A Don's Life

Which academics have turned down honours?

It's a dilemma which most of us aren't going to have to face. But I'm sure many of have enjoyed this particular "what if...." question.

"What if I was awarded an 'honour'...MBE? CBE? Knighthood? .... would I accept it?"

 Yes, because I would be dead chuffed, and an hour or two at Buckingham Palace would be fun (and it wold be nice to have something to put on instead of my Mum's old headgirl badge when the posh invite says "honours will be worn" ? Yes, because it is really a tribute to those I work with and my whole institution? (Never quite sure how much I believe that one?) No, because the whole parade is just a hangover from the days when we really did have the empire that most of these medals proclaim? No, because just look at the company I'd be keeping? And so on.

And then of course there is the question of Which Honour. I dont imagine that the OM has ever been turned down (only 25 of them at a time, and nicely discreet, with no imperial undertones)... But what about "Dame"? Useful presumably for getting upgraded on an airplane, but fancy actually living with a silly title like that. Imagine how embarrassing it would be coming over the tannoy at the dentists.

Anyway, when there was the razzmattazz earlier in the week about the celebs, writers and artists who had turned them down between 1951 and 1999 (Lucian Freud, Grahame Greene and co), I found myself wondering which academics had done the same.

The newspapers hadn't been quite as interested in the university refuseniks. But when I managed to get hold of the full list, it actually sprung a few surprises.

What's the price of cheap filming in Greece?

One piece of apparently good news is that the Greek authorities intend to reduce the price of filming on major Greek archaeological sites. You'll now be able to film on the Acropolis for a mere €1600 a day (down from €4000 in 2005, and a whole lot cheaper than the equivalent in (say) Italy).

This may be a false bargain for the film crews. I doubt if they can provide much practical support for that amount of money (the electricity, the guy with the keys etc.), and I strongly suspect that you won't get an exclusive on the Acropolis at that price. Go and try and make your movie and I bet you'll find another couple of film crews also on the job.

But there's worse. The Greeks are presumably aiming at 'big motion pictures'  or adverts (see the joke above) -- but for documentary filming there is more to these prices than just the cash.

Is Hockney any good?

Sometimes there are advantages to being married to an art historian. On Tuesday, it was going to the opening of the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy -- and exhibition of his recent landscapes (mostly of Yorkshire).

There had been loads of publicity, advance reviews and tv programmes about these pictures, and I hadn't much liked what I saw. Quick big stuff, I thought. And not actually very interesting (even if you are a fan of Yorkshire). In the event, I thought the show WAS much more impressive than I had expected (not sure if it was interesting). . . but that's another story.

The really amazing thing was the crowds of people. This was the opening (usually at the Royal Academy a fun, well-oiled but relatively demure occasion) and there were people queuing to get in right across the courtyard. When you got inside there were loads of photographers lined up the stairs, waiting for the celebs and ostentatiously not lifting their cameras for the likes of us (thank god).

So why the interest?

Leveson and Camillagate

I've just been reviewing a few books about the Queen (it being her diamond jubilee and a diamond quantity of books appearing to celebrate); and, as always, I've done way too much reading -- beyond and behind -- to get into the piece. In particular, I've been wondering how come we've all forgotten the Camillagate and the Squidgygate tapes.

Maybe these causes célèbres of the 1990s are now hardly a memory, but it's a bit odd that these bits of royal phone interception (if they were genuine) haven't played their parts in the Leveson Inquiry (unless I've missed it). Maybe that it because the conversations (between Di and J Gilbey, and Charles and Camilla) were apparently taped by amateur hackers -- or alternatively by the security services -- not by professional tabloid journalists (in this game, remember, "amateur" is always a bit of an alibi). Maybe it is all so long ago that most of us have forgotten.

I haven't forgotten.

