Step Five: Practice a musical instrument. Since I took up playing the double bass at the age of 18, I have learned two important life-lessons. First, ensemble playing is very good for the mind and the soul, though not necessarily for the liver. Second, being mediocre is fine — you really don’t need to strive for perfection in everything you do (just in one thing). The jazz band of which I have been the mediocre member since we played at Oxford back in the 1980s, A Night in Tunisia, has a tradition of performing together twice a year. The plague put a stop to that this year and our experiments with online collaboration risibly failed. (You cannot jam on Zoom.) The solution was to try to practice in new ways — not easy to sustain through the long days of internal exile, but the payoff will come when the band strikes up again next year. I may rise above mediocrity.
Step Six: Watch “Doctor Who” with your children or grandchildren. I more or less gave up watching television at around the same time I took up bass-playing. There is one exception to this rule: “Doctor Who,” without a doubt the greatest television series of them all, which predates me by a year, having begun in 1963. The revival of “The Doctor” in 2005 was the single best thing the BBC has ever done. With my son Thomas, who turns nine this week, I’ve been catching up with 15 years of the series’ exceptional science fiction—which magically combines time travel, terrifying aliens and British irony—though we still cannot decide who was the best Doctor: David Tennant or Matt Smith? Or was it actually Tom Baker?
Step Seven: Step. Do not fail to go for a walk every day, regardless of the weather. I write these words after an hour in a fully-fledged blizzard. A walk is infinitely preferable to any gym. If no one will come with you, take Proust.
Step Eight: Improve your curry making. If you haven’t been cooking this year, shame on you. I recommend applying some turmeric, cumin, red chile and coriander seeds to some of that leftover turkey.
Step Nine: Dress like an Oxford don, every weekday. Back in the spring, the beard, T-shirt and sweatpants combo was not conducive to the production of great thoughts. And yet I found it hard to take seriously the people who donned suits and ties to broadcast from their bedrooms. After months of slovenliness, I hit on the solution. I purchased a Fair Isle sleeveless sweater and dug out some maroon corduroy trousers, once part of the costume of an Oxford professor. This restored self-discipline and enabled me to finish writing a book. (I couldn’t quite bring myself to go full Tolkien by buying a pipe, but I was sorely tempted.)
Step Ten: Disable notifications on Twitter. It occurred to me with a flash of insight that I don’t in the least care what the people I don’t follow on Twitter think, otherwise I would follow them. “Would you let all these other people into your garden?” I asked my wife one day. “If not, why would you let them inside your head?” Goodbye, snark!
Step Eleven: Do not watch sports. Just don’t. To me, soccer and rugby without fans is about exciting a spectacle as two dozen men playing blind man’s buff. When we watch sport on television, we are imagining ourselves in the crowd, which is the real source of the adrenaline surge—not the flight of the ball from foot to goal. Without the ebb and flow of singing, cheering and booing, there’s just no thrill.
Step Twelve: OK, drink booze, too. But only after 6 p.m., otherwise you’ll end up like Agnes in Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain” (without a doubt the best book published this year). Tea’s all very well during the day, but I couldn’t have retained my sanity after dark without the following liquids: Bent Nail IPA, a delicious beer brewed by Red Lodge Ales; the Veneto winemaker Inama’s smooth yet peppery Carmenere Più; and Laphroaig, my favorite peat-infused Scotch, which they began making the same year Scott published “Guy Mannering.”
As I pointed out eight months ago, “all the great pandemics have come in waves.” This one has managed three in the United States and two in Europe, and we’re still at least four or five months away from herd immunity. So, while you await your vaccination this holiday season, don’t go nuts. My twelfth step would have appalled the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. But just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are precious few teetotalers in a pandemic.
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and Oxford. He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm.