A Don’s Life

Jane Ellen Harrison meets 'Health 'n Safety'

I have now finished my Aberdeen lectures, and am spending my last days here exploring the archives. I'm in search of (among others) Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick, brilliant and intensely irritating - let's be honest - classical archaeologist, who was one of the iconic founding figures of my own Cambridge college (and whose portrait, as an old lady, I have in my college room; not the sultry version by Augustus John at the top of this post).

Before women were allowed to take degrees at Cambridge (a privilege not granted till after World War II), Harrison got her first formal degree (an Honorary LL.D) from the University of Aberdeen in 1895 -- before picking up another honorary academic gong at Durham a couple of years later.

I've long wondered what the story was, and whether the degree was at all controversial at the Aberdeen end.

The answer is that it wasn't all plain sailing.

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo: what was Catullus on about?

Lucky Catullus (in Alma-Tadema's version, centre, above). He has had more publicity in the last 24 hours than in the last 24 years. Whole cohorts of journalists who have never read a word of the first century BC poet have been puzzling (with the help of wiki usually) about what the words 'pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo" really mean?

Because these were the word written by Mark Lowe in an email to a young woman who had asked him the meaning of "diligite inimicos vestros".

What it means is quite simple (though a number of family newspapers have refrained from printing a translation without a good few dashes and asterisks): "I will ram my cock up your ass and down your throat."

Mark Lowe's defence is that Catullus was being witty. A few journalists have half-sided with him -- suggesting that this was meant as a lusty to retort to the Latin she wanted him to translate. The passage, which is from St Matthew, says 'love your enemies'. No says Catullus, bugger them.

If anyone had actually read (and thought about) the complete poem -- for the offending phrase is the first and last line of Catullus Poem 16 -- they would have seen a better joke and a better defence.

How (not) to buy a subsidised bicycle

In case you hadn't caught up with this, the UK government has a "Cycle to Work" initiative, which allows workers for those companies who opt in to get tax relief (under a "salary sacrifice" scheme) when they buy a new bike to get themselves to work. The University of Cambridge have indeed just opted in --  and the procedures are currently administered by "Cyclescheme", who describe themselves as "the UK's number one provider of tax-free bikes for the Government's Cycle to Work initiative". (So there are number two and three providers? I found myself wondering -- then discovered Booost and Cycle2work.)

It is, of course, a good idea in principle. Anything that would get cars off the Cambridge roads and more bikes on, would be a great improvement.

But just look at the dreadful palaver that it takes to get one of these things -- and the nasty sting in the tail (namely that the richer employees benefit more from this scheme).

Pagan survivals?

I hope no one thinks that I have not been impressed by my first trip to the far north-east. Elgin may have been a disgrace, and Inverness probably worse (though mitigated, in that case, by picking up a copy of Dyer's Pompeii, two volumes of a nineteenth century biography of Bulwer-Lytton, plus Sidney Colvin's memoirs in the bookshop there).

But all around were quite wonderful scenery and extremely elegant towns and villages. The beach nearest to Elgin is at Lossiemouth (right and left) -- and was totally deserted except for some hardy dog-walkers and a couple of even hardier sandcastle builders (aged c. 6). The waitress in the hotel said that it was packed in summer -- hard to imagine and who with?

But the jewel of the neigbourhood was a little place called Fochabers, a village planted by the Dukes of Gordon to get the great unwashed off their estate in the late eighteenth century (the Scots may complain about what the English have done to them ... but it seems to me that the posh Scots themselves are guilty of some pretty dreadful treatment of the rank and file). The upside of this is a tiny planned town, all of an architectural piece. Centre stage is a gorgeous Grecian Church of Scotand church (gorgeous on the outside at least, the inside has been pretty mauled over) staring across the town square are the Gordon Chapel (of the Dukes).

The weirdest thing we saw, though, was a 'rag well' -- or 'clootie well' (as in 'ne'er cast a clout', I imagine) -- near the village of Munlochy (that's the picture at the top).

The desecration of Elgin

I don't mean LORD Elgin. I'm talking about the town of Elgin, north of Aberdeen (to which Marion Diamond suggested I might turn my attention).

The fact is that the husband has been up in Scotland this weekend, and we decided to spend a couple of nights even further north, and chose Elgin as a good base for all kinds of things we thought we wanted to see.

Elgin had once been a wonderful town. Not to mention the famous ruined cathedral, it still has an elegant Greek revival church (complete with a replica "Monument of Lysicrates", as you can see in the photo, on its top). This was just part of what had once been an elegantly proportioned town centre of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century.

But what on earth have the locals allowed to happen to it?

The High Street is now a complete disgrace (and I am afraid the pictures don't quite capture the horrors of it). All local efforts seem to have gone into a 1980s/90s shopping mall, leaving the beautiful street to crumble -- some of it boarded up, some of it taken over by rock-bottom rent charity shops, all of it scarred by modern shop-fronts that  pay no attention to what had been a beautiful street-scape.

What on earth as caused this?

Aberdeen Connections

I am currently spending a few weeks north of the border, giving the Geddes-Harrower lectures in Aberdeen. I have to confess that (unlike a number of my colleagues) I have never been one to go weak at the knees at the mere thought of the banks and braes of Caledonia, etc etc . . . In fact, I am none too keen on the great outdoors, and have always been a little suspicious of the Scottish weather, the cult of tartan (et al) and all that whisky-buffery (the 'nice little island malt' stuff).