Hatchet job of the year

I was chuffed earlier this week to find myself (or rather my review of Robert Hughes' book on Rome) on the shortlist for the "Hatchet job of the year" prize. Actually the name of the prize is a bit misleading. OK it's a good headline grabber -- and got hundreds more column inches than if it had been called "2011 Prize for Critical Journalism". But, as its manifesto makes clear, it's not actually a prize for skewering . . . it's for honest as well as entertaining book reviewing, that isn't afraid to go beyond deference, to call a spade a spade.

As far as my Rome review goes, I think I was just doing my job. I made it pretty clear that I am quite an admirer of Hughes, and loved his The Shock of the New. But the chapters of Rome that cover the ancient world (the bit I really know about) are so riddled with dreadful errors -- howler after howler -- that I had to speak up. The point of a review, after all, is that an informed critic should give an honest, professional evaluation of the . Many other books on the Hatchet shortlist are poetry or fiction, and there the nature of that evaluation is rather different. But in the case of Rome, it was facts pure and simple... mixing up BCE and CE, wrong dates, wrong names, all tumbling out one after the other...

I have never met Hughes, but if I were to have the pleasure, I would say just what I wrote to his face. And that has always been the ethical touchstone of a review. If you couldn't say it to the author, then it's a skewering, so don't.

King Georges leave the University Library

I have been in the University Library for the first time in weeks - and, when you have a day there (cuts or no cuts) you do still feel wonderfully grateful for the books they have -- mad though some of them may be. In fact I have spent a very happy day reading some really loony and interesting stuff on Cicero's De Haruspicum Responso, none of it available on line -- so thank you, book librarians one and all.

But it was only on the way out that I noticed that something was going on in the front hall. There were barriers round one of the King Georges -- the statues that stand in the entrance way, and look down upon you as you return your books. These guys have become my very favourite statues in Cambridge, George  the first and the second (one by Rysbrack, the other by Wilton): not just because they have observed me payimg my library fines for many a year -- but also because they are some of the best "English monarchs as Roman emperors" statues that there are. And they got walk on parts in my Washington DC lectures last year.

Anyway, I soon discovered that the barrier were not there because these things were about to be cleaned (first assumption), but because they were about to be moved out.

No longer will the Georges survey my library fines. They are, I am told, going to the Fitzwilliam Museum.

And I am bloody sad.

A Roman brothel token?

I was hoping to keep out of the story about the "Roman brothel token" found by a metal detectorist near Putney Bridge and now on display at the Museum of London. But I think someone had better give a different version from the torrent of lurid stuff now pouring out about the sex-life of Roman London.

The object in question is a small bronze "coin" -- with a scene of sex on one side and a the Roman numeral XIIII on the other. Assuming that it is genuine (and there are quite a few fakes of these circulating and this one was not actually found in an archaeological context), then it is what archaeologists term a "spintria". This is a Latin word for male prostitute... but it is an entirely modern practice to apply it to these little objects; we haven't got the foggiest clue what the Romans called them... or (despite what you read) what they used them for. Quite a few have been found across the Roman world (there's another on the right).

The favourite idea circulating about this recent discovery is that it was part of the highly developed Roman brothel economy. Perhaps you handed over 14 asses (the coin not the animal, I mean), got the token and then went and redeemed it at one of the local brothels (a bit like a book token). Or maybe the sexual position depicted on the token was what you had paid your 14 asses for (shades here of the tour guides' explanations for the paintings of the different sexual positions depicted on the walls of the brothel at Pompeii ... a kind of visual menu for those who couldnt ask for it in Latin. Errr.. come again?)

Now, as there is no evidence for these things at all, no-one could actually disprove that. But remember that there is no Roman mention of such things, none have been found in any place that has been identified as a "brothel" . . .  and just think of the kind of infrastructure of the ancient "brothel industry" that this kind of internal currency would imply. (Let's face it, most sex for money in the ancient world  -- like now --happened at street corners, under bridges, after closing time at the bar... NOT in designated "brothels" . . . )

So what is a more likely explanation?

Five thoughts on getting to 57

I am in a couple of hours 57 years old. My rather elderly  (aged 40) mother gave birth, old-style, in Much Wenlock Cottage Hospital on 1 January 1955...with a midwife and the local GP, who (as he and Mum always used to joke, for years after) only got there when everything was more or less over. (This isn't just self obsession -- it's a story I heard repeated at the said GP's Xmas party for years and years in my childhood and adolescence... with greater or lesser shades of embarrassment, on my part)

So my birthday has always been (for me) a New Year occasion. And always bound up with New Year's Eve... everybody is pissed and enjoying the 'rite of passage' and at some point after midnight I nerve myself to say (or not to say) "and..errr.. excuse me..it's my birthday.

Anyway, at 57, happily and very very gratefully married for more than quarter of a century .. five thoughts on birthdays as you get old(er).

1) Bloody lucky (version 1). I am still alive, 57 years on. I've survived 2 children and various bits of medical intervention (including a benign breast lump/aka clot of milk, when I was breast feeding, and that seemed like imminent death at the time). Most of the people I work on (the Romans) were dead or dying by their late 50s. So thank the Lord, and modern medicine.

Truth, Kim Jong-il and Prince Philip

Truth, as everyone knows, is the first casualty of war. But it doesnt fare too well when monarchs and/or dictators die . . .  or even, I suspect, when royals are taken into hospital.

For a start, the authorities never want to announce the death until they have got the transmission of power sorted. So when exactly Kim Jong-il finally fell off his perch, I suspect we will never know -- but it could have been some time before we were all told (the intervening hours being spent in getting Kim Jong-un briefed, and his lines learnt -- and in dealing with any of the other relatives who might have made trouble).

And we can't be certain about where he died either. Do we believe the story that he was on a train, going on one of his hard-working visits to his people? Or do believe the South Korean spies who say that the train never left the station (and that the train story was invented to conceal a much more mundane, less public-service, death at home in bed)? Or do we think that the spies were simply trying to discredit the enemy, by alleging a lie about the death location . . . Bluff and double-bluff.

And this kind of thing isn't just a problem across the "axis of evil". Remember that in 1936 King George V's doctor famously gave him a fatal dose of morphine (somewhere between euthanasia and convenience killing). It was not only to relieve his suffering and give him a more dignified end, but also (as the doctor himself apparently admitted)  to make sure that the death and succession happened early enough to be announced in the morning Times, not in the far less prestigious and proper evening papers.

I couldn't help having some of this in the back of my mind when I was reading about Prince Philip's recent stay in hospital.

Christmas tradition -- and innovation

"Tradition always incorporates innovation" insisted the daughter (an anthropologist-cum-historian) on Christmas Eve. The reason for her insistence on this great anthropological truth was her desire that this year we should try roasting rather than boiling the sprouts for Christmas dinner.

Predictably enough, we chose to follow that other anthropological model: namely, "accretion". The husband had liked our encounter with roast sprouts in the USA, but rather doubted our ability to do them well enough on our first try (and anyway, he is still quite partial to boiled ones). So -- as we had laid in well more sprouts than we needed -- we decided to roast half and boil half, just to be on the safe side. (I expect that we will now do this sprouting double act as long as we have Christmas together.)

At this point, I rather pretensiously observed that our decision followed the model of our Christmas tree... it was growing tradition, a bit like the way we put new decorations on the tree each year, without throwing away the old ones. To be precise: a rather jolly hart (above), vaguely taken from the Wilton diptych joined the line up this year, as did a shining ship (on the right, supposedly based -- though I dont think you'd know just to look at it -- on Turner's Fighting Temeraire).

