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

Sorry -- driving test cancelled

My son has been learning to drive this summer, and had his test booked for just before he went back to university. Then, with less than 24 hours notice, the Driving Standards Agency rang to cancel: the driving tester was ill.

For those of you reading this outside the UK, the British driving test falls into two parts. The first is the “theory test”, which is a mixture of “hazard awareness” simulations and multiple choice questions on the Highway Code and basic driving skills. The multiple choice questions tend to run along these lines:

You see a small child about to run across the road in front of your car. Do you

a) Shout at it to get out of the way

b) Accelerate, as fast as possible, to give it a chance to cross safely

c) Do an emergency stop

You feel like a cigaratte while driving. Do you

a) Keep going, but try to reach onto the back seat for the packet of Marlboro Lights you think you left there

b) Speed up to get more quickly to the nearest lay-by

c) Stop when it is safe to do so

The right answer is almost always the one containing the words “stop” or “cautiously” (as in “proceed cautiously”). "Accelerate" or "speed" are usually wrong. I can't see much harm in rubbing in the idea that being slow or stationary is a good thing; but the whole exam isn’t really that much of a challenge.

The practical test is something else, and it includes horrible exercises like “reversing round a corner”. That’s the equivalent of the Latin gerund: not used all that much in real life but a stinker to perform correctly if you have to.

Anyway the son had got to peak performance for this and then the test was cancelled.

The sex secrets of Kennedy's Latin Primer

A friend (and distinguished contributor to the TLS) e-mailed me at the week-end on the subject of Kennedy’s Latin Primer. He had come across an old article in the Guardian by the no less distinguished Valentine Cunningham, suggesting that the “Memorial Lines on the Gender of Latin Substantives”, which form an appendix to the Primer, were a “camp semaphore” – in other words, a cover for a series of steamy references to pederasty. It was an argument about Kennedy I had missed.

For those who do not number Kennedy (seen here with "the gerund") among their bed-time books, these “Memorial Lines” are a series of  jingles to help the young learner remember which Latin nouns are masculine, which feminine and which neuter. (“To nouns that cannot be declined/ The neuter gender is assigned. .” as one of the more memorable examples goes.) To judge from my father’s memory up to his death bed, they were once drilled into the heads of the young. Already in my day, they seemed a bit quaint.

Cunningham was really interested in the re-use of the jingles by Benjamin Britten in his version of the “Turn of the Screw” (no problem with the camp there). What caught my attention was his claim that, by a very careful choice of examples, old Kennedy himself – whose Revised Primer came out in 1888 and is still going strong (even if we don’t do the jingles much any longer) --  encoded a very similar  message.

My first instinct was to scoff. But after a bit of work, I wasn’t so sure.

How many academics does it take to buy a coffee maker?

Are academics hopelessly incompetent boffins, who couldn’t run a chip-shop?

I usually get very cross about this silly myth. In fact, I have a US bumper sticker on my office window which says (words to the effect of): “The trouble is that the people who ought to be running the country are too busy teaching school”. If nothing else it amuses the passing tourists.

But just occasionally, we (or, lets be honest, I) do seem to live up to the myth.

Take, for example, the idea that the hard-working Fellows of Newnham might have a coffee machine that would make good coffee 24 hours a day in their Senior Combination Room (that’s what we call our “Common Room”) -- replacing the thermos jugs that are now put out three times a day, and quickly lose their freshness, taste and heat.

This subversive idea was first mooted about three years ago. Specifically, some super-brain came up with the idea that we might have one of those Flavia machines, which makes you a very nice cup of coffee from a little foil sachet (as you see in the picture).

But there were closely-argued objections from two sides.

First there was the eco-lobby. Some of the fellows were far from happy with the environmental wastage caused by all those sachets. Then there were the taste police, who thought that this bulky modern machine was an inappropriate intrusion into our lovely, Victorian Combination Room.

Death in the family

Well not quite in the family. But my old PhD supervisor died last week while I was in Italy and it feels a bit like losing a parent.

That’s partly because you run through much of the same gamut of emotions with your supervisor as you do with your Mum and Dad. I mean a mixture of abject devotion and admiration, oedipal hostility, irritation, love and awe. Which is why, I guess, the Germans use the phrase Doktorvater or (if only!)  Doktormutter.

But it’s also to do with the succession of generations – biological or intellectual. The death of others, after all, brings out self-obsession in every one of us. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t thought, as they weep for their parents in the grave, that it is now “their turn next”. Suddenly it’s you that the grim reaper is going to have in his sights. 

Two wonders on the bay of Naples

Tourist attractions come in two kinds: those that turn out to be far more impressive than you ever imagined, and those that look much better on the postcard than in real life. I always thought that the crater of Mount Vesuvius would fall firmly in the second category. But I was wrong.

