A Don’s Life

Pliny -- the elder and the younger

It has been a good and bad week for the family Pliny. The "elder" was that unsufferable polymath who wrote the multi-volume Natural History and was killed in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 (a combination of curiosity about the eruption and a rescue mission for some stranded friends). The "younger" was his nephew, the eye-witness of the eruption. It is his letters to Tacitus about the event that give us our best account of it  -- even though, they were written almost 30 years later (Angelica Kauffman's reinvention of the scene preceding the eruption, with young Pliny and his mother, is at the top of this post).

As for Pliny himself, he would no doubt be disappointed to find himself best remembered for witnessing a natural disaster. The highspots of his career must have been his consulship in AD 100, plus his special imperial commission in Bithynia. He seems to have allowed the letters he exchanged with the emperor during that commission into the public domain -- and a crawling collection they are, with Trajan scarcely able to contain his irritation at Pliny constantly bothering him with trivia (one of the bits of trivia being the inconvenient Christians in his province). 

Anyway both "elder" and "younger" got an outing on Radio 4 this week.

The Much Wenlock Olympics

I have only just caught up on the 2012 London Olympic mascot called "Wenlock" (on the left). Truly ghastly it is (what designer could really have been proud of this, and what insult to children who are, presumably, the intended audience/market?) But it still strikes a bit of a chord with me, as this horrible creature is named after Much Wenlock in Shropshire, where the first modern Olympics were held (and where, as it happens, I was born -- in the Lady Forester Cottage Hospital, pictured below).

When I was growing up there (after an early spell in Church Preen -- compared to which Much Wenlock  seemed cosmopolitan), we always went in for the Olympics. Not the athletic events which brought rather glitzy runners to the village), but all the peripherals that made the "Olympiad" (as we  called it) much more like a local fete: I mean the prizes that went for the best animal made out of felt, or the best face made out if a potato (I still remember the agony of making a potato face and not realising that you had to put salt in the water to preserve it, and discovering the next morning that it had all gone irrevocably brown).

Better off in Brussels

I am in Brussels for most of this week, interviewing for the European Research Council Starting Grant programme (and what you see is the view from our interview room in EuroTower; the less scenic aspect below). Which is probably just as well, as it means I escape the rumpus caused by my last post on the sigma on the new Faculty doors (or rather the absence of the sigma).

This little squib has now been picked up by the Cambridge News, The Mail, The Telegraph, Corriere della Sera, and Anglia TV News -- to name just a few. That itself has a moral. In the old days bloodhound reporters would get out in all weathers to track their scoops down (or that's the myth at any rate). Nowadays it's easier to find them via Google.

But why on earth did this particular little item of news capture the imagination?

Well, in part, it must be that the idea the boffins getting it wrong always has a certain pleasure.  In this case a load of journalists who didn't have the foggiest clue about the difference between a Roman 'S' and a Greek 'Sigma' laid into Cambridge classicists for getting their spelling wrong. (In fact The Mail was so muddled that the first version of its headline said that we had got our LATIN wrong . . .)

In any case it wasn't a question of spelling -- and my first blog never said that it was.

Door rage (and wedding bells)

We have a sparkling new extension to our Faculty building in Cambridge, which wonderful in every way -- except for its FRONT DOORS. They look OK (although the photograph here doesn't quite bring out the best in them). The problem is opening the damn things. Because they are both (that is the exterior ones and those  that then lead into the lobby) fitted with Health and Safety approved disabled operation.

This means that, in order to open them, you have to press an electronic 'open door' button -- and they then sweep aside dramatically in front of you. Dramatically and slowly. So, at busy times (like, on the hour, when lectures are changing over), there is a mass of bodies trying to get into and out of the building, but needing  to wait for the stately pace of the doors' operation.

Can't you just push them anyway? Yes you can, but they are very heavy indeed (because of their motor), and not for the frail or those carrying a pile of books. In any case, as soon as you come along and push them open and then someone pushes the button from the other side, the doors take on a life of their own and come back and attack you.

The ancient Athenian sex-strike

If you've ever done live radio, you'll know how terrifying it can be. It's the drying up over a simple question that is the scariest prospect. Some friendly interviewer asks you when Caesar murdered, you really know perfectly well that it was the Ides of March 44 BC -- but suddenly, in front of a couple of million people, your mind goes blank and in desperation you make a stab at 43 (knowing perfectly well, in some part of your consciousness, it wasn't). And you get back to the office to discover an inbox full of emails lambasting you for your ignorance, regretting how low the University of Cambridge has sunk to have you in a char etc etc.