Conversation, let me reassure you, doesn't usually run along these lines over our kitchen table. But it was perhaps a nice reminder of what a wonderful anthropological case study modern Christmas can be. In fact a friend of mine who taught Anthropology in Cambridge often used to ask candidates at their interviews to comment anthropologically on Christmas. She was never very impressed by those who went on about the terrible 'commercialism' of it all; she was looking for a bit of analysis of our nostalgia, and the way the celebration (for many, no matter what religion -- if any) still acts as a re-affirmation of ties of friendship, a focus of remembrance, not to mention gift exchange.

Sadly, for me, it now acts as a focus of remembrance of her. She died a few years ago, but Sue's question to her candidates (as well as her whole-hearted, exuberantly atheistic investment in all the festivities of the season) is now always part of what I think when I "think Christmas". Exactly, she would have said. For that's the way that Christmas comes to mean more, the older you get...generating and preserving an ever increasing number of things to remember. (And I'm sure that's how she used to press her interview candidates.)

But Christmas isn't just a great case study for the anthropologically inclined. Classicists get a toe-hold in there too.

Is the Christmas card on its last legs

I rather like getting Christmas cards, which I put up lovingly all over the house -- on the mantlepiece, blu-tacked to the picture rail, under the tree. But I suspect that they are on their last legs, even more a thing of the past than a book.

That's to say, my tally of "e-cards" now almost exceeds my "card-cards". Some of these are wonderful. I just received a great Sophoclean Xmas card ("best wishes for a cathartic Christmas"), all beautifully drawn and scanned by one of my students (thank you, Sam). And some e-cards do include messages really targetted at me, with or without an appropriate image (thanks Gillian and Jan); or are sent from abroad, nicely timed for Xmas (and it was much better to get Estelle's up to date news from Australia, than have the old news of a month ago chugging its way across the world by ship).

What I hate are those e-cards sent by people or firms who just click "send to all" on their e-mail, and hey presto... you've got your Christmas message. It is one step on from the xeroxed "Christmas message" (nauseatlnglycelebrating young Quentin's 15 A*s at GCSE, or Tamsin's starring role in The Importance of Being Earnest).

Juliet's balcony

Tourist hot-spots come in many different guises. Only a couple of weeks ago the queue to get into the Colosseum was about an hour and a half in length -- and all to see the rather depressing ruins inside the building which are nothing compared with the splendid outside. (Tip: if you really want to see the Colosseum, go to one of the entrances to the Forum and buy the ticket there.. the queue is never so long.)

In Verona, where we finished our stint of filmimg yesterday (not the amphitheatre, in case you are wondering), the place to go is the "House of Juliet", complete with balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet. There were no actual queues, but a tremendous, polyglot crush, even in mid December -- made all the more democratic by the fact the view of the balcony and other bric-a-brac is free. You only have to pay if you want actually to go and stand on it, and to see the other Juliet memorabilia in the 'museum'.... pride of place going to the bed that starred in Zefferellis version of Shakespeare's play.

Of course, the place has nothing to do with the non-existent Juliet at all, and was a clever invention of the 19th century, turned into a veritable tourist attraction in the 1930s.  But overall it is as odd as the Colosseum, with the added tinge of slightly off-putting, slightly leering, slightly touching "romance".

Coffee solution

I've been living out of a suitcase for the last ten days (and blogging from hotel rooms -- on hotel wi-fi, not always the best for inserting big pictures or managing links; sorry). One thing I've solved, though, is the hotel "coffee for breakfast" problem.

The issue is this. You want to get up early and work, but there are no coffee-making facilities in the room -- and if there are, the resulting coffee is truly ghastly. So the only options are: a) to go down to the hotel restaurant (but that demands getting dressed) or b) order room service in advance (but that means predicting the night before when exactly you are going to need the caffeine injection, and also you have to deal, scantily clad, with the waiter ) or c) order room service when you wake up (but by then room service is busy and you can be busting for a coffee for a long time -- and there's the same problem re the waiter). Not to mention the fact that the coffee in all these cases may still not be much better than dishwater.

