A Don’s Life

BA cabin crew -- I'm on their side.

I came out to Italy (atmospheric picture -- from Torre del Greco -- above)  with BA and I'm going back the same way, and by the luck of the devil both these trips have avoided the cabin crew strike. Which is just in its way, as I am, more or less, on the side of the strikers.

I am sure that they are going to lose, and they have a lousy PR team compared with the BA machine. I am not even sure how much they actually earn: on the one hand you have those who claim that the average pay (including perks) comes to more than £30,000; on the other, there are the claims that the basic pay is just £11,000. 

So far as I can see, comparing what different airline cabin crew earn is much like comparing the different earnings of fellows at Cambridge colleges. It proves (thanks heavens) much harder  to produce a league table of salaries than you imagine.  You start by observing that one college's fellows get paid a lot more for Directing Studies than another college's. Then you discover that you haven't factored in the book grants or the subsidised nursery places.

A ride up Vesuvius

As I have  been hinting from time to time, I am currently making a documentary about Pompeii. When I say "making", I mean presenting and having quite a lot of content input -- it's actually been "made" by an assortment of excellent producers, directors, camera- and sound-men. Two of these, Daisy and Paul, you see in the pic, over last night's pizza -- because we are now filming and today was our first day.

I am still amazed that it takes a weeks solid filming to make a programme that will run for 59 minutes on television, but I am beginning to see why. I'm also beginning to see the skill of imagining a programme in your head, but actually filming it in a completely different order

This morning we went to the Naples Archaeological Museum, to look at various things, especially some jewelry kept there. Television certainly lets you do things that you don't get away with usually in academic life, like trying on the rings and the bracelets. I'm not sure I wholly approve - but it was certainly a buzz. Who could be so cynical that they did not feel a buzz slipping on an armlet once worn by a dead Pompeian? Not me.

And in the afternoon we went up Vesuvius to get a look over the area once submerged by the eruption, and out over the sea (plus back into the crater, which was steaming slightly).

Orwell Prize

I am posting this on the way to Pompeii.

Just to give the good news that "A Don's Life" (along with 13 other excellent blogs - congratulations all) has just been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, blogs division. Here they are, courtesy of Nick Thornsby.

The Don is realistic and does not even speculate about reaching the short list. Indeed she is taking her own medicine -- when students get shortlisted for jobs, she always says "celebrate now, just for that -- anything else is in the lap of the gods". 

She also knows that a good part of the pleasure of this blog is all you commenters. So thank you.. lets all have a pat on the back.

Last year the Orwell blog winner was a wonderfully eloquent policeman. I am delighted that a jobbing Classicist gets to the foothills.

More from Pompeii soon.

Do we need a written constitution?

Yesterday evening I went to London, first to go to a book launch/colloquium on the idea of a written constitution for the UK -- to celebrate the publication of Richard Gordon's book, Repairing British Politics, which not only argues for a written constitution, but has a go at drafting one. I haven't read the book yet, but there were plenty of arguments last night on and around the British Constitution (for and against a written version) from 14 speakers, who miraculously kept to time.

I have to say that I came away with the idea that British politics was in a right royal mess, but that a written constitution wasn't likely to be the panacea. 

There were some fascinating contributions, apart from Gordon himself. It was good to hear Antony King argue against an elected upper house, for example. And Andreas Whittam Smith was eloquent on the excess of legislation under New Labour: one new criminal offence for every day they have been in power, so no wonder so much of it is so sloppily drafted and under-scrutinized.

The problem for me was that those who advocated a written constitution didn't convincingly explain why that would actually help our current dilemmas. In fact, as Dawn Oliver pointed out, the campaign for a written constitution tended to become a shopping list for a whole lot of other things we'd like to change (and which didnt actually need a written constitution at all). And Colin Kidd had a good number of cautionary tales about the endless supreme court messes that can result if you do have one.

Then there was the question of whether you could compare our constitution to a tennis club. Vernon Bogdanor started off his plea for a written constitution with just that comparison. If you become a member of a tennis club, he said, and you ask what the club's rules are, you don't expect to be told that they are scattered through various minute books and that some of them are just convention, not really written down at all. So why do we tolerate that with the state?

Well it isn't actually that simple.

Ever heard of Google?

On Tuesday I went to an enterprising day at the Open University, organised by the "National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement" -- all about how academics and the media can work together in engaging publics (the plural is intentional) with the research being carried out in universites and elsewhere.

If you think that all this was driven by some kind of "impact agenda" then you would be right. But the day was also rather interesting,  because it brought together academics and media people who make programmes -- plus some who straddle the divide (that is, academics who make programmes, like Tristram Hunt).

I gave one of the ten minute papers, partly singing the praise of radio -- which (despite In Our Time etc) often gets left out when academics sit down to think about how to storm the media. We all imagine ourselves as the next Schama, Starkey or Hunt in front of the cameras, rather than the microphone.

I shall be doing my own bit in front of the camera over the next few weeks, which I'm quite looking forward to. But radio still has a lot going for it.