So Aberdeen has been a nice surprise. Not in terms of the weather, which is pretty dark and rainy. But I haven't come across a single piece of tartan. I have eaten my first pot of stovies (thanks, Chris and Liz). And even more important there have been some real intellectual discoveries and satisfying coincidences.

My lectures are on various forms of nineteenth-century engagement with classical archaeology, and I have been looking for Aberdonian connections to my usual themes.

These have come in abundance -- coincidentally and unexpectedly.

The Tesco University Library?

"The Tesco Library" doesn't exactly trip off my tongue very easily. Not that I have anything against Tesco. The "Cadbury Schweppes Library" or even "The John Lewis Partnership Library" wouldn't sound any better. But I'm sure I could get used to it -- if it came with a few million pounds to keep the library as great it has always been. This year has been the first time in 25 years working in Cambridge that I have had a suggestion for a library purchase rejected for the sole reason that it was too expensive. And if a Tesco (vel sim) "naming opportunity" would make sure I got the books I needed, I would be happy.

So I dont really understand the fuss in some quarters about the possible Tesco scenario. There are all kinds of dangers in raising private money to fund university research. But they are all about the possible power that the donor thinks they are buying -- over policy, academic priorities, or appointments. If Tesco thought that, for their millions, they could have a say in what books were acquired, who should be allowed to borrow, or who should be University Librarian, that would be a different matter. We have a regular and generous donor to the Classics section of my college library. The letter always comes saying "the choice of books is of course yours". That's exactly how it should be,

For mega-donations, naming is a good way of recognising benefaction which doesn't hurt anybody. After all it hasn't hurt the Bodleian to be called after their sixteenth-century bank-roller, Sir Thomas Bodley.

Launching the blog book -- and Midweek

This was the week which launched the blog book. It is now well over 3 years since I have been blogging (reluctantly to start with, but soon with terrifying enthusiasm and not without its irritations, I am sure, for the long-suffering family). The whole thing has been strangely life changing, and in quite unexpected ways. If anyone had said to me four years ago that I would be sitting down to Sunday lunch to a couple of people from Swaziland whom I had previously only met electronically, I would not have understood what they were talking about.

But that is, of course, what happened a few days ago. (Thank you Paul and Glorious for coming from Africa to see the book on its way, thank you Eileen from the US, and thank you everyone else who went to such trouble to come to join in the fun.)

For those who haven't yet seen it, the book of the blog includes quite a few of the original comments from various commenters. And we decided to have two parties to launch the book, one in London and one in Cambridge, to make it as easy as possible for all those published commenters to make it. The Cambridge party was at Heffers, the London one at the Society of Antiquaries -- excellent locations, I should say.

A good time was had by all. The only problem for me -- who has an increasing difficulty with names (not, I like to think, a consequence of failing memory, but simply of having too many to remember . . . ha ha) --  was how to recognise the guests. Or rather it was how to tell those guests I had never seen before (the commenters known only previously through cyberspace) from my familiar friends whom I just happened to have temporarily forgotten.

I got it wrong several times. Sorry all. And it didn't get better after more alcohol.

Do universities need Mandelson's 'consumer revolution'?

In twenty years time, I am afraid we will look back and wonder what happened to the "education" in higher education. We will have no doubt that the blame for turning them into training establishments at the behest of business (which is almost certainly where they will end up if things go on the way they are) lay with the Labour government of the early 2000s.

According to today's papers Lord Mandelson will be announcing the way forward on Tuesday. University courses, it is predicted, will now be advertised with their drop out rates, the number of contact hours with  students have ("how often they will have tutorials with star academics") etc.  The model for this is apparently the new "food-labelling system".

Now, I realise that all this has not been announced yet, and I should perhaps hold my anger until it has, But these leaks have a habit of being right, so here goes.

For a start, anyone can surely see that a system made for a hamburger with too much salt is not likely to be "fit for purpose" (one of new Labour's own favourite slogans) in assessing the education, learning and research of hundreds and thousands of bright young people. Besides, after the signal failures of the British business and financial sectors over the last few years, many will wonder whether the "business" model that underlies all this is really the magic bullet that it cracked up to be. (Thank God that universities HAVEN'T been run like businesses, one might say.) And if they reflect further, many will soon realise that Mandelson's reported desire to slash the funding of those courses which do "not benefit the economy directly" will have the effect of decimating departments of Maths and Theoretical Physics, as well as the more obvious targets of Classics, History and Anglo-Saxon -- all of which are jewels in the crown of British intellectual life and by EDUCATING their students rather than TRAINING them have in fact turned out a generations of students who (among many other things) know what thinking is, and how to adapt their mental processes to new circumstances.

Of course, all is not perfect with the higher education sector. And they haven't got better in the last few years -- largely as a consequence of being asked to do a lot more for not a lot more money, and the conflicting aims and aspirations of successive policy makers. Mandelson may complain about the student experience, but it is his government that has ensured that university funding depends differentially on research "output". So what does he expect us to prioritise?

Even so British universities are among the very best in the world for much less money than pours into higher education in other places. (Compare the achievements of Cambridge and Harvard, pound for pound.) They are, as we have observed before, a much more glittering star in the British firmament than British sport. They do not deserve these ill-informed attacks. When was the last time that Mandelson spent more than a morning in a university, I wonder?