Let me say straight away that, for the middle-aged, it’s not the gentle stroll that it's often made out to be. For this trip we had invested in the new edition of the Blue Guide to Southern Italy and the entry on Vesuvius was only one of many things it got wrong.

The Blue Guides used to be reassuringly boring: loads of close printed information, careful directions to the B. Daddi altarpiece in the second chapel on the left, and art gallery collections listed obsessively, but usefully, room by room. The new version has fewer “facts”, a smattering of sub-Dorling-Kindersley pictures and no obvious sign that those who have updated it have actually been to many of the places they talk about (always the benchmark of a good guidebook).

In the case of Vesuvius, it said that the crater was a ten minute walk from the car-park. Well maybe the athletic young can cover almost a kilometre at a 15% incline in ten minutes, but most of those making the trek on Sunday were taking a good half hour (even with the “free” walking sticks handed out at the start of the path).

Yet when you get to the top, there’s not only a great view, over Pompeii and Herculaneum, but the crater itself (il gran cono) is truly gob-smacking: vast, sulphur-smelling and ominously steaming through its fissures. It really did feel like coming face to face with the earth’s dangerous underbelly.

But if Vesuvius won a touristic star from me, so too – more surprisingly – did the Blue Grotto.

Upstairs at the brothel

Despite the bleats in my last post about not getting enough time for (real) work, I am now in Naples for seven days doing some serious hard graft  at Pompeii: my last good look at the site before I write my book on it.

One of the Pompeian places that is sure to feature somewhere in this book is The Brothel. Now that the famous House of the Vettii is closed to the public, it is this that is the tour guides’ hot spot, nicely restored with Danish money a few years ago. On the ground floor, it consists of five little rooms, each with a fitted stone bed – plus a single loo, though no running water.

What makes it 100% certain that it is a brothel rather than (say) a cheap lodging house is the decoration (a lot of more or less unimaginative bits of painted erotica above the doors to the ‘cells’). And, of course, the graffiti: all over the walls are scrawled boasts and confessions, along the lines of  “I fucked Glyce/I want to fuck Glyce/I fucked Glyce for tuppence”.

Hardly surprising, I guess, that it attracts streams of visitors. And hardly surprising that the site authorities enter into the sprit of it a bit. Some wag, no doubt worried about the effect of light on the paintings, has posted “No Flash” on the notice outside.

But what I’ve always wanted to know is what happened upstairs.

What do we do in the Long Vacation?

A few years ago the canny person who designs the Cambridge University Pocket Diary (an essential tool for life in this place) decided to rename the summer. No longer did the months of June, July, August and September go under the banner heading “Long Vacation”. Henceforth they would be called the “Research Term”.

The reason for this is obvious: to dispel the idea that the summer is one long holiday for academics – a nice excuse for lazy afternoon on the river, picnics, garden parties or extended trips to the South of France. Not that it has been wholly successful. I still meet people who say “Ooh, I do envy you the long holidays you get in your job”. Even students, amazingly, sign off their summer emails with a cheery  “Hope you’re having a good break!”

So what do we do in the Long Vac (as it used to be called)?

Greek treasures and global treasures

I only wish that many of those who exploded at my post on the Greek fires had read it in English. That’s not meant as a criticism. I can read modern Greek just about well enough when I need to, but given the chance to read an English translation I’d always take it. So I can hardly object to others relying on the account of my views on the Ethnos website.

The trouble is that it was a bit of a travesty of what I actually wrote. For the record, I’m NOT advocating that the Greek heritage should be distributed wholesale abroad for “safe-keeping”. I am simply arguing – as I’ll explain a bit more after the jump – that there is something to be said for some dispersal and replication. Part of the reason is an entirely practical one: its the ‘Wills-and-Harry-never-in-the-same-plane’ sort of principle.

And for those of you who thought that I was being decidedly insensitive - to say the least -  in even raising these issues at a time like this (“to make such ill comments/suggestions at the time of national crisis in Greece, it just shows the type of person that you are”), please note that I did start the post with an explicit apology for just that - and, for good measure, with a sombre reflection on the hundreds of Ottoman women and children killed when the Parthenon went up in smoke in the seventeenth century.

Now that I have the link, let me say that you can find details of how to give to the disaster fund by clicking here  (in Greek), or consult Spyros Iakovidis’s most recent comment on the earlier post.

All the same, the intensity of  the responses took me aback a bit. It wasn’t just the abuse: “fuck!! of!!!!” as George put it, or “UP YOURS MY DEAR..”, in the  (slightly) friendlier words of another George. It was more the bigger debate about the role and preservation of cultural heritage revealed by many of these hard-hitting reactions.