A Don’s Life

How to insure an old car -- for a new driver

Getting older means doing all those things you thought you never would. In my case, buying a washing machine (wasn’t the launderette good enough?), burying my parents (whom I’d assumed would live for ever), and now buying another car – for the kids to learn to drive.

When they were small, we lived in a street where occasionally the middle-class mums and dads would do just that. You would spot them driving up with a brand new – probably bright yellow,, or other youthfu colour -- VW Golf late at night (the Golf is/was your average mum and dad’s dream of a “safe car”), then decorating it with ribbons, etc. In the morning Cressida (vel sim) would emerge from the front door, affect astonishment, kiss mum and dad …and drive off.

Never would that be us, we said.

Well it hasn’t been, quite. We haven’t done the brand new thing, nor the ribbon thing, But having discovered how much it would cost to insure our new-ish Corsa for a 20 year old male learner, we thought that the second car idea might me cheaper.

Maybe it has been….

But, all the same. insuring a seven-year-old, 1200 cc, un-sexy car we bought for under £3000 for a male learner aged 20 and a female learner aged 22 and a safe middle-aged lady professor hasn’t been cheap, or hassle free.

Want a motto? Do it in Latin.

I am delighted to see that some of the contributors to the great British national motto competition realised that a bit of Latin might help out here. For it is truth universally acknowledged that a society in search of a slogan, must be in need of Latin – which usually puts things snappier and shorter and cleverer than the poor old English vernacular.

I mean, could you ever capture “Per Ardua ad Astra” quite so neatly in our mother tongue? “Through struggles to the stars” seems horribly cumbersome. It's actually only one word more, it feels more like three times as long. (There were in fact a couple of 'tribute' parodies of this posted.."Per ardua ad nauseam" -- or "Per ardua ad Robin Reliant (cant afford an astra)")

I know this truth to be fairly universally acknowledged, as my Faculty in Cambridge gets so many requests from Rugby clubs, charities, WI’s, etc., to turn some reassuring platitude into a Latin slogan that we have a specially designated motto-writer. Professor X (I’m not going to reveal his name for fear of increasing the workload beyond what is manageable) is kept pretty busy.

Well, the British motto suggestions fell into two camps: a few who picked up an existing Latin slogan and redeployed it more or less appropriately; and most who tried their hand at their own bit of Latin. The results of this were what my older colleagues would call “alpha/gamma” – that is, occasionally brilliant but let down by some awful Latin grammar (or alternatively, disappointing in their grip on the Latin language, but enlivened by flashes of genius).

Playing safe with bona fide Latin was John Marshall with “O tempora O mores” (“What times, what customs!”). This is a quote from Cicero in 63 BCE railing in the senate against the standards of his own day and at the terrorist Catiline. Catiline was supposed to be bringing down civilisation as Cicero knew it, and planning to nuke Rome. The only trouble is, it is just as likely that Catiline was a relatively innocent stooge, set up by Cicero looking for reds under the bed, and for an excuse for a brutal campaign of summary executions (or, in our nicer days, detention without trial)…not a dangerous “terrorist” at all. So all the more appropriate then?

The trouble with inventing your own Latin is quite how to make it sound clever rather than “dog”. Not many succeeded. A few admitted their ignorance.

Archimedes thought the "National mottoes are for wimps" might sound better in Latin, but didn't risk it. Simon asked for the Latin for “Keep a stiff upper lip".

What would that be?

Have we found the Cave of Romulus?

There’s lots in the news this morning about Italian archaeologists having found the very cave where “according to legend” the famous wolf suckled the abandoned twins – Romulus and Remus – who went on to found the city of Rome. Or at least Romulus did; he murdered Remus in the process.

It’s one of those funny returning news stories, because it was first announced way back in January. Presumably it didn’t get enough attention then, so it’s now being re-run, backed by Mr Rutelli, ex-mayor of Rome and now the Minister of Culture, as triumph for the Italian nation (“ a mythological place has become real”, he said). And sure enough, today, it’s all over the press and the airways.

But is it true?

Well, for a start, it depends on how much stress you give to “according to legend”. For the last ten years or so, there’s been a huge campaign in Rome to find the traces of the “real Romulus”. One tremendously charismatic Italian archaeologist, Andrea Carandini, has boasted of unearthing the traces of Romulus’ own palace, not to mention his original city boundary (the one Remus jumped over and got himself killed). So why not the cave too?

Well the truth is, folks, Romulus didn’t exist. He is a MYTH. So searching for his physical remains is a pretty fruitless task.

