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

Sex on the Beach

My prize Christmas present this year was an extremely elegant cocktail shaker, plus all the trimmings.  And I mean all: four martini glasses with flashing stems (improbably acquired from Marks and Spencer); cocktail recipe book; bottle of cointreau and bottle of tequila (who would keep tequila in the house if they were not making cocktails?); and, to complete the kit, 12 limes (ditto, as for the tequila).

After a day’s stint in the library, honestly, I need a stiff drink. Roy Roebuck, commenting on my last post, thought that Oliver Cromwell, the old Puritan, would have approved of my Christmas work regime. Well the day of labour, maybe. But he’d have been a bit less happy about the evening’s entertainment.

So it’s been good-bye gin and tonic or a delicate glass or two of white wine; and hello Blue Lagoon and Moscow Mule.

No peace for the wicked

I am spending Christmas in the library. Well, that’s not quite 100% true. The whole family is taking today off work for the ritual turkey, presents and inebriation. But that’s as far as it goes.

I should say that I can think of many more exciting ways of spending the festive season (I’m not that sad). But I have an unmissable deadline on 2 January, which can only be “un-missed” if I get to work for a regulation eight hours or so, on most days between now and then. (OK that trip to Egypt didn't help!)

I realise that my blog may give the impression that a don’s life largely consists of whirlwind tours to exotic foreign locations. But most of what I do is infinitely more humdrum, and much less blog-worthy. Right now, it involves putting on my fingerless mittens and “checking references” in the Classics Faculty Library, whose heat has been firmly turned off until the beginning of January.

I feel a bit like the academic equivalent of Tiny Tim.

Pissing on the Pyramids

  If you venture deep inside the pyramids (as I did the day after the fun at the zoo) you find that the inner chamber smells very strongly of piss. It’s a predictable act of desecration, I guess. But it does tend to encourage a speedy visitor turn-around.

In general, though, the pyramids sprang lots of surprises. And they offered the possibility of pleasures (or transgressions) that would be decidedly off limits back home.

Let me say to begin with, unlike so many “Wonders of the World,” they do not disappoint.  They are absolutely vast and, at least if you view them one direction, they give every impression of being isolated in the trackless desert.

Visitors are not encouraged to look the other way, where the huge silhouettes appear not against the background of the camel-dotted sands, but against the suburbs of Cairo – and, in particular, against the distinctive colours of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (Pyramids branch). It doubles with Pizza Hut if you go upstairs.

The smile on the face of the tiger?

Last Friday I put my hand into the mouth of a hippopotamus and have lived to tell the tale. The scene of this act of consummate bravery was Cairo zoo, where under the gleeful instructions of a couple of zoo keepers I was given a bundle of hay and told to insert it into the beast’s wide-open jaws.

One of my first posts on this blog was a complaint about the political correctness of the zoo at San Diego, where disabled animals are treated with all the respect of their fully-abled brothers (i.e. they are not put down), and where everything is done for the best of all ecological reasons. The Cairo zoo goes to the other extreme. It managed to up-stage even my own old-fashioned ideas of “animals as spectacle”. The biter bit, you might say.

Small World?

In my own specialism (I haven’t a clue what happens in English or Modern Languages, let alone in Science), there are two basic types academic conference. The one squashes as many papers as it can into the time available: 15+ papers in a day, with as many participants speaking as many different languages as the organizers can muster, with hardly a moment for proper discussion – but if you’re lucky a good party, and generous quantities of alcohol at the beginning and end of proceedings. 

The other is a more gentlemanly affair. A small group of experts round a table, just a handful of papers, and hours and hours of discussion, to which everyone is expected to contribute. As a rule of thumb, you consume less alcohol but learn a lot more, and have to work harder, at this sort of occasion.

