A Don’s Life

My Bradford and Bingley mortgage

I have had a Bradford and Bingley mortgage since 1983. And I am getting slightly angry about my current image.

Am I a buy-to-let borrower, who has self-certified wildly inflated assets and an improbable salary, and is just about to walk away from my buy-to-let property rather than keep up the mortgage payments I could never have afforded anyway? Not I’m not. I was an old fashioned B and B saver, who bought her first flat in London 25 years ago, traded up in Cambridge when she met her husband and then again 15 years ago.

I went through all the old fashioned questions they used to put to you about your assets, and I didn’t fib. After all they got in touch with your employer, so how could you tell a whopper?

When demutualization came in 2000 we voted against it, in what was a hard-fought battle with the carpet baggers who wanted to turn the B and B into a bank. We weren’t great economic geniuses, but it didn’t take much common sense to see that the interests of most savers and investors were better off with a mutual. How could they not have been?  Though Mr Brown was hardly in evidence then, when we needed him. He was all in favour of the demutualisation, wasn’t he?

So why did we stay with the B and B after that?

Simple. Because the staff were wonderful and  they had always been nice to us, at the counter.

Are the North Koreans short?

I came home today too late for the start of the presidential debate. All because I had to go to the library to pick up a copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea which I need for my first lecture on Thursday (you’ll see why if you listen.. as I THINK there will be a podcast).

Anyway, when I walked in McCain and Obama were busy discussing whether, and under what preconditions, they would talk to heads of state of countries they didn’t like/rogue states/terrorists. North Korea seemed to be at issue. McCain was saying:

“By the way, North Korea, most repressive and brutal regime probably on Earth. The average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean, a huge gulag.”

I’m not quite sure what McCain means by a ‘gulag’ (‘gulf’ would have seemed a better word). But is it true that the North Koreans are three inches shorter than their peers in the South?

Paupers go shopping on Rodeo Drive

So what – as several of you have asked – did I wear to the Emmys?

Well that’s a hard one for us over 50s (but under 60s). We are faced with the Scylla of an off the shoulder mutton-dressed-up-as-lamb creation, and the Charybdis of some dowdy ensemble which makes you look as if you are on day release from the retirement home.

In the end, I had fixed on a lightly triumphal number…black leggings with a silver embroidered tunic over the top (my version of a toga picta), plus some shiny purple triumphal shoes. All of which were picked up on a one stop shop in Harvey Nichols when I was back in the UK.

But unless I was to go to the ball entirely without cash, credit cards or ID, or unless I was to take my usual clunky shoulder bag, I still needed something to carry things in. And so I arrived in Los Angeles.

So, staying not far away, we decided that we would go on the hunt for a bag in Rodeo Drive, shopping mall to the stars.

I can tell you, a couple of British academics, dressed in usual British academic style, have a hard time.

On the red carpet at the Emmy's

This time last night I was at the Emmy’s. On the red carpet and at the Governor’s Ball, no less. My last post hinted at some celebrity culture coming up, Well yesterday I was eyeball to eyeball with Tom Hanks,  Jon Stewart and (even) Mary Tyler-Moore – and hundreds of others who, much to my children’s annoyance, I didn’t recognise. It’s a lesson in how glamour comes when you least expect it.

The truth is, of course, a little more complicated. For a year or so now I have been in email contact with the Senior Vice President of the Emmy's, that is the US Television Academy (such are the surprises of electronic communication). He had read my Triumph book and thought that there was a ot of overlap between the Roman Triumph and the Emmy’s – and thought I might like to come and take a look.

So off we went to LA, me and the husband, and were quite enthralled. We didn’t just sit in the auditorium, but we went to the Green Room (with its 10 million dollar  chandelier) and even onto the stage for a quick peek. The funny thing was we were sitting just in front of the tele-prompter. So, if we turned around, we could see the messages displayed to the winners as the made their acceptance speeches. Usually “Please wrap it up now” in big letters.

I should say that the husband noticed something the matter with Heidi Klum’s now famous fall (above). I didn’t – or at least I thought it was uncharacteristically good acting.

But was it like the Triumph?