But is this the place that the Romans themselves BELIEVED was the cave of Romulus?

That’s a finer question.

And the answer is “maybe”. But, honestly, I still have my doubts.

Mission accomplished

You’ll be relieved to know that the parties and the five-minutes-of-fame radio talks are pretty much over, here at least.  I don’t think that even I could take more than a week or so, fun as it certainly is. At this point I feel like a nice couple of days in bed to recover.

Dream on. For now comes the rather more serious – and frankly more lasting -- side of raising the book’s profile. That is, going out and talking about it. First stop, on Thursday, is the London Review Bookshop for a gig with one of my colleagues in Cambridge, Chris Clark.

Chris works on the history of Germany and recently wrote a history of Prussia that won loads of prizes. We thought it would be fun to talk about first about the Romans, but then about the idea of “triumphalism” a bit more widely. So do come.

Of course, Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment is likely to be on the agenda – which was typically Roman in its amateur dramatic style. I hadn’t realised until a few weeks ago that the aircraft carrier he landed on was just off San Diego, I thought he was in at least somewhere near the Gulf. Caesar would have loved the stunt.

But we hope to open it up a bit beyond the “US = Rome (or does it?)” debate.

Self promotion?

Confession. I have spent a lot of last week in book promotion. Yes, I want it to sell -- and yes I want people to like it too, which may not be quite as closely connected to sales as one would like to think. There are, sadly, loads of wonderful books, brilliantly reviewed which actually sell in trivial numbers, and other which sell in their thousands but no one ever reads. How many people actually finished even the first chapter of A Brief History of Time?

So I started the week with Start the Week. It gets 2 million listeners so is probably the biggest audience who’ll ever get to hear abut the book. For that reason, it’s also pretty terrifying – and seems more so when you’ve left Cambridge at 6.00 in the morning to make absolutely sure you can get there for 8.30. I thought we were a motley crew of guests honestly, talking on some not entirely sexy subjects. Climate change in China and the role of the Commonwealth can usually be guaranteed to make even a worthy Radio 4 audience glaze over, I fear. The Roman Triumph I suppose seemed quite jolly in comparison. But what is more, everyone had a ghastly cold . . . so it felt a bit as if it was being broadcast from a sanatorium.

Did it sell the book? To judge from Amazon’s rating – yes, a bit.

Then there were the launch parties: one in a really great location in Greek St (perfect place to have a Triumph party…geddit?) and the other in our friendly neighbourhood bookshop in Cambridge. Memory of these is predictably a bit fuzzy. It felt rather like being the birthday girl at a kid’s party: hostess behaviour started off pretty well…but after an hour or so decorum lapsed and the rest is history. The best bit in Cambridge  was that some undergraduates had got to hear of it and just turned up. I don’t think they realised how flattering that felt.

Then of course there were the reviews . . .

10 tips for King Tut

It’s still a few days till the Tutankhamun spectacular opens at the Dome – so obviously I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not even one of the quarter of a million who have booked an advance ticket, so I imagine it’ll be a long time before I get in there. But I did catch the -- very similar -- version of the show that has been in the States (that's Chicago on the left). So I think I’m qualified to offer some tips. Or to be precise 5 tips for seeing the show, and 5 things to follow up with afterwards.

First . . . for seeing it:

One: Make a bee-line for the glorious alabaster cup carved in the shape of a lotus flower. Everyone goes  weak at the knees about Tutankhamun’s  gold. But for me this exquisite piece of stone wins every time. It’s got his name written on it, and it was found just at the entrance to the tomb, probably left there by robbers.

Two: Do some prep before you go. There’s more to this show than treasure, so get into Egyptian history and culture. It’ll help you get your money’s worth. As well as the exhibition’s own glossy guides, my favourites for quickly telling you what’s what are Ian Shaw’s, Ancient Egypt: a very short introduction or John Baines’s, Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt.

Three: Don’t forget Akhenaten. This show goes beyond King Tut (in fact, only a third or so of the objects are his). It has a lot to say about Akhenaten, his predecessor, and possibly father. Apart from the Tut treasure factor, “dad” was a much more interesting type, reigning in the middle of the fourteenth century BC and known for his commitment to monotheism. The art of his reign is really distinctive, eerily naturalistic, as you’ll see in the wonderful head in Gallery 5. Knocks on the head the idea that Egyptian art simply when on being the same for millennia.

