The drilling has started again. The scaffold has been up for over six months now. The Professor holds his forehead in despair. How can they expect him to think and teach when his office has become a building site? This morning, it feels like the drilling is going through his skull as he sits at the keyboard answering emails.

The University of Strathkelvin takes pride in its ancient spires. By contrast, the crumbling modernism of the Social Science block resembles a mix of East Berlin and Croydon. Now and again, a builder in a hard hat and high vis jacket walks along the scaffold past his seventh-floor window as if he’s walking on thin air. 

Despite the noise, there is a comforting scent of academic time in his office, which is filled with books from floor to ceiling. It’s a strange aroma, a sweet musky combination of dirty linen, chocolate, coal fires, burnt wood, dustiness, stale coffee and yesterday’s aftershave.

The Professor is untidy, the thousands of books are in no order, and they are indexed in his mind only. He takes pride in being able to locate them on request. “Pierre Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations, it’s over here, I think.” He’s quietly pleased with himself when he magics the book out of the piles of chaos for a student like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

The study is filled with filing cabinets and boxes of C90 tapes, micro tapes, papers, photocopies, newspaper articles, ancient course handouts, and acetates for overhead projectors. They are the sediments of a scholarly life and decades of research. Like academic compost, the scent of sun-bleached paper, ink, and glue releases volatile chemicals as they slowly decompose. There is a word for this phenomenon: it is known as bibliosmia. 

As he sits in front of the computer, it is pinging with email alerts. “I wish I could turn off these damn reminders from Teams,” he says to himself aloud. The truth is the frequency of their sound is so high that often, he doesn’t notice them. 

His eye switched to the 'themed' section of his Office 365 inbox. The email is titled 'URGENT - Ethical Compliance and Research Data'. It reads: “Our records show that you have committed to destroying all personal data relating to your research subjects including recordings. Could you please confirm that you have done this?  We will be conducting a survey of staff offices to ensure you are compliant…” 

It feels like there is an extra layer of Caledonian sternness in this university directive. He can’t go back to his work somehow; the thought of destroying thousands and thousands of hours spent listening to people in their homes or cafes and pubs annoys him. In that chaotic archive of tapes are the voices of heroes and villains, sports stars, musicians, politicians, neo-Nazis, football hooligans, anti-racist activists, poets and authors. A whole cacophony of human life committed to tape. 

As the moment of irritation passes, he descends once again into his inbox and the long list of requests and queries sent to him as Head of Department.

That night, the Professor leaves the office late as usual. During the short cycle ride across town, he can’t get the 'ethical compliance' email out of his mind. “Do they expect me to destroy all those recordings?” he says to himself in disbelief as he cycles along the banks of the Clyde. 

The long summer nights in Glasgow are deceptive; it’s past 9.30 pm and still light when he returns to his tenement on the city’s southside. Confused, the key doesn’t open the front door of his flat. He looks more closely and realises he is trying to open his front door with his office key. It’s a bad sign – work becomes home, home becomes work.

After dinner, there is not much time to decompress from the long day. It’s often like this. The Professor remembers what it was like in the era of the ‘analogue university’ before email, computers and the internet. Three colleagues shared one phone line, and he recalls overhearing a senior colleague complain about him as all three simultaneously picked up their receivers: “Not sure about this new guy, he gets too many phone calls.”

Thirty-five years later, it’s so hard for him to switch off from work at the end of the day, and he often struggles to fall asleep. The stash of marijuana gummies does its job, and it works most nights. It’s usually an unquiet rest, though. Tonight, he falls quickly into a deep sleep, but one furnished with a nightmare.   

The dream takes him back across town to the city centre campus. The scaffolded concrete building is lifeless and dark. Wandering the crepuscular corridors, there are no faces or sounds of life.   

He reaches for his keys and fumbles with the lock. He walks in and sits at his desk in the moon’s half-light. Something stirs in the darkness like the murmur of a far-off crowd.

He turns around on his swivel chair, and the box filled with C90 tapes seems to be vibrating. He flicks the desk lamp, which casts a beam across the room like the headlights of a car. He goes closer. He sees his handwriting on the end of one of the cassette boxes. It says - Mary Cavanagh 6^th May, 1988.

As he holds the cassette, the lines of his handwriting start to move. They form the shape of a line portrait of a face, and as the likeness takes shape, the mouth begins to move.   

“You promised you would send this to my mother! The cancer hit her hard. I was only 32 when I died… no recordings then, no voice notes, only this box, a silent plastic prison. You need to send me to her NOW!”

The handwritten lines on the other cassette boxes are moving too. Another face forms and speaks. “You said I would be anonymised… but I didn’t know what I was consenting to when I signed your consent form. You took away my name.  And now you’re going to wipe my voice from this tape… delete me, silence me. Leave me without a trace. Anonymisation is annihilation. I am not just DATA, I am a human being.  I will not comply… I will not be COMPLIANT!”

The Professor wakes up startled from the nightmare; his heart is racing, and he lies in a pool of sweat. He reaches for his mobile phone on the bedside table, and there are more notifications from his inbox.   

*This is a work of fiction