Anyway, thanks to my friend Caterina (really thank you C), problem is solved.

By their Christmas decorations shall ye know them?

Italy may be collapsing, but -- so far as I have seen in the last week -- it doesn't actually look as if it is collapsing quite as much as the UK does. I am sure that there must be areas of Italy where every other shop on the High St is a charity shop (if not boarded up). But that's not obviously true of the centre of Rome, nor of the very non-touristy area where I am staying (the Viale Marconi) -- nor, for that matter, of the rather grim Ponte di Nona suburb, where I have been today (no shortage of thriving strip-malls there as we discovered).

It feels as if Italy as a country may be bankrupt, but that a lot of Italians are doing very nicely thank you.

And the whole place seems more covered with neon Christmas decorations than I have ever seen it before. And there seem to be more poinsettias than you can even find in New York (where on earth does this poinsettia custom come from?).

Some are reasonably tasteful, like -- I suppose -- the angels on the way up to the Campidoglio (at te top of this post), or the vast tree outside the Colosseum (a gift from Norway?). Others are either frankly horrible (like the neon crib, including camel, in the Piazza Venezia), or merely vulgar (like the Mercedes-sponsored lights near the Spanish Steps).

You only occasionally get a glimpse of the much more traditional Christmas kitsch, like the crib balancing on a heater at the back entrance to the Terme Museum, where we were filming yesterday.

That Euro Dinner

In principle, I'm all for a united Europe, a single currency and a fiscal union -- and feel dismayed at the Cameron stance. (Though I have to say that the appalling fates that have been predicted for the UK, outside the "real Europe", haven't so far sounded that dreadful to me "The New Switzerland", "The Singapore of Europe", "Norway without the oil". Could be worse, couldn't it?)

My problem is not the principle. It's how the vast superstate is organised and by whom? Thinking of this tends to bring out the rampant democrat in me. I can't say that I feel too keen on having a national budget "approved" by the European commissioners, and sent back for improvement if it doesn't come up to scratch on their view.

But there's also a giant questionmark, of course, over how you negotiate all this -- horribly brought out by the procedures this week.

I am in Italy right now, and I haven't been following what's been going on hour by hour -- so I'm only just catching up on that dinner and all night meeting.

I'm not sure, in any case, that it is a great idea for anyone to take big, long-term decisions over fiscal union with the pistol of Greek default and Italian collapse held to their heads. But, more to the point, how could anyone make sensible decisions in the way these leaders, elected and un-elected, were asked to do? (Clever as Mario Monti may be, do we really think it is OK for an entirely unelected leader to commit the Italians to a significantly new version of the EU treaty -- even if it IS to their short term advantage?)

OK, the whole public side of these discussions may only be a "staged" version; the real talking might well have been going on elsewhere. But is a nine hour late night dinner a good way of doing important business? The Italian papers are saying the Boyko Borisov (Mr Bulgaria) actually put his hand up a one point and asked to go to bed...and well he might have.

Austerity Olympics please

When the Greeks put on such a lavish show at the opening of the 2004 Olympics, I asked my Greek friends who exactly was paying for all this. "The EU", they said smugly . . , well, chickens have come home to roost. In more ways than one. Many of the great Olympic venues in Athens are now rotting (as you see on the right). So much for sustainabilty.

So after these jingoistic parades of the last couple of decades (the Greeks weren't the only ones), I was hoping for a great return to the Austerity Olympics (as of1948). Wouldn't it be a great idea to cut all the crap, forget all the nationalism, and just have a simple parade ofthe athletes without all the glitzy, meretricious and evanescent razzmattaz.

But David Cameron just hasn't got the bottle. He's just doubled the budget for the opening.

A don's inbox

I often think that the blog headlines makes my job look rather different from the (hugely rewarding) day to day reality of university teaching. I cant talk to you about what my students said in their supervisions (at least they would be understandably very angry if I did). So we tend to drift to the foreign trips, the big lectures .. and all the stuff that is NOT really the 'day job'.