But, then again, there is an advantage in live transmission: what you say is exactly what gets broadcast; there no editing you into some mistake you never made.

On Friday I went to Oxford to do a lecture at Jesus College (the Don Fowler lecture -- founded in memory of a great young classicist who died in his forties more than ten years ago now). And at the last minute, I had arranged to do an interview with the Today programme on one of my little hobby horses: the role of women in power and government, and the backward steps we've taken from "Blair's Babes" on.

It's not just that there are only a handful women in the government. It's also that there has been a progressive "feminisation" of those that there are. In exchange for the wonderful feisty Barbara Castle, Mo Mowlam types -- we have got a load of padded shoulders. 

Newnham Classics goes to Paris

I think that my very first blog on this site wondered about how best to help students when they were coming up to final exams. They are already clever, they already know a load of stuff, and they are worried. Most "revision sessions" simply serve to bolster morale (OK folks -- morale boosting didn't work today; quite the reverse, sorry).

So I have started to plot 'away-days' for our finalists in the run-up to exams -- a day out to somewhere intellectually bristling, slightly exotic and physically tiring. Last Saturday we boarded the Eurostar and went off to Paris, to spend a long, hard day in the Louvre and have lunch in the slightly chilly open, but very Parisian air (that's me with the students at lunch above).

Politicians look like their parties (like dogs and owners)

I'm writing this while the great British newly re-energised democracy is waiting to see what government its elected representatives will cook up between them.

The husband, I should say, is relatively content. He saw the way the wind was blowing by 12.30 on Thursday night/Friday morning and went to bed. He is now hoping for the Tories to get in long enough to abolish ID cards, before the colour of their politics is revealed and, after a new election, a Brown-less reformed Labour party is swept back to power.

I did stay up till about 4.00, hoping for a Portillo moment...but it never came (I missed Esther Rantzen losing her deposit, which must have been one of the greatest triumph's of the evening's democracy -- a sign that the electorate can tell the different between a Martin Bell and a celeb).

The Cambridge vote

No I don't mean the vote that has just closed. I'm writing this in front of the television before the first result from that one has come in....and already I am fed up with the Labour crew mouthing the phrase "strong and stable government" (which is their euphemism for trying to do a deal with Clegg and waltz back into Downing St), and with the Tories crowing about "a decisive rejection of the Labour party" (when the exit polls suggest that it hasn't been half as decisive as they hoped).

But we shall see in a couple of hours.

The vote I'm talking about is the University vote (closing tomorrow) on "disciplinary, dismissal, and grievance procedures" -- or on what we call "Statute U".

One of the several advantages of working in Cambridge is that it still retains a semblance of democratic self-governance; big decisions still get voted on by all of us. In this case the issue is about emending the University Statute (U) that was brought in, as I recall, when Mrs Thatcher demanded that we should have a procedure for making academic redundant. Before that, redundancy was thought of as a potential threat to academic freedom -- and no university officer could be made redundant. (Contrary to popular report, they could be SACKED, simply not told they had become surplus to requirements -- that was what "tenure" meant.)

Everyone, even the people who wrote it, recognises that Statute U in its current form is unsatisfactory. That's different from knowing what to do about it.

In Woodstock -- and scammed!

I don't often get scammed.

I was once nearly taken in by one of those hand-written letters that arrive from Africa, asking you for 200 quid for some poor woman to complete her midwifery/teaching course. In fact, I was on the brink of sending off a cheque, when I got suspicious of the sob-story of financial decline  (it was the phrase "and then we had to sell the goat" that, for some reason, got alarm bells ringing -- it was just TOO much of a cliché). And then -- being a semi-trained palaeographer -- I looked at the letter carefully and saw clear signs that it had been copied out by someone who had not much of a clue what they were writing,, and was probably spending all day churning out identikit copies to send off to people like me. It was even clear that the copyist had left a gap for the amount of money required, which had been filled in by another hand. (I thought that the copyist probably was well deserving of what money I could give him/her -- but there was no way of getting it to them!)

But normally I am much too suspicious and hard headed.