A Don’s Life

It's a don's life -- the book

This is the last post before the end of 2008 and a piece of news (OK – a confession) to share with you.

There is more than a chance that a selection of A Don’s Life posts will be gathered together into that old-fashioned thing called a BOOK, coming out next autumn. You and I may share some initial anxieties about whether a blog translates well into print media. But the team at Profile Books convinced me that the answer was yes. Or, at any rate, worth a try.

If you’ve got any favourite posts that you think might get missed, let me know.

Now the next question is about the comments – because I think that they give this blog its distinctive character.

Crime victims and Christmas messages

On the day before Christmas eve, I discovered that I had been the victim of crime.  Don’t start to feel too sorry for me. As crimes go, it was rather low grade. When I went out first thing in the morning to bike to work, I walked over a pile of glass – as someone had come down our back lane during the night and smashed the son’s car window in. Nothing taken, just a mess.

The first priority was to get it mended before the Christmas holidays. And God  Bless Murketts of Cambridge, they did.

Then we debated about whether to call the police. We knew we couldn’t claim the cost off the insurance – but there was a sense of citizenly duty here. What if there had been a whole series of car windows bashed in all up the street? Shouldn’t we help the boys in blue to get a full picture of the crime spree? Besides, if we were to ring up in a week’s time and say that it had happened a second time, wouldn’t it stand us in good stead to have reported the first occurrence?

When the husband first rang the police, they didn’t sound exactly overjoyed to have another crime on their books, and statistics. “That’s an unsoluble crime, Sir”, the man said. But the next day the police rang us back. Not to report an arrest but to suggest that we might be interested in signing up for  something called “Ecops”.

This led to a closer encounter with the Cambridge Constabulary than we had ever imagined.

Underwater Romans

Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with new Roman discoveries. I would like to blame my own single-minded attention to Pompeii, and then to Roman laughter. But the particular discoveries I’ve got interested in today were made several years ago – so I just can’t have been paying attention.

An archaeological friend of the husband who came to pre-Xmas lunch on Tuesday pointed us to the Comacchio ship wreck, not far from where he usually lives.

Comacchio, near Ferrara, is a kind of mini Venice, built on thirteen little islands connected by bridges. And in the late 1980s, as I now know, the remains of an ancient boat was discovered near the city, in an area that had once been an ancient beach. The boat had run aground in the first century BC and been covered with the sand.

What intrigued me were the contents of this vessel. They included not just the usual kind of cargo: in this case amphorae, pottery, logs of boxwood, over 100 Spanish lead ingots (many stamped with the name Agrippa), plus the usual bric a brac for a voyage (tools, clothes, sandals etc). There were also 6 small lead portable shrines, in the shape of mini-temples, of a sort I’ve never seen before (they are in the picture). Some have mini-images of Mercury in them, others Venus.

Were they cargo intended for sale? Were they picked up somewhere to be flogged back home (perhaps a bit of commercial speculation . . . someone spots them on sale and reckons he can sell them for profit back home). That seems more likely than that the set were all part of the crew’s personal possessions.  Either way, it seems like a striking piece of Roman evidence for what may well have been a personal religious object, and so personal religious devotion. Or were they elegant ornaments without much active religious significance at all?

Anyway, I soon found myself on the trail of more Roman boats.

RAE madness

As every university teacher and administrator in the UK knows, the results of the Research Assessment Exercise were announced last Thursday. The reaction since then has been fairly sick-making, especially from those who came well out of this dreadful process.

Me included I’m afraid. According to most calculations Cambridge came out “top” overall (unless you use a different method of calculation, which lands the LSE at the top of the table). And in the Classics race alone, Cambridge came top, “beating” Oxford by a whisker. And yes, I’ll ‘fess up, I have shared a self-satisfied smile or two about that with colleagues here since I got back.

But hang on. Have we all forgotten what a dreadful process this is? And isn’t it the responsibility of those who have done well out of it to speak out loudest against it? For them, at least , it doesn’t look like sour grapes.

What's in a don's inbox?

Remember those  “in-box” tests they used to make people do at job interviews. The candidate was sat down in front of a made-up collection of letters, notes and demands that might be lying in their inbox on their first day in the job and asked to prioritise! The idea was to see if they would rank buying the bosses wife an anniversary present in front of fixing up a meeting with Managing Director. I was never quite sure what the right answer was supposed to be.. or if there was one.

Well I thought you might be interested to see what a real life donnish in-box looked like: the electronic version, I mean. California is a good place for reflecting on one’s email. By the time you get up in the morning most of the European messages for the day are already waiting for you.

So what does the gathered harvest of yesterday look like? It was in fact rather a thin crop. It’s nearly Christmas and well past the end of term – so there were none of the usual apologies/excuses for students (“Sorry – my essay WILL be in your pigeonhole by 5.00, Susie xxxxxxx”) and the usual administrative stuff of the working week. So treble this for the mid-term picture.

First in the box was good news . . .

Why modern Greece should shake off Socrates and Plato

Why did Greece erupt in dreadful riots last week?

It can’t have been entirely the tragic shooting of the unfortunate teenager. Though exactly which of the factors that might have been behind it were really the most important is still anyone’s guess.

There’s the recession, unemployment, government corruption, poverty, anarchist provocation, police violence, the tensions of immigration . . .and so on. Certainly there’s been a massive transition in the cultural make-up of Greece.  No one who has been there in the last few years could fail to have spotted how “the Albanians” have been blamed for everything from local robberies to shoddy plumbing.

