A Don's Life by Mary Beard - Times Online - WBLG

Happy Christmas: the anthropology of ritual

Happy Christmas everyone -- and especially to those who have sent wishes and cards etc to me.(That's me feeling happy at home, taken by the daughter, on the right.)

I am writing this at seven o clock on Christmas Day...after opening the presents, cooking the turkey, eating the feast, playing some party games, all accompanied by industrial quantities of alcohol. Now we are watching a classic Morse on the television, before Poirot in Syria comes on at 9.00. Sounds familiar?

As the children have observed, this is about the only ritual we do without feeling stupidly self-conscious -- I couldn't  for example, mount an Easter egg hunt without a certain sense of self irony (and even when we DID mount such things, it did always seem faintly silly).

So, we asked ourselves, if we were doing an anthropological analysis, what would we point to?

Shutting the stable door...

This notice is currently on display at Cambridge station (photograph kindly taken by the husband).

Does it have a point?

Suppose I am under the influence of alcohol, I see the notice and think "Gosh I must take special care while on the platform, as I am indeed under the influence of alcohol...". Isn't part of the point of being under the influence that you don't realise that you are?

The notice is clearly pointless (except to enable the station authorities to say to the coroner, when an inebriated passenger has slipped under a train.. "but there were notices warning the drunk to take extra care").

Within a few years there will no doubt be a notice threatening a few years in prison if you are caught drunk in charge of a suitcase on Cambridge station.

That is because 'we' (I mean new Labour and the Tories, and the Lib Dems I suspect, if you scratched the surface) have only one reaction to behaviour we dont like: namely, bang the buggers up.

Who should clear away the snow?

Cambridge looks beautiful, and numerous photographers are out capturing their colleges in the snow for the next prospectus (rumour has it that a particularly fetching shot of a snowman at Emma some years ago did more for the college's applications than a lifetime of school visits). You can see the view from the windows of my college room on the right.

It is also treacherous. Hardly any roads have been gritted or salted, and many have become skating rinks. The pavements likewise are uncleared, and you walk on them at your peril -- even two days after the snow fell.

So who is supposed to clear the snow and why don't they?

Answer one: the local council is supposed to do it, but they don't, first of all, because it is uneconomic.

Lunch in Florence -- punishment for my carbon emissions, and a glimpse of my own past

On Wednesday I went to give a paper at the European University, which is housed in stunning quarters outside Florence, in Fiesole. Getting to know about this has been one of the good consequences of working with the European Research Council -- it is a fantastic place, all graduate, which offers fully funded PhD grants and generous post-doc fellowships. (Why don't more Brits take advantage of this?) 

I left Gatwick at 10.00 (on Meridiana, as will become relevant later in the story) and by 1.15 (the time change works in your favour) I was lunching with a friend and ex-student overlooking the Ponte Vecchio. Niggling doubts about the morality of this in "Copenhagen week" were quickly overlain by the sheer fun of it all, and how easily it had worked. Breakfast on the Thames, lunch by the Arno.

But don't worry, punishment was to come.

Vote first, think later: vetting (and Iraq)

 
I am of course pleased that there have been changes to the vetting arrangements for school visits etc. I would much prefer that we didn't live in a world in which everyone was assumed to be a danger to children unless "proven" otherwise. But even so, if there must be legislation, then it is better that some of the rough edges are knocked off sooner rather than later.

But the bigger question is: what on earth were the MPs doing when they passed this vetting bill, in its full form,  in the first place? Why did it take a group of authors, among other interest groups, to see what the implications were going to be for school visits by poets and novelists, or for language exchange arrangements, or for sports clubs? In their enthusiasm for flushing paedophiles out of the woodwork, did no MP spot these issues? Did they not have their brains in gear, or listen to those that did?

To offer a comparison with something much more trivial (though important to those involved): when we are changing regulations for our exams in Cambridge, we make sure to think through all the implications, however remote, very carefully. How might this change impact on someone who was reading Latin and French, and was currently on a year's placement in France? Might they possibly be unfairly disadvantaged by a change that is brought in for the benefit of the majority of students. Taking account of all the possible consequences is what making rules is all about.

So what has gone wrong to make our legislature so conspicuously sloppy?