Authorial anxieties meet Top Gear

I am now, as I write, flying back to Berkeley from my 4 day British book launch. The vast pot of frequent flier miles I have recently acquired means that I am able to do this in unaccustomed luxury (I’ve cashed them in for an upgrade in other words). So in this quiet cabin of the plane (turning left as you go in) peace is reigning.

Behind me, Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the Top Gear team are, uncharacteristically, slumbering or tapping in their lap-tops. To tell the truth, neither me nor the other middle-aged lady I got talking to were quite sure it was them – but we checked it out on my iPhone while we waited on the ground for the luggage of someone who hadn’t showed up to be found and removed. (How is it I wondered that this happens so often? How can so many people turn up at the airport, check their bags in, and then not actually make it to the plane? Or is it some ready-made airline excuse.)

Anyway, so far as the book goes, all I can now do is hope people buy it. Quite what ensures that they do is difficult to say. It would be naïve (and plain wrong) to think that it was simply quality. Some bad books sell millions, some really excellent ones don’t get into four figures.

Some publishers put a lot of money into buying preferential space in bookshops. You may imagine, like I used to, that those books on the front tables of Borders or Waterstones are there because the staff in the shop think they are good.

No, they are there because big publishing houses have paid for them to be put there.

10 things you need to know about Pompeii

OK – to celebrate my new book (officially out on 18th, sorry to repeat)… here’s my favourite facts and non-facts about Pompeii.

1. The inhabitants of the Roman town were all killed by the eruption of 79. Wrong. Just over 1000 bodies have been discovered – out of a population of perhaps 12,000. Most of them made it to safety.

2. The city lay undisturbed from the day Vesuvius erupted until its rediscovery in the eighteenth century. Wrong again, I’m afraid. Almost straightway the locals came back to salvage their stuff, digging through the volcanic rubble, and if they were lucky, heaving out some of the most valuable stuff. If they were unlucky, their tunnels collapsed and they got smothered in the process.

3. The people of Pompeii were caught completely unawares by the disaster. Well only the very unobservant ones were. There had been rumblings and mini-earthquakes for days. Cracks were appearing everywhere. That’s why so many of the houses had the decorators in. They might not have known exactly what – but they knew something nasty was going on.

4. The body of a rich lady was found in the gladiators’ barracks – she was visiting her gladiator toy-boy when the eruption came. OK, half right. A female skeleton with expensive jewelry WAS found in a room in the barracks, but she wasn’t on an assignation – unless she didn’t mind 17 other people and a couple of dogs sharing her love-nest. She was probably using the barracks as a refuge on her flight out of town, with all the rest of them.

...and more...

Campaign for Real Bookshops?

If there can be a campaign for Real Ale, or Real Bread – why not Real Bookshops?

In my quick visit to the UK to launch the Pompeii book, I’ve actually got gigs at three different – but Real – bookshops. A dying breed, in th efface of internet competition.

On Monday I am gong to sign a pile (in the hope they sell) at Hatchards, one of the few surviving Real Bookshops in central London (the LRB shop, in the picture, is another).

On Thursday I got off the plane to go to a party at Heffers, still surviving in Cambridge. We all hope that Heffers is coming through its 3 for 2 phase, and its coffee shop taking up as much space as the whole Classics department. The new second hand mezzanine – visit it, or sell your surplus to them  --  is a great white hope. And for me, the Classics department at Blackwells who took over Heffers a few years ago, and might just spread the ‘philosophy’,  is the great white hope.

Blackwells in Oxford passes most of the tests for a Real Bookshop,. In the Classics Department: a) you can sit down, and b) you will find books there you have never seen. Better than a library.

Anyway, if people  in Cambridge wake up in 5 years time and wring their hands that there is no good bookshop in town, they will only have themselves to blame. They will have been buying off Amazon. And they’ll have forgotten that they have people in Heffers who do still know about books.

In fact, God willing, in that nightmare scenario, they will be able to take the train (or drive, if they’re not enviro-activists) to Ely.

For the big surprise of the week was going to the Topping bookshop in Ely.

The tree-sitters of Berkeley

Just as I’ve got happily dug into Berkeley, I now find myself zooming back to England for a few days. It’s for launching my Pompeii book, so I’m quite looking forward to the celebrations. As I think I’ve said before, this is the perfect book-writer’s moment: you still remember that you wrote it, you’ve got the new baby in your arms, but no nasty reviews yet. So I shall enjoy it. One of the gigs is at Toppings of Ely, on Friday, so if you're around do come along.