The conference at Williamstown, hosted by the Research Institute attached to the Gallery, was emphatically of the second type. There were just ten of us and we had each submitted a written paper in advance. Some of these were weighty foot-noted affairs; mine, I must confess, was rather lighter. At the conference we were given just fifteen minutes to re-introduce what we had written; I was more obedient on this time-limit than some, I can boast. Then it was just discussion for two days --  fortified by copious amounts of healthy food, fruit-juice and mineral water.

The subject was the “Art of Spoliation”. It wasn’t actually quite as relevant to modern geo-politics as that title might imply.

Come back, baby Jesus

  Being in the United States in December is almost enough to turn me into a raving religious fundamentalist. I have been assaulted (visually at least) by so many reindeer, sleighs, Santa Claus’s and snowmen that I would give anything for a half-tasteful trio of kings or even a baby Jesus. And I would swap all the piped versions of “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” quickly followed by “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer”  for a few bars of some pre-pubescent chorister hamming up “Once in royal David’s city” (or even the ghastly “O little town of Bethlehem”).

The problem is that if you want to celebrate the festive season without offending any one else’s religious sensibilities, you are inevitably pushed into kitsch. That’s going to be true in the UK sooner than we know, with the onset of a guaranteed non-offensive, politically correct, one size fits all winter ritual.

It’s been years now since all those jolly hunting scenes that I remember from the  Christmas cards of my childhood disappeared (blokes in pink chasing the poor fox on what was presumably meant to evoke the Boxing Day Meet). Soon it’ll be the turn of the birth of Jesus. The only way you can now safely send a standard nativity scene is if it’s taken from a medieval manuscript and sold in aid of a museum – “art”  in other words.

Otherwise it’s much wiser to stick to children playing in the snow, holly or sub-Picasso doves of peace. Even I had an anxious qualm when the staff in my Faculty wanted to display a Christmas tree. Was that multi-cultural enough, I wondered. Don’t worry, I decided it was.

The dirty books in the library tower

Every Cambridge undergraduate, as well as a fair few of the dons, believes that the University Library stores its collection of pornography in the tower. It’s a myth encouraged, I suspect, by the distinctively phallic shape of this structure, which rises almost twenty floors over the main entrance to the Library.

But it is just a myth. I now know that the tower contains something much more exciting than pornography – and something more exciting than its title, “The Supplementary Collection”, would hint.

Cambridge, like the Bodleian, the British Library and a few others, is what is known as a Legal Deposit Library, which means that since the eighteenth century it has received a copy of every book published in the country. Nineteenth-century academic librarians operated a hard-line policy on these books: those that were considered “academic” were fully catalogued and put into the main system; the rest (from school textbooks through Christmas annuals to board games and Penny Dreadfuls) were put into the B stream, with just a rudimentary hand-written slip for a catalogue entry.

When in the 1930s the Library moved into its new Giles Gilbert Scott, industrial-style, building, the B stream was lodged in the tower – which I visited for the first time a few days ago. It was an utterly memorable occasion, and not just for the lift getting stuck repeatedly on the way up!

Why victims should NOT have a voice

I have held on to this post for a few days, as it seemed a bit tasteless to plunge in straightway.

Last week at the Old Bailey a statement by Adèle Eastman, Tom Ap Rhys Price’s fiancée, was read out in open court, after his killers had been found guilty but before they had been sentenced. Ap Rhys Price had got a First in Classics in my Faculty at Cambridge a decade ago and then become a lawyer. His killing has seemed to many people peculiarly and horribly senseless.

The public reaction of his family has surpassed belief in its dignity. Together with his legal firm they have set up a trust in his memory to provide educational facilities for the disadvantaged – as, in one way or another, his killers certainly were. And, far from squealing for the noose, they decried the widespread carrying of knives. (Donations to the trust can be made online.)

But under a pilot scheme now running in England (influenced in part by practice in the United States), the bereaved were allowed to make their own courtroom statement about the impact that the crime had had on their lives.

I am sure that, had I been in Adèle Eastman’s position, I would have done exactly what she did. I am also sure that this innovation is a very bad idea.