It reminds me of a meeting we had in Cambridge in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Should the Rosetta Stone go back....where?

What is the best selling post-card in the British Museum?

The last time I inquired -- admittedly more than a decade ago, but was told that it was the permanent "number one" -- it was a rather dreary image of the Rosetta Stone. That outsold its major rivals by several thousand. If you are interested, the main post-card rivals were:  various views of the Museum itself, the (also Egyptian) bronze "Gayer Anderson" cat (displayed on the card plus or minus a real live tabby cat) and an original drawing of Beatrix Potter's Flopsy Bunnies.

There is no doubt that the Rosetta Stone (seen a few years back above) is a major icon of the British Museum -- and in fact, its post-card celebrity is backed up by its presence on best selling umbrellas, duvet covers and mouse mats (remember them?), all especially popular, I am told, in Japan.

I was once very puzzled about all this. After all, it is a rather uninspiring lump of black basalt, inscribed at the beginning of the second century BCE, recording an agreement between the Greek king of Egypt and a group of Egyptian priests, concerned among other things with tax breaks for the said priests. It came to London, as spolls of war in the early nineteenth century, captured from the French.

So why so charismatic?

Presumably because it was the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs, as the inscription was trilingual -- in hieroglyphs, Greek and Egyptian demotic. Whether you think that the key work was done by Thomas Young (British) or Jean-Francois Champollion (French) depends  partly on your national prejudice.

And now, again, Zahi Hawass (Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt) wants it "back"? Does he have a point?

Modern languages or -- "What's French for entrepreneur?"

Occasionally, I hate the House of Lords. That's when the unelected Lords Mandelson and Adonis are busy running the country, with no come-back from us voters (Daily-Mail-style rant has been suppressed here). More often, I thank God that we still have them -- with all their unelected, clever and un-self-interested sense of responsibility and duty. (Yes.)

Last week was a great example of this when Baroness Coussins (ex of my own Cambridge college, I confess) launched a debate (starting at "Column 807") on the state of Modern Languages and its relationship to the economy. One nice fact she brought out pretty soon was that languages in this country are in such a parlous state that we may not be able to provide all the translators we need for the 2012 Olympics. Now I have very mixed feelings about this money-burning sporting extravaganza -- but the idea that it should fail because we haven't got enough interpreters... That does hurt.

Academic impact: last days to comment

This post is a manifesto. I don't usually (?haven't ever) used this blog to urge any specific protest. But there is less than two weeks left to register your comments -- pro or con --  on the HEFCE consultation exercise over the new "Research Excellence Framework", which threatens to distribute a significant proportion of government funding to universities on the basis of the social and economic "impact" of their research.

Don't misunderstand me. I am all in favour of research making an impact outside the academy. But that is quite different from funding (and so, implicitly, directing) research on that basis. In fact, it is probably the case that the reason that UK research has had such a significant impact is simply because it didn't set out with an "impact aim" in mind.

It has been "curiosity driven" research of the highest quality -- and for that reason, for causes and effect that could not be predicted, precisely calibrated or explained, it has made its impact, five, ten, twenty, maybe fifty or a hundred years later. (Stefan Collini in the TLS is good on this; and me and others have a go here).

Jane Ellen Harrison meets 'Health 'n Safety'

I have now finished my Aberdeen lectures, and am spending my last days here exploring the archives. I'm in search of (among others) Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick, brilliant and intensely irritating - let's be honest - classical archaeologist, who was one of the iconic founding figures of my own Cambridge college (and whose portrait, as an old lady, I have in my college room; not the sultry version by Augustus John at the top of this post).

Before women were allowed to take degrees at Cambridge (a privilege not granted till after World War II), Harrison got her first formal degree (an Honorary LL.D) from the University of Aberdeen in 1895 -- before picking up another honorary academic gong at Durham a couple of years later.

I've long wondered what the story was, and whether the degree was at all controversial at the Aberdeen end.

The answer is that it wasn't all plain sailing.

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo: what was Catullus on about?

Lucky Catullus (in Alma-Tadema's version, centre, above). He has had more publicity in the last 24 hours than in the last 24 years. Whole cohorts of journalists who have never read a word of the first century BC poet have been puzzling (with the help of wiki usually) about what the words 'pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo" really mean?