But it is hard also not to spot how most Greek (and some other) commentators repeatedly reach for classical antecedents, not always accurately, from Plato and Socrates . . . and others.

Now, I’m usually all in favour of reflecting on classical precedents for most things in modern life. But in this case, it seems to me that my beloved classical precedents might be more of the problem than the solution.

Bye-bye California -- with a visit to the doctor

It’s less than a week now till I leave sunny California (yes still sunny), and there is an impossible number of things still to fit in. Grade the students’ papers, write two reviews, get a paper together for a conference in January – to name just three of the more pressing obligations.

The truth is that I had a rather leisured and genteel image of how life would be when I finished the lectures -- some nice early nights, curling up in bed with a novel or two, toddling down the road to the movie theatre . . . You know the kind of thing.

Well it hasn't been quite like that.  For a start, writing the lectures left me pretty brain dead – so that even girlie novels have seemed an intellectual bridge too far. My rate of progress on one of the books I’m reviewing has been something like 75 pages a day. It takes a long time to get through a 550-page tome at that rate.

And then of course there are all the people I want to see before I leave and had to put off until after I’d finished performing. There’s not a lunch or dinner that remains free till I leave. Huge fun, but it doesn’t actually speed up the reading!

Not to mention getting things organized for going to Sudan after Christmas. You’ll be hearing more of this in due course, you wont be surprised to learn. But for the time being, the story is about getting a Yellow Fever vaccination. Not quite as simple here, it turns out, as in the UK.

Oxbridge interviews: real advice from a real don

This week marks the start of the Oxbridge interview season. I’ve been watching with interest from the USA as newspapers peddle advice to anxious applicants and their parents about how they might best get through the ordeal – and especially  about how to deal with all those weird questions that we dons do like to devise to trip up the poor candidates.

More often than not, the information is being fed to the press by Oxbridge Application Advisory Companies, which make their money out of increasing the Oxbridge mystique, then claiming to offer a way through the applications jungle.

Feel some sympathy for Oxford and Cambridge, please. While we do our best to de-mystify the process and explain why interviews are useful (can you think of a better way of distinguishing two students, both with 10 A*s at GCSE and predicted for As at A level?), other people have a financial stake in making it all seem as complicated as possible.

One company is charging £950 for an Interview Preparation Weekend, which is just one small part of the “Premier Service” (covering everything advice on your personal statement to 14 hours personal tuition to promote independent thinking), for which they don’t even quote a price on the web; you have to phone, which I haven’t.  I cant imagine the price is far short of the just over £3000 annual fees for being  taught at Cambridge. To be fair to this company, you can apply for their Access Scheme, a much shorter version, if you receive Educational Maintenance Allowance – though how many people are given this is not clear. Perhaps it depends on how many spare places they have once the fee payers have paid their fees.

So what is my advice?

Flexible working is a mixed blessing

It’s hard to be against the extension of ‘flexible working arrangements’ confirmed this week by the UK government. That’s why they’re called ‘flexible’ . . . it means you’d be counting yourself as rigidly inflexible if you objected. But it seems to me to be a mixed blessing all round.

For a start it is ‘helping’ working  parents (and mostly working women) on the cheap. Sure, any help is better than nothing. But what this means is that women now have the right to request that they get up really early, drop the kids off at school, go into work by 8.00, take a half hour lunch break, leave by 3.30, pick the kids up, go home, feed them, get everything ready for the next day, and collapse by 9.30.

I have not much sympathy with the wails of how expensive all this is going to be. In any case, employers have a right to refuse the request if it would be detrimental to their business to grant it.

What would help working women much more, of course, would be a lot pricier. How about some safe and reliable school buses to take kids to and from school (like what I’m observing here in the US). Or how about regular after-school, and half-term, clubs so that parents don’t have to rush to pick them up at 3.30 or 4.00.

But in truth, politically incorrect as it may sound, a bit of ‘inflexibility ‘ might not be a bad idea all round.

A good old-fashioned misogynist -- and a classicist with form

Once you get to be fifty, as I am sure I have gloomily remarked before, invitations to funerals tend to outnumber invitations to weddings. Just while I’ve been in the States, three old Cambridge Classicists have died.

Frank Walbank died a couple of months ago. He had been (and still in a way remained) one of the subject’s real radicals -- not just  writing the standard commentary on Polybius (on whom he gave the Sather lectures), but also a gloriously Marxising treatment of the late Rome empire, The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West.

I only got to know Frank after he retired to Cambridge more than thirty years ago. He was just short of 99 when he died. I vividly remember his 90th birthday party  in Peterhouse, his Cambridge College. The other guest of honour was the man who had been Frank’s Director of Studies when he was an undergraduate, Bertrand Hallward (the first Vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham, and the man who almost certainly invented the myth that Scipio ploughed salt into the fields when he destroyed Carthage -- see Classical Philology 1986).

Imagine, I remember thinking, what it would be like being 90 and still being 'young Frank' to your old teacher.

Then a few weeks ago, one of my own undergraduate teachers, Geoffrey Woodhead, died. He had been a charming misogynist of the old school, who had vehemently opposed the admission of women into his college. I had taken a very dim view of this at the time. Thirty years on, I think I prefer an old-fashioned out and out misogynist, to the crypto-variety that now stalks the Senior Combination Rooms of Cambridge in left-wing disguise. At least you know where you are with the out and out sort.