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

Business or pleasure?

As we landed in Los Angeles, I realised that one of the things I liked about British Airways was the cabin crew. The same would go, I guess, for most hi-cost (ex-)national airlines. Jump onto a budget carrier and you're in the hands of a posse of underpaid, size-8, late adolescents, who are either insufferably jolly or entirely uninterested. At least BA still employs a sprinkling of women of a certain age and a certain size, who appear to be treating the job as a career and -- as they will tell you given half a chance -- are worried about their pensions.

I'm sure that they are all equally well trained in the use of the escape slide (and the lo-cost version may actually be slightly nimbler in the event of landing on water).  But, if disaster struck,  I would certainly feel safer with these matronly types in charge.

Sex in the sculpture garden

The traces were undeniable. We were peering at one of the most famous Roman portrait sculptures in the world, discussing with art-historical intensity the provenance, the marble and the tooling. Then someone had the nerve to point out that on its cheek and its chin were the faint but clear marks of two bright red lipstick kisses.

The emperor's new clothes

After the Louvre Pyramid and the British Museum Great Court, now the Capitoline Exedra. The wondrous gallery of art and sculpture housed in Michelangelo’s palazzo on the Capitoline Hill in Rome is the latest to snatch more display space by reclaiming some dead ground and to cover it with elegant, post-modern glass.

In this case, Italian architect Carlo Aymonino has transformed what was a garden between two parts of the building into a stunning combination of archaeological site and museum gallery.

It opened just a few months ago. Last Sunday afternoon, even the locals who wandered in seemed surprised at the new building and what they found in it.

To strike or not to strike?

As I remember them, lecturers’ strikes in Cambridge used to be faintly absurd affairs. When the “day of action” was called (it was only ever a single day) you would cancel your lectures and supervisions and re-arrange them for later in the week. You couldn’t let the students suffer.

On the day itself, you’d send a letter to the administration telling them you were on strike, so that they could dock your pay. After all, if you don’t have designated working-hours or working-place, it’s hard for the boss to know whether you’re on strike or not. Then you’d toddle off to the library for a solid day’s research, “work” in another sense.

The net result was a ghastly week of rearranged teaching squashed into all hours. You had lost a day’s pay and your employer (against whom you were supposed to be striking) had saved it. All in all, a pretty decisive own goal.

So is the current AUT “action short of a strike” – that is, the exam boycott – any more on target? I really don’t know.

A blog before its time

So far exams here seem to be going ahead through the AUT boycott and “revision classes” are in full swing. These can be gruesome affairs. The students hang on your every word for a hint of what’s on the paper. You can’t give it away – but then you don’t want to punish them either, by only talking about things that aren’t going to come up.

A good way to avoid this game of bluff and double-bluff  is to give them a intellectual treat. Serving up the author of one of their key textbooks for a grilling usually works brilliantly. Key texts tend to be austere objects,  600 pages or so, squashed between the sombre covers of some university press. If the students get nothing else out of the encounter, at least they discover that the author is a human being.

But in a course I co-direct on Roman Britain (from Julius Caesar to Manda Scott) the textbook of  choice is flimsy paperback, privately published – part of no grand academic imprint. It’s almost as if some university course on the Modern British Novel focused on the product of a vanity publisher.

Feeling smug at the zoo

I’m not an avid zoo visitor. But, if I must, I go for old-fashioned elephant rides and chimpanzees in funny hats, pouring PG Tips over each other. True, it’s not the kind of entertainment that most of us over-10s would choose. But at least it feels more honest than the sanctimonious double standards that are the order of the day in most modern wildlife parks.

All the talk is of conservation, of preserving endangered species and of the heroic struggles at artificial insemination that these noble goals seem always to entail. But underneath it’s the same old voyeurism as we watch these poor caged beasts do their tricks for us. The more pissing and farting, silly noises and cuddly new-borns the better.

Searching for the mothballs

Today I did manage to shut the door against students and all-comers and claim exactly 2 hours and 35 minutes for finishing my book. Writing it I mean, not reading.

Being on the brink of submitting the typescript is about the best stage there is in producing a book. You can gaze in pride at those hundreds of crisp pages that are all yours, and that no-one yet has had a chance to be nasty about. No sharp comments from publisher’s readers. No acerbic reviews. They have not yet (for this is even worse) been systematically ignored by every literary editor in the land. In your mind’s eye, the book is still the mover and shaker that you always hoped it would be, a Whitbread prize-winner and money-spinner. You start to plan the new car/bathroom/house you'll have on the proceeds.

Get me out of here

With a lofty disdain for the rhythms of the rest of the country, the University of Cambridge treats May Day  bank holiday as a normal working day.  I had planned to use it for some real academic brain work – more precisely for finessing the footnotes of a book due at the publishers weeks ago. In the event, I spent most of it wrestling with the tricky problems of “evac-chairs”.