Because these were the word written by Mark Lowe in an email to a young woman who had asked him the meaning of "diligite inimicos vestros".

What it means is quite simple (though a number of family newspapers have refrained from printing a translation without a good few dashes and asterisks): "I will ram my cock up your ass and down your throat."

Mark Lowe's defence is that Catullus was being witty. A few journalists have half-sided with him -- suggesting that this was meant as a lusty to retort to the Latin she wanted him to translate. The passage, which is from St Matthew, says 'love your enemies'. No says Catullus, bugger them.

If anyone had actually read (and thought about) the complete poem -- for the offending phrase is the first and last line of Catullus Poem 16 -- they would have seen a better joke and a better defence.

How (not) to buy a subsidised bicycle

In case you hadn't caught up with this, the UK government has a "Cycle to Work" initiative, which allows workers for those companies who opt in to get tax relief (under a "salary sacrifice" scheme) when they buy a new bike to get themselves to work. The University of Cambridge have indeed just opted in --  and the procedures are currently administered by "Cyclescheme", who describe themselves as "the UK's number one provider of tax-free bikes for the Government's Cycle to Work initiative". (So there are number two and three providers? I found myself wondering -- then discovered Booost and Cycle2work.)

It is, of course, a good idea in principle. Anything that would get cars off the Cambridge roads and more bikes on, would be a great improvement.

But just look at the dreadful palaver that it takes to get one of these things -- and the nasty sting in the tail (namely that the richer employees benefit more from this scheme).

Pagan survivals?

I hope no one thinks that I have not been impressed by my first trip to the far north-east. Elgin may have been a disgrace, and Inverness probably worse (though mitigated, in that case, by picking up a copy of Dyer's Pompeii, two volumes of a nineteenth century biography of Bulwer-Lytton, plus Sidney Colvin's memoirs in the bookshop there).

But all around were quite wonderful scenery and extremely elegant towns and villages. The beach nearest to Elgin is at Lossiemouth (right and left) -- and was totally deserted except for some hardy dog-walkers and a couple of even hardier sandcastle builders (aged c. 6). The waitress in the hotel said that it was packed in summer -- hard to imagine and who with?

But the jewel of the neigbourhood was a little place called Fochabers, a village planted by the Dukes of Gordon to get the great unwashed off their estate in the late eighteenth century (the Scots may complain about what the English have done to them ... but it seems to me that the posh Scots themselves are guilty of some pretty dreadful treatment of the rank and file). The upside of this is a tiny planned town, all of an architectural piece. Centre stage is a gorgeous Grecian Church of Scotand church (gorgeous on the outside at least, the inside has been pretty mauled over) staring across the town square are the Gordon Chapel (of the Dukes).

The weirdest thing we saw, though, was a 'rag well' -- or 'clootie well' (as in 'ne'er cast a clout', I imagine) -- near the village of Munlochy (that's the picture at the top).

The desecration of Elgin

I don't mean LORD Elgin. I'm talking about the town of Elgin, north of Aberdeen (to which Marion Diamond suggested I might turn my attention).

The fact is that the husband has been up in Scotland this weekend, and we decided to spend a couple of nights even further north, and chose Elgin as a good base for all kinds of things we thought we wanted to see.

Elgin had once been a wonderful town. Not to mention the famous ruined cathedral, it still has an elegant Greek revival church (complete with a replica "Monument of Lysicrates", as you can see in the photo, on its top). This was just part of what had once been an elegantly proportioned town centre of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century.

But what on earth have the locals allowed to happen to it?

The High Street is now a complete disgrace (and I am afraid the pictures don't quite capture the horrors of it). All local efforts seem to have gone into a 1980s/90s shopping mall, leaving the beautiful street to crumble -- some of it boarded up, some of it taken over by rock-bottom rent charity shops, all of it scarred by modern shop-fronts that  pay no attention to what had been a beautiful street-scape.

What on earth as caused this?

Aberdeen Connections

I am currently spending a few weeks north of the border, giving the Geddes-Harrower lectures in Aberdeen. I have to confess that (unlike a number of my colleagues) I have never been one to go weak at the knees at the mere thought of the banks and braes of Caledonia, etc etc . . . In fact, I am none too keen on the great outdoors, and have always been a little suspicious of the Scottish weather, the cult of tartan (et al) and all that whisky-buffery (the 'nice little island malt' stuff).