All the same, it seems a bit odd leaving Berkeley now I feel so settled, and equipped with all I need for life both scholarly and otherwise. No prizes for guessing that the total of library books signed out is now well over 20. But the pleasures go beyond that. They include a local Italian deli; a cheese-shop 5 minutes drive away, which is not only out of this world, but doesn’t come out with the usual foodie put-downs that good cheese shops often trade in (“surely, Madam, you’re not going to serve the Brie de Meaux with that rennet-mixed, unpasteurised chevre from Sardinia…?”); not to mention a Xerox machine which scans documents, makes pdfs and send them to your email . . .how cool is that.

We’ve even, thanks to the encouragement of the son who’s here on a visit, made it into central San Francisco. We did an inadvertent visit to the Golden Gate Bridge (which is to say we missed the turning to what we really wanted to see – namely the vast fake Roman ruin left over from the 1915 International Exhibition). The Bridge turned out to be covered in mist, and better visible from our own house on a clear day. Its gift shop rivalled the one at Stonehenge for tastelessness.

We had better luck in our search for the Grateful Dead house and one of Janis Joplin’s many temporary residences – gone up in the world since the 60s, I fear. The Dead (if they are) will be turning in their graves at the nicely painted, bourgeois clapboard. And even better was the SF Museum of Modern Art. The collection itself seemed not particularly special, but the architecture (it’s by Mario Botta, c 1995) was stunning – shiny and spacious, with all kinds of unexpected and cleverly thought out views from floor to floor. And the gift shop (always the test of a good museum . . .) was retail therapy heaven (I bought an Andy Warhol watch).

The only blot on the landscape over the past couple of days has been a pair of noisy helicopters almost continuously overhead.

Surveillance of the ‘tree-sitters’ we were told

Honesty is the best policy

In my Berkeley office – the one always used for the person giving the Sather lectures – there is a small photo-gallery of past Sather lecturers, five of them. They are actually quite a reassuring crew and considerably less scary than the wall-full of men in suits that I saw when I visited the office 18 months ago. Individually charming, I am sure, but a bit fearsome en masse. (A cull has obviously taken place . . .)

All the same there is a question of quite how one imagines oneself fitting in. So far, I have merely brought to the office a large piece of signage in the shape of an arrow, with the logo “BEARD”, balanced on the desk and pointing at my predecessors. It indicates, to me at least, my own would-be infiltration of this magnificent crew (Professors Bagnall, Feeney, Foley, Millar and Sedley). My private joke.

The acquisition of said arrow is in fact its own story, with a nice moral.

A month or so ago I was in Oxford for a dinner, at LMH. The college was having building work done, and as I wandered pre-prandially, with a mate, around the college outskirts, I spotted several signs with the name of the building company in large letters: BEARD.. as in Beard Construction of Swindon and Oxford.

My first instinct was simply to nick one.

Why Cambridge should get into the soaps

I may be thousands of miles away, but I still got wind of the little storm about the Cambridge Communications Office having the cheek (or good sense) to try to “place” Cambridge stories with our favourite soaps.

I can understand the instant visceral reaction to this. I still haven’t quite got over the idea of “product placement” in movies.  Naïve as I was, I hadn’t realised  -- till I visited some movie studios in California a couple of years ago, and the truth was revealed --  that when Julia Roberts picks up a can of coke on screen, it’s not because she likes it, or because it  necessarily fits with her character’s tastes. It’s because the Coca Cola company have paid for her to do it. I haven’t ever watched a movie in quite the same way.

But this Cambridge move is a bit different. What is the university supposed to do? Leave the media alone and let them come out with the same old picture of life among the dreaming spires? How many television plays have we seen, featuring a load of elderly blokes on high table. “Port or claret, master” says one be-suited, be-gowned toff to the other. And if it’s not the old codgers, then it’s blonde, white, be-blazered undergraduates, having dangerously tantric sex in a punt somewhere, when they should be writing their essays.

What is our Comunications Office supposed to do? Wait till more of this stuff appears, then write a prim letter to the BBC or whoever, to protest that Cambridge isn’t quite like that.

This soap idea was a brave attempt to take the initiative.