A Don’s Life

Glasgow's Cabinet of Curiosities

I was due to be in Glasgow on Thursday evening, giving a lecture at the University on Roman jokes. A few weeks ago I reaIised that I had messed up.  I was also due to be in London at 8.00 am on Friday morning, talking about Pompeii at the Classics Breakfast Club at Godolphin and Latymer School. This Club is a wonderful little institution which brings together sixth-formers, teachers, parents and members of the local community for a weekly dose of the ancient world, every Friday.

I spent a red-faced, guilty few hours thinking that I would probably have to let the Breakfast Club down (the Glasgow gig was a one off,I calculated,  the Club a weekly event – there would surely be another time). But then I remembered that there might be a sleeper train. And sure enough there was. You can leave Glasgow at 11.40 in the evening, after a nice dinner, and chug into London Euston before 7.00 am the next morning. That gives plenty of time to get over to Hammersmith for breakfast. Problem solved, minus the red face.

So, on Thursday at 8.00 am I caught the train to Peterborough, to pick up the express to Glasgow. It turned out to be a dream of a journey, with free wi-fi throughout and plenty of table space.  A mobile office in other words – where I got on with the industrial quantities of marking I had to do, in an uninterrupted 5 hours. (Though recent reports suggest that the days of being able to get any food and drink on these National Express trains are numbered . . . 5 hours without a bite?!)

My terrible confession is that, in all my 54 years, I have never once been to Glasgow before (in fact much of Scotland has been a no go zone for me – though a series of lectures in Aberdeen in the autumn looks set to fix that). So when I discovered that I had over an hour between getting to the Faculty of Arts and having to start the lecture preliminaries, I decided I had to see something.

Many of Glasgow’s high-spots seemed too far away. But just on the doorstep was the University’s Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery.

Dixon of Dock Green On-line

I mentioned a few weeks ago that -- after our backyard crime -- we had registered for e-cops. This is Cambridge's attempts to keep the police in touch with the local community by sending out email news of crime in your area and what the boys in blue are doing to apprehend the offenders.

I had been rather looking forward to this. But the first few weeks it was deeply disappointing. Was there so little crime in leafy Cambridge that all they could put in the emails was invitations to crime education events? Or were they keeping something from us?

"Once more we will be celebrating Valentine's Day -- helping people in need of some crime prevention" ran the e-bulletin on 28 January (urging us to come and find out about more about window locks). This was quickly followed up by a message suggesting that we might like to put an 'In Case of Emergency' (ICE) number on the contacts of out mobile phones.

Nanny state stuff.

But recently things have looked up. Particularly exciting was the Sergeant's blog that arrived on 11 Feb.

In praise of Gail Trimble -- classicist

I don't have much experience of University Challenge. When I was at school, I vividly remember a successful team from St Hilda's Oxford (then happily all-female). More than 40 years on I could still tell you some of their names: they were a role model for thousands of clever little girls.

When I was a student myself, I was too snooty to be bothered with it. We hadn't come to University to be general knowledge quiz contestants; we were enjoying the life of the mind at a far higher level. (You may suspect that this was a convenient alibi -- covering up youthful fears that exposure to the buzzer would reveal some worrying lacunae in the knowledge base).

I now watch it just occasionally. And last year I was question-mistress at a Cambridge rag version. reading the questions out, with appropriate rhythm and tempo, is -- I can assure you -- harder than you would think. I came away with my respect for Paxman heightened.

And then last week I caught a glimpse of the Corpus Christi team in action, with the splendid Gail Trimble scoring more points on her own than most ordinary teams do combined.

Just how impressive was it?

Byzantium and Prince Charles

I know that it was all in the family, but until yesterday I hadn't been to the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy. This was partly because I had been in the US when it opened, partly because I had an invitation to an evening opening yesterday, which seemed a way of making sure I went.

Now, the first thing to say -- but I'm biased, given that my husband is one of the curators -- is that the show is stunning. From the greatest hits of late Roman sculpture to the icons of the Sinai monastery, you get an array of art (and art engaged with religion) that beats almost anything you can see anywhere. No contest. I was silenced (more or less).

But I hadn't quite expected the kind of evening opening of the show that I found. Frankly, I think, I squeezed in as the wife of a curator. The other guests were much more exclusive than me: including some of the monks of the Sinai monastery, senior members of the Church of England,and Prince Charles.

We had been alerted to his resence beforehand and told to bring ID. So it wasn't entirely a surprise -- but other things were.

Dorothy Garrod and the skeletons

Dorothy Garrod was a fellow my college, a leading prehistorian (specialising in Neanderthals and the palaeolithic), and the first female professor in Cambridge. She was elected to the Disney chair of Archaeology in 1939. That was before women became full members of the university or were allowed to take degrees (although they could sit the exams).

Garrod doesn't seem to have been pushy or flamboyant. She wasn't another Jane Harrison and was described as "cripplingly shy" (how that "shyness" fits with running major excavations in Lebanon, Palestine and all over the place is a difficult question -- and one suspect the "shyness" may be a sexist put-down). Nasty Cambridge gossip said (and says) that she was only elected to keep the disreputable Mortimer Wheeler out. But then they often had (and have) some story about appointing women which have not much to do with their being clever or best for the job.

At Newnham we're celebrating the anniversary of her election to the chair -- but also an intriguing excavation she conducted not in the Middle East, but in the college garden.

In Our Time

I’m writing this on the way back to Cambridge having just done an In Our Time programme on the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. Rome vs Carthage can be a pretty blokeish subject, so it was a nice dare to have an all-woman panel: me, Ellen O’Gorman from Bristol and Jo Crawley Quinn from Oxford.