So Aberdeen has been a nice surprise. Not in terms of the weather, which is pretty dark and rainy. But I haven't come across a single piece of tartan. I have eaten my first pot of stovies (thanks, Chris and Liz). And even more important there have been some real intellectual discoveries and satisfying coincidences.

My lectures are on various forms of nineteenth-century engagement with classical archaeology, and I have been looking for Aberdonian connections to my usual themes.

These have come in abundance -- coincidentally and unexpectedly.

The Tesco University Library?

"The Tesco Library" doesn't exactly trip off my tongue very easily. Not that I have anything against Tesco. The "Cadbury Schweppes Library" or even "The John Lewis Partnership Library" wouldn't sound any better. But I'm sure I could get used to it -- if it came with a few million pounds to keep the library as great it has always been. This year has been the first time in 25 years working in Cambridge that I have had a suggestion for a library purchase rejected for the sole reason that it was too expensive. And if a Tesco (vel sim) "naming opportunity" would make sure I got the books I needed, I would be happy.

So I dont really understand the fuss in some quarters about the possible Tesco scenario. There are all kinds of dangers in raising private money to fund university research. But they are all about the possible power that the donor thinks they are buying -- over policy, academic priorities, or appointments. If Tesco thought that, for their millions, they could have a say in what books were acquired, who should be allowed to borrow, or who should be University Librarian, that would be a different matter. We have a regular and generous donor to the Classics section of my college library. The letter always comes saying "the choice of books is of course yours". That's exactly how it should be,

For mega-donations, naming is a good way of recognising benefaction which doesn't hurt anybody. After all it hasn't hurt the Bodleian to be called after their sixteenth-century bank-roller, Sir Thomas Bodley.

Launching the blog book -- and Midweek

This was the week which launched the blog book. It is now well over 3 years since I have been blogging (reluctantly to start with, but soon with terrifying enthusiasm and not without its irritations, I am sure, for the long-suffering family). The whole thing has been strangely life changing, and in quite unexpected ways. If anyone had said to me four years ago that I would be sitting down to Sunday lunch to a couple of people from Swaziland whom I had previously only met electronically, I would not have understood what they were talking about.

But that is, of course, what happened a few days ago. (Thank you Paul and Glorious for coming from Africa to see the book on its way, thank you Eileen from the US, and thank you everyone else who went to such trouble to come to join in the fun.)

For those who haven't yet seen it, the book of the blog includes quite a few of the original comments from various commenters. And we decided to have two parties to launch the book, one in London and one in Cambridge, to make it as easy as possible for all those published commenters to make it. The Cambridge party was at Heffers, the London one at the Society of Antiquaries -- excellent locations, I should say.

A good time was had by all. The only problem for me -- who has an increasing difficulty with names (not, I like to think, a consequence of failing memory, but simply of having too many to remember . . . ha ha) --  was how to recognise the guests. Or rather it was how to tell those guests I had never seen before (the commenters known only previously through cyberspace) from my familiar friends whom I just happened to have temporarily forgotten.

I got it wrong several times. Sorry all. And it didn't get better after more alcohol.

Do universities need Mandelson's 'consumer revolution'?

In twenty years time, I am afraid we will look back and wonder what happened to the "education" in higher education. We will have no doubt that the blame for turning them into training establishments at the behest of business (which is almost certainly where they will end up if things go on the way they are) lay with the Labour government of the early 2000s.

According to today's papers Lord Mandelson will be announcing the way forward on Tuesday. University courses, it is predicted, will now be advertised with their drop out rates, the number of contact hours with  students have ("how often they will have tutorials with star academics") etc.  The model for this is apparently the new "food-labelling system".

Now, I realise that all this has not been announced yet, and I should perhaps hold my anger until it has, But these leaks have a habit of being right, so here goes.