Four: Don’t expect to see the big gold mask. The exhibition organisers are quite up front in saying that it was too fragile to travel, but people still come expecting to see it. Partly  because the publicity material for the show (as you can see above) uses an image of something striking similar. Actually it’s a vastly blown up version of a small “coffinette”, about 16 inches long in all, which IS in the show – and which originally held the pharaoh’s liver.

Five: Be prepared to come face to face, in a way, with Tut. His mummy has just been unveiled in Egypt and isn’t here. But the last gallery contains his CT scans – and from these they’ve reconstructed his head in latex. It was controversial exhibit in the US. What colour should Tut have been? Many people were convinced that he should have been darker.

But now for some surprising places where you can follow the show up – all in the UK . . .

Why didn't the Athenians give the women the vote?

I have had a dreary cold, which in other circumstances would mean postponing teaching and taking to bed with a glass of whisky and a DVD. But the term-time schedule here (see previous moaning blog) means that if you put off an afternoon’s teaching, there’s really nowhere to put it except 7.00 in the morning or 10.00 at night sometime beyond next week. And I can assure you that students find that no more agreeable (or quaintly idionsyncratic) than you or I.

So you muddle through, like I did this afternoon from 2.30 to 7.00 solid, spreading your germs, trusting your voice will hold out, and hoping that the young will get you interested enough to forget you’re feeling so ghastly. It usually works. I can’t claim I was particularly looking forward to the three consecutive hours on the Critics (ancient and modern) of Athenian Democracy, but the students – pairs of my college first years – got me engaged. (If they didn’t, this job would be a lot less worth doing.)

One of the issues we skirted round was, of course, the Woman Question. Why didn’t those lovely democratic fifth-century Athenians give women political rights? And do we think worse of them for not doing so?

"Rivers of Blood" -- what Enoch Powell didn't say

I don’t like repeating myself in this blog, and I did touch on Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech in a post last year. So apologies.

But we’ve just had another example of some hapless or malevolent Tory (and I find it increasingly hard to tell the hapless from the malevolent in the Tory party) being forced to fall on his sword because he’s admitted to thinking that Powell, in that in famous speech, had a point. To be precise, Nigel Hastilow – prospective Tory candidate for Halesowen – has stood down, after appearing to agree with the Powell idea that uncontrolled immigration would change the country dramatically, and for the worse. It's a "Powell was right" line shared by the British National Party (who actually manufacture badges with that slogan).

Let me say straight away that I am emphatically NOT on Powell’s side. Though the sanctimonious attitude of New Labour on the issue is pretty hard to take too. What was being said by members of both main political parties in 1968 about immigration now seems light years away. If you can imagine it, Labour politicians were then capable of punning on the idea Sikhs’ human “rights” and their “rites” – both referring to wearing a turban (or at least that was John Stonehouse, quoted in the Powell speech..

But what seems so very odd to me is that, despite its usual title, Powell never actually used the phrase “Rivers of Blood” in this speech. Churchill had done so, so had Thomas Jefferson (the first, at least, in the context of urging others to avoid them). The closest Powell came to it was a famous, but significantly different, quote from Virgil’s Aeneid.

Goodbye to the British Museum's Round Reading Room?

A few days ago I got to see the terracotta warriors at the British Museum. Old cynic that I am, I was ready to be decidedly unimpressed – and to come away judging them not quite up to the classical stuff I was used to.

In fact I was gob-smacked. The show is brilliantly displayed – and you get a brilliant sense of closeness to the objects (until, that is, you cross the magic electronic line which sets the alarms off, embarrassingly).

I was also pleased to go to an exhibition about which I knew absolutely nothing. I know the BM prides itself on giving you the historical context for all its treasures. But I ignored all that. I have quite enough chance to be learnedly contextual when I’m looking at a classical show. Here it was wonderful fun just to gawp.

Though I’ve since then read this week’s TLS article on the “army” by John Keay, and I’ve wondered if I  shouldn’t perhaps have looked more carefully at the labels. I’d missed the obviously crucial fact (and an obviously crucial crossover with Greek sculpture) that all these figures were originally brightly painted.

But what struck me almost as much as the objects was the setting. The show is mounted upstairs on a temporary floor above (I suppose) the carefully preserved  desks and catalogues of the old Round Reading Room of the BM.

I’d been one of the very best lovers of that room – emotionally connected to it by the pages of thesis written there, by the assignations set up in its wonderful panopticon, and by the afternoons spent sleeping off good lunches bought me by older and richer readers when I was still in my 20s.

Maybe, I thought, seeing this show, the Reading Room could find a permanent new use.