For a start, you don't have to bother about what you wear on the radio. There is no need for nice frocks. You can even pick your nose, so long as you have something to say.

Lecturers - beware germs

I have moaned before about pointless health and safety notices (like the one urging drunks to take care on the station platform -- for those drunks compos mentis enough to stop and read the notice). But the USA sometimes presents even more aggressive examples of the nanny-state.

I had a great time in Madison, but was a bit surprised to find one of those containers of hygienising "wipes" on the podium in the lecture room. I wasn't sure exactly what the point was. Was I supposed to sterilise my own hands so that I didn't pollute the lecturing control panel? Or was I supposed to use them to wipe the microphone and the switches and computer connections etc, in case there were some threatening germs still lurking from the previous user?

It reminded me of those US supermarkets where they give you an antiseptic wipe to clean the handle of the trolley with (or your own hands?) before you load it up with your food.... and indeed about all those women whom I found in Berkeley used their feet to flush the loo, and assumed that was normal.

I guess I am counter-suggestible in the hygiene department, as in others . . . .

Presidential condoms: the ultimate stimulus package

I have just been in Madison, Wisconsin -- giving a lecture on Pompeii as part of their Year of the Humanities celebrations. Was it sensible to go away from Cambridge for the last two days of term? No it wasn't. I had so little sleep that I was close to weeping at the very slightest provocation (like "how are you?") by the time I had left.

Was it worth it? Yes it was. And so many people turned up that we had to move to a bigger room. OK, a boast -- but, I promise, I have done my time turning up to lecture in rooms laid out for 250 to find some 20 faithful followers, most of whom were relatives. So I know what it's like when you don't get an audience.

I had last been to Madison something like 20 years ago. I remember, first of all, the cows. Wisconsin is the Dairy State and it's not hard to spot (one lunchtime I had some delicious deep fried curds, which were not wholly in step with the current diet). And I remember that State Street had been full of intriguing little shops and cafes run by left over hippies. I thought that these would have long since disappeared, with the hippies. But in fact they were still there.

How do people walk on high heels?

This evening the husband and I went to a preview of the Paul Sandby exhibition at the Royal Academy. Sandby (1731-1809) was, so it is said, 'the father' of English watercolour painting, and there were some under-stated little treats in this show. I was particularly taken with his clever little images of "London life" (below) and the big views of the Thames, west and east from Somerset House (showing how, before the Embankment was built, the Somerset House gardens stretched right down to the river).

So it was fun. But these parties are a bit odd when (it being Lent) you are off the booze. You find that you become much more observant of other people, and --  of course -- what they are wearing. On this occasion, I found myself with a fellow guest observing the various shoes on display. It seemed to me an achievement almost beyond imagining that so many women could actually function on heels quite so high. This is a skill (?) that I have never managed to acquire. I simply fall over if I try. And that is not just in later middle age and weight. I have NEVER managed it. 

The weirdest gift ever

This morning, as I was making my way back from Brussels, my sterling assistant collected the mail. One item was a small brown paper parcel, addressed to me, with the husband's name in brackets (as you see in the picture). Inside was a nice Paperchase gift box, tied up with an elegant brown ribbon. And inside that was something wrapped in tissue paper. . . .the something was a peeled hard-boiled egg. No note, no nothing; just the egg.

So what does it mean? There are rather few clues. It was posted in London, and our names are correct, as is the address (but that is easily available to anyone who can google). No I don't recognise the writing.

I have been trying to think of what clever jeu de mots it could represent -- the kind of thing that is blindingly obvious just as soon as you have thought about it. Is it about being "hard-boiled'? Or is it some classical joke? (It made me remember the Greek unseen I completely mucked up in one exam when I was an undergraduate, as I couldn't translate the key word in the passage -- which was "oon" = "egg".) Then again, I was talking to someone a couple of weeks ago about how, when we were excavating skeleton in a cemetery site in the Midlands in the 1970s, we used to put half hard-boiled eggs in the eye sockets....

The daughter thinks more clues will follow, in clever Agatha Christie style. Tomorrow there will be another strange parcel, then another -- and eventually all will be revealed.

From Cambridge to Brussels, again

Monday was a big day for us classicists in Cambridge. It was the day of the handover of our new Faculty building extension (a bit of expenditure that just got under the wire before almost all the money in the British university system disappeared). It gives us a little suite of new offices which are intended to house all those externally funded research projects that bring us in the money to keep going.

The point is that you have to say that you will give your funded project an office, otherwise you don't get the funding (nice view from new offices is seen here, on the left). But the really good news for us was that we also got more library space in the process -- almost one third extra shelving. For old fashioned books. Arts and Humanities are probably not good enough at explaining (even to colleagues in the university) why books and print journals are still crucial to research.

Scientists tend to think that any periodical more than 10 year old is chuck-able. I am still finding gems in Eastern European journals of the 1950s, even the 1850s.

Anyway, the new library has bags of space for that. 

Meanwhile, after the new building handover, I was off to Brussels - for another round of the the European Research Commission Starting Grants.