s coronavirus campaign and who communicates clearly and persuasively on the air waves. Quite the hero of the hour, it appears.

Almost 50 years ago I was briefly living and working in Leeds during the hey day of its then (almost) all conquering football team. I went one evening to a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Leeds Playhouse. To call that an avant-garde play for its time would be like saying that Bernie Sanders is a bit critical of Wall Street. Brecht was right on the edge in those days. As I walked back towards the car park, feeling a tad dazed by the mind-blowing experience of the past two hours, a tall lanky gentleman with a lock of dark hair brushing across his forehead and much more smartly suited and booted than myself came gently padding past me and looking over his shoulder to tell his companions that he would bring the car round to collect them. I’d know that high-stepping stride anywhere, I thought to myself, but not with such a warm, gentle smile on his face.  And certainly not at a Bertolt Brecht play.

For it was indeed he, the notorious bite’yer’legs Leeds United defender, Norman Hunter. A constant and reliable presence for over a decade in Don Revie’s champion side alongside higher profile names such as Charlton and Bremner, he was renowned for his committed and uncompromising style. An icon (before the word became common parlance) for the United faithful of the virtues of the quiet hard man – team over self, efficiency over beauty, destruction over creation. But that evening he looked every inch the quiet, cultured professional man with a twinkle in his eye. And I’ll never find out what old bite’yer’legs thought of that Bertolt Brecht play back in 1972 since he has sadly just become another COVID-19 statistic. And in all the obituaries this morning, I can find no reference to his taste in radical post-war German plays.

For me, the greatest compensating feature of the past month has been learning how to use online learning platforms to deliver lectures and tutorials to students. I got through six online lectures during the last two weeks of the spring term and have a couple more to undertake later this month. As a confirmed technophobe given to losing the plot at the first sign of a transmission glitch, I can hardly claim to be a master of Teams, Zoom, Adobe Connect and Skype but I just about manage them.

The most telling moment in my breakneck dash for online competence four weeks ago came when the brilliant Lisa from the Learning Development team at Cass Business School introduced me to the use of breakout rooms during Adobe Connect online lectures. It has been a godsend this week, she said, for the teaching sessions we have been doing with staff and students. We always knew that it was there but we never got round to really using it.

Therein lies the challenge which, cliche as it may sound, surely lies ahead for universities. Even if that may not at first blush appear to be the case. As and when today’s restrictions ease, there may well be an initial rush to re-establish the face-to-face contact which students have sorely missed. This may even result in a first-year lift in applications for on-campus university places. This will support the view that the much prized “student experience” remains the super brand par excellence of tertiary education. And we can all go back to face-to-face lecturing and consign online delivery to the vocational and other less academic courses.

Yet Lisa’s moment of revelation about the value of online breakout rooms will have been repeated many million times over in recent weeks. And will continue to be repeated over the weeks ahead. Just as in my little way I have discovered the joys of delivering exactly the same lecture which I had been planning to deliver face-to-face, but with more control than in a lecture room and at least an equal level of interaction with students. Plus feeling a lot less exhausted during and afterwards. And being able to pop out into the garden when the students were tackling practice questions.

The missing link here is what the students made of it. Too early to tell since their attention (and that of university authorities) is focused on just getting through this current period of revised teaching, coursework and examination formats. But the polling sleuths will not be far behind with their feedback surveys to gauge the customers’ rating of the service provided. I anticipate that the reaction will be significantly positive – in part out of that instinctive appreciation which the human spirit tends to show for any service provided in adverse conditions but also reflecting some surprise at how clear and useful and informative the online lecturing experience turned out to be.

So can the universities sustain the competitive appeal of the campus life over the greater flexibility, and much lower cost, afforded to the student by this online delivery? In the answer to that question lies the future viability of the massive infrastructure in which universities have invested over the past decade. Including all that student accommodation which has sprouted a whole new branch of the buy-to-let housing market. Long before this latest dash for online delivery, questions were being raised about the value-for-money of accumulating over £30,000 of debt (at a crippling interest rate of 3% over RPI) in return for a routine BA degree handed out to half the nation. Hence the focus on employability in the marketing campaigns of so many universities. If the same degree (and hence employability) level can be attained whilst living rent-free at home and carrying on with that school holiday job in the local butcher’s shop, then the economics for the student looks compelling.

The rub lies in those claims of employability. Sure, the campus experience carries the cachet of excitement and zeitgeist and peer group partying but this is the millennial generation that knows the score about the gig economy and property prices. Unless the university can sustain faith in the competitive advantage which its campus experience offers for future careers, then it will increasingly seem like an expensive luxury only for those financed by the bank of mum and dad. And as yet more universities feel obliged to offer a competitive online package (rather than be outdone by their peers as well as the specialist online providers), they will find themselves forced down that dreaded path known to the corporate marketeers as “cannibalising” your mainstream business. Could today’s surge in the use of online delivery spark the student behavioural changes which erode the university’s financial model? The annoying half-answer is yes but not just yet. It will be a long drawn out process and will hurt the lower end of the university food chain most, but it will happen.