The house “rules” of IOT make it an exciting 45 minutes from the performer’s point of view. For a start, no notes allowed. I’m sure this is right. Even if you couldn’t SEE people searching for the written answer, you’d be able to ‘hear’ it, if you know what I mean. And the temptation to read choice bits out would be almost irresistible. And the difference between reading something out and having a real conversation is glaringly audible.

You also don’t really know what you’re going to be asked. You get a general idea of what the first questions might be, but that’s it (thank goodness I got the myth of Carthage not the First and Second Punic Wars!). So, as it’s live, if you don’t know the answer, you just have to improvise – or look around to rest of the panel and hope for rescue! It’s amazing how quickly you get acclimatized. If answering the first question has a kind of “oh-my-god-this-is-live-radio” feel to it; by the second half it really does feel much like a ‘real’ conversation.

The biggest worry, surprisingly, is whether you’ll find anything to disagree about. Because that is what gives the programme its punch, I think – and makes it much more interesting than 3 worthy academics in collusive agreement (however fascinating the subject matter). This time we managed to come down on different sides of one key Carthage question: what was the city like in the third century BC, just before the Punic wars.

Jo and Ellen took the view that it was really opulent, the Queen of the Mediterranean or (as Jo put it) “the New York of the third century BC’. Beard was more doubtful, suggesting that the opulence was a construction of the Romans themselves, and partly a legitimation for going to war (not unlike the WMD of the recent Iraq war as one of my smart students observed). After the programme we pressed on with this, arguing about whether there was enough archaeological evidence to clinch it (Beard no, the others a guarded yes).

The only downside of the programme is having to spend the night in London before. The Radio 4 guys may be pretty laid back, but they are not going to risk having a live contributor getting stuck on the train and not turning up for 9.00 a.m.

Why I like Islamic dress

Some people have asked about what I thought about the lot of women in Sudan. Actually, with a ten day visit, it is hard to tell. There MAY not be a direct relationship between what you see as a tourist and what you see if you live there. But may be not. The daughter is currently living in Dilling (a town in the Nuba mountains) and I will be able to report in due course, via her.

I can, however, give a provisional verdict on Islamic dress. I know that Laura Bush got wound up about the use of nail varnish in Afghanistan (as if nail varnish were a human rights issue). But, after a few days, I felt very at home in Sudan.

Women don't have to cover up totally. There are some who wear burkas, most simply wear long skirts and long sleeves. This was the costume I adopted -- not much flesh exposed, but no aggressive concealment. It only took a day before I rather relished the democracy(and the colour coded fun) of this kind of attire. It was great for a 54 year old woman like me, and in fact a relief not to have to walk through the streets of Khartoum, confronted (as you are in Cambridge) with posses of 16 year old  size 8s, displaying their thighs and belly buttons (pierced).

It took about a week before I realised that I had entirely internalised this kind of dress. Walking by the Nile one day, I saw a young woman, on her own, dressed in a shortish skirt and short sleeves. "Is she a prostitute", I whispered to the daughter, in the embarrassing way that mothers have. "No", she insisted, "She's a Christian".

It was instantly clear enough how our teenagers must appear to a cultural (even in not religiously devout) Muslim.

Who should clear the snow on the pavements?

I sympathise with commenters who make the point that it is simply not worth it for the UK to invest in expensive snow clearing equipment, when we only get covered with the stuff very rarely. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything at all.

Today I biked into the office -- the roads being relatively clear, unlike the pavements. But my bike jammed up for the return journey. Since it was 'serviced' two weeks ago, the brakes have 'stuck' almost every time I've used them --and, as they are internal hub brakes, you can't get at them to un-stick them. So, as I pushed the thing home, I had plenty of time to observe the pavements at close quarters.

They were lethal.

Brussels and Eurospeak

The reason for going to Brussels was to assess grant applications for the European Research Council. Eighteen months ago when I did this for the first time I was a bit ‘iffy’ about the whole show. That wasn’t because of the quality of the applicants or of my colleagues, or anything like that. It was largely because the Euro Research Council didn’t entirely seem to have its act together – whether that was in getting you your expenses or providing internet access in their HQ.

This time, all has been much smoother  (well, the on-line bit was spotlessly organised and I’m optimistic about the expenses). And I leave Brussels a newly invigorated Europhile.

Why?

Snowbound to Heathrow

The meteorological anxiety confessed at the end of my last post proved more than well founded. It was indeed a very good idea not to have relied on getting back to Cambridge to teach at 11.00 am this morning.  The snow would have put paid to that.

The fact is that my flight took off from Washington on time, and all seemed to be going to plan. Even as I woke up this morning, the captain was only to talking about delays getting into Heathrow. But around 8.25 (the flight being due in at 9.25), he told us that we were instead going to be landing at CARDIFF  (in UK terms, that's a bit like going to Chicago, when you think you're going to Boston). Even if we could have landed at Heathrow, he explained, we wouldn’t have wanted to. The poor blighters who had touched down several hours ago were still on the tarmac waiting to get into the terminal.

In retrospect there seems something odd here, and about this whole Great British Snow ‘Crisis’. As the husband pointed out, it’s all very well (and true enough) to say that it really isn’t cost effective to invest in the latest snow clearing facilities. But that shouldn’t mean that you have no contingency plans at all. The Romans, after all, substituted human labour for technological innovation. It’s hard not to believe that 1000 guys on call with salt and shovels couldn’t actually have kept Heathrow open and functioning.

But anyway, every cloud . . . And today was obviously Cardiff International Airport’s big day.  More British Airways jumbos were lined up, each of them having diverted from their London destination, than it could have seen in years.

I have to say, though, that the ‘Welcome to Wales’ signs and the best wishes for a good Welsh holiday were, from the passenger point of view, a bit hard to stomach.