To tell you the truth Sophie, right now I feel terrible.

I try to protect you, to inspire you, to be strong for you, to look after you, but sometimes I feel so helpless.

I’m tired, its 3.20am, I have to get up for work in a few hours, I can’t sleep, my minds racing, I’ve tried hiding under the duvet, making a cup of tea, smoking a cigarette.

I thought writing this might perhaps help.

I just don’t know if I can continue to do this job.

I feel like I should be making and constructing things.

I feel I’m just inventing projects on the side for the sake of it.

To keep me busy.

Turning on myself for every mindless observation or thought, dragging it out in the hope that it might somehow mean something, give me hope, direction, a cause, a purpose.

But all of this is a diversion.

Writing, websites, projects, interviews, plans, courses, classes, meetings, demonstrations.

I can’t escape the simple fact that I am not enjoying being a Professor.

I have this seething hate growing in me for the University, and its management, the way it’s all structured, the system, the media, the government, power & authority.

Right now I feel incredibly frustrated, angry, resentful, and more than just a little Kamikaze.

I’ve got debts that restrain my abilities and plans, which force me to live this lifestyle and take on the responsibilities of this job.

I feel a million miles from what first attracted me to teaching: being able to teach, to talk, to move around, to show students the shortcuts, and the long way round, to communicate, visualize & inspire.

I feel deeply that I have lost my personal freedom, that I have aged, that I have hardened, that I have become blunt in my approach to everything.

I have become obsessed with the present, with everything happening around me, in the newspapers, on television, in magazines.

I am scouring everything for signs of change.

I feel something fundamental is happening at this moment, as everyone sleeps, not quite revolutionary, but something very significant and important.

But I can’t quite put my finger on it, define it, imagine its effect, but I’ve convinced myself it’s more than just sensory and cultural.

I feel I’m missing out on being able to define this moment myself.

To be part of this process of change I observe.

A Professor of Fashion is a very small job, a very small world to be occupying right now.

And I have such limited resources to walk in my own direction.

This job might preserve me, might act as a catalyst for something else.

I’m a positive person, I accept the existence of possibilities, of opportunity, I factor in luck & chance, I know how hard life can be, I am a resourceful person.

But I can’t help slipping under when I feel so under whelmed by my own definition of myself.

Society has got by without Professors of Fashion for thousands of years; I can’t help questioning why I’m necessary.

I need a role that allows me to be technically creative, not just fucking clever.

Great cultural change is about to happen, this decade is about to characterize, the turn of the millennium is about to give way to the actual millennium itself, to a thousand years of boundless possibilities.

We live in a epoch defined by a vast empty space in front of us, that has until now been completely incomprehensible culturally.

Nostalgia has been the only way of defining ourselves in relation to this frontier.

People everywhere are about to realize exactly where they stand in time, and question what they are doing here and why, just like I am doing.

I’m not sure when this change first occurred, it certainly wasn’t September 11^th, but the 2004 Tsunami was a fundamental turning point, though I think that was a year characterized by a sense of completion, punctuated by a natural disaster that brought everyone abruptly back down to earth.

It happened last week, and yet everyone is already talking about it in historic terms, even me.

That has to indicate something.

A line in the sand.

I wish I was rich. I wish I had a budget to blaze my way through.

So that I could lead the way forward, and mark this time in epic proportions.

Status is wasted on McQueen, Galliano & Comme des Garcons.

Meritocracy has failed.

Now things divide and fracture.

On the one side you will have an increasingly hyper nostalgia, Art Nouveau like, Fascistic, surface, inter-woven & swerving: a streamlined curvilinear history, organic, rooted in experience, childhood, fantasy, growing up, memory, detail, myth, legend, revival, and tribute.

On the other there can only be escapism, survival, opposition, radical innovation, blind expression, formlessness, breaking down barriers, tearing up the rules, getting the hell out of here, driven by panic, fear, terror, meaninglessness, and hope.

I don’t know what that side will possibly be like.

None of this writing is helping me, by the way.

It’s now 5.30am and I am now SHATTERED.

I’ve got to get out of this job.

I feel like punching someone.

Fuckit I’m going to sleep.

Words by Professor Julian Roberts