A couple of years ago I shared a day's emails to try to rectify this a bit. And I am going to try it again. What follows is a list of emails received in the 24 hours between yesterday morning and this morning. I have omitted the 50 something that were mere adverts (British Airways, ASOS etc), or simply circulars (like the nice regular messages from the Danish Embassy), or alerts from Twitter, or clearly spam escaping the filter (like the nice hint that I might have inherited a few million from an intestate Mr Beard in Kenya).

So this is what we have.. a Don's (real) Life!

Educational tourism

There is something deeply frustrating about many of the bright new educational ideas headlined by all political parties. I mean the 'educational tourism' ones. They are easy to recognise. Some minister or shadow minister has been on a visit to Norway, the United States or wherever, and returns home with an 'idea' for schools or universities -- whether is is how to raise the basic skills of 11 year olds, or how to increase diversity among undergraduates -- which they proceed to wave around (often accusing the educational professionals here of blindness to exciting new developments overseas).

They sometimes haven't got wise to such problems of these schemes as could be discovered  by a quick trawl on google (the issues surrounding New York charter schools, for example).They sometimes don't appear to have thought about the key structural differences between one (superficially similar) system and another.

That is especially apparent in admissions to university, where the USA and the UK are really non-comparable -- for the simple reason that American kids normally aren't entering into subject specific degree programmes right away, but specialise later. So they can reasonably be selected by non-specialists (who might indeed be charged with particular targets for ethnicity, social background etc). We, on the other hand, are normally choosing students for specialised courses, to be completed in three years. You surely have to involve specialists, not general adminstrators for that.

"Shagging for chastity"?

I didnt try to go and hear David Willetts speak about the future of universities on Tuesday. A feeble excuse -- you have the Minister of State for Higher Education showing up in Cambridge for a 30 minute talk followed by an hour's discussion, and you say you are too busy, Beard? But I am now very glad that I didnt try to rearrange my life. -- because as many of you will already know --  a group of twenty or thirty students (and some senior members) disrupted his talk as he started to speak, first with a prepared chant, then occupying the stage. Willetts went home without saying a word.

If I HAD showed up I would have been furious (for pretty selfish reasons). Instead I think I feel more embarrassed, on the part of the institution. I think that Willetts' policies for universities are almost wholly misguided; and I think it is really encouraging to see students engaging with the politics of Higher Education (instead But stopping him explain his views and then discuss them, is folly.

For a start it is a terrific own goal. Willetts will go round for months saying that he had tried to talk at Cambridge but he had been forced off the stage (that's what I would say in his position anyway). But more important -- as most people I've talked to in Cambridge think -- to prevent someone (because you dont agree with them) voicing their views is to flout what the university is all about. Protest, yes; tough argument, yes. But the university (and indeed these students above many others) are committed to the principle of free speech... so what were they doing stopping it.  As Simon Goldhill, the organiser of the event, characteristically put it, "you cant shag for chastity". (Quoted here)

Online etiquette

 

One of the things that I really like about this blog, is that the commenters are (by and large!) courteous, on-topic and full of relevant learning (and languages). The comments engage with, and add to, the blog. Most people have read the original post very carefully .. too carefully sometimes, if you ask me (that's why they pick up all the errors of punctuation.... but thanks all). And they (I mean, you) make the blog more the sum of its parts.

I've only recently come to realise quite how different we are from the usual online postings. I've been doing a few BBC talks and the comments on these are nothing of our sort... there are some careful engagements, that's true, and I'm hugely grateful for those, whether pro or anti. But a frightening lot of the comments that appear on the Have Your Say BBC website seem to be driven by different versions of bile. Same is true for the Guardian Comment, Mumsnet .. or really any big commenting site.

There is an awful lot of 'this is rubbish'. 'you are a complete idiot to write this'... or "ho  ho old lady, do you have a beard?'