For a start, anyone can surely see that a system made for a hamburger with too much salt is not likely to be "fit for purpose" (one of new Labour's own favourite slogans) in assessing the education, learning and research of hundreds and thousands of bright young people. Besides, after the signal failures of the British business and financial sectors over the last few years, many will wonder whether the "business" model that underlies all this is really the magic bullet that it cracked up to be. (Thank God that universities HAVEN'T been run like businesses, one might say.) And if they reflect further, many will soon realise that Mandelson's reported desire to slash the funding of those courses which do "not benefit the economy directly" will have the effect of decimating departments of Maths and Theoretical Physics, as well as the more obvious targets of Classics, History and Anglo-Saxon -- all of which are jewels in the crown of British intellectual life and by EDUCATING their students rather than TRAINING them have in fact turned out a generations of students who (among many other things) know what thinking is, and how to adapt their mental processes to new circumstances.

Of course, all is not perfect with the higher education sector. And they haven't got better in the last few years -- largely as a consequence of being asked to do a lot more for not a lot more money, and the conflicting aims and aspirations of successive policy makers. Mandelson may complain about the student experience, but it is his government that has ensured that university funding depends differentially on research "output". So what does he expect us to prioritise?

Even so British universities are among the very best in the world for much less money than pours into higher education in other places. (Compare the achievements of Cambridge and Harvard, pound for pound.) They are, as we have observed before, a much more glittering star in the British firmament than British sport. They do not deserve these ill-informed attacks. When was the last time that Mandelson spent more than a morning in a university, I wonder?

Pit stop at Pompeii

Tourists have been complaining about the refreshments provided at, or near, Pompeii since the mid nineteenth century. The careful Murray's Handbook to Southern Italy warned visitors in the late 1800s to be careful about the prices at the Hotel Diomede (a convenient watering hole near the entrance to the site, just outside): better to fix a price with mein Host before you sit down to lunch; else you might find yourself seriously ripped off.

For the last few decades there has been a decent restaurant in the middle of the ancient city, not far from the Forum. It came courtesy of the allied bombing which smashed holes in Pompeii in 1943 (it had been reported that the enemy was hiding out there). One of those holes was not made good after the war, but found a new use in providing for hungry visitor (plus one of the few loos on the sites). It wasn't ever brilliant -- but it did offer a decent plate of pasta rather cheaper than the modern equivalents of the Hotel Diomede just outside the site.

Then a couple of years ago, it was closed.

I wish Nick Griffin hadn't seemed quite so MAD

Don't misunderstand me. I think the policies of the BNP are appalling. But the Question Time programme did play into our comfortable assumptions that people with terrible ideas are recognisably monstrous -- when the truth is that some of those with the vilest views on earth can be charming dinner guests.

And it's that truth that politics needs to grapple with. Demonisation is easy, but it doesnt reach the complexity of the problem. (Look where the demonisation of Saddam Hussein got us.)

Part of the problem on Thursday night was the way the programme had been reformulated to consist in a series of personal attacks on Griffin himself. The husband remarked, after we had watched, that it felt as if Griffin had been in the stocks and the audience and other panellists had been pelting him with past its sell-by-date tomatoes. (Bonnie Greer was the only one who used a bit of cleverness and wit in the attack -- and I gave her full marks for that, even if not for what she said after the programme.)

Where, I wondered was that old-fashioned idea of loving the sinner while hating the sin (a nice formulation of Gandhi, St Augustine others)? The problem about Griffin is his ARGUMENTS, and it's those that need to be demolished, not his personal qualities, or lack of them. But sadly Griffin played into their hands, and came across as barking, if not repulsive.

The bigger problem here is how we understand Virtue and Evil. It suits the cheaper side of political debate and media hype to imagine that somehow all the virtues (or vices) come together, as a package: a good person will be good across the board, a bad one similarly bad. It's a view with a long pedigree (and Aristotle has got a lot to answer for), but it crudifies political culture, is almost always a gross oversimplification and it undermines our capacity to deal with racism, terrorism, discrimination or whatever.

It's a don's life -- the book

The book of this blog is due out on 5 November. But advance copies are now available from Amazon, and are on their way to those commenters whose comments are included in the compendium (you know who you are). I like the look of it and, obviously, feel some trepidation about how it will be 'received', and -- of course -- bought.

The book reprints some selected posts, as well as including quite a few comments (and I think that debate actually makes the book). It also has an essay, by yours truly, on the nature of blogging -- and why I am a convert to the genre, despite many initial misgivings about dumbing down etc etc.

I hope you'll like it.