A Don’s Life

Addenbrooke's...no flowers please

I hope this isn't tempting fate, but I havent had much to do with hospitals lately. But my old Director of Studies is currently getting better in Addenbrooke's and I have been a (small) part of the visiting team. So I now realise how out of touch with the style of a 21st century hospital I have become.

On the day of my first visit, I realised that I had forgotten to get any flowers for the house. "It's OK," I said to the husband, "I'll get some at Addenbrooke's; they'll be pricey, but they are bound to sell them."

How wrong can you get? There were none on sale and Joyce's ward was clearly a flower-free zone. So what has happened. Are flowers supposed to spread germs? Are they a health and safety hazard (water and broken glass over the floor and very expensive equipment)? Or are they a waste of nurses' time, who have a lot more important things to do than being amateur florists?

There may be something in all this. I doubt that there is any clear evidence for your average bunch of friesias spreading MRSA, but -- yes -- I would prefer the nurses were saving my life, not primping my flowers. All the same, I smell a bit of a rat. If flowers are such spreaders of disease, then how come they are allowed (and even encouraged -- see bottom right of the link) in private hospitals? Is it because private hospitals are more laid back about infection, because patients are largely in private rooms? Or are they more committed to the idea of being ill having its compensations (at least some nice flowers...)?

Addenbrooke's, overall, does seem a bit dour. Sure, I realise that I am lucky to be living near one of the country's best hospitals (and if I am whisked in tomorrow, nurses and doctors please don't hold this blog against me). But does it really have to be so "lecturing" and downmarket. Do you have to be punished for being ill?

Heffers' Classics favourites

If you want your local bookshop to survive, you have to get off your arse to support it. One thing is to buy stuff there (Amazon may be wonderful, but you can't browse in the same way, or fully test drive the product before you read it -- and I doubt that Amazon will ever have on your doorstep tomorrow some of the specialist Classics books that Heffers has on the shelves). Another is to participate in events there, like 150 plus of us did at Heffers last night -- which you cant do on-line. On-line engagement with the Amazon site tends to be a pretty solitary thing.

Heffers was hosting a Classics event. This was partly to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library (which is apparently about to go digital); partly to celebrate great Classics books in general. Four of us -- me, Paul Cartledge, Tom Holland and Michael Scott -- had a few weeks ago chosen up to 10 of our favourite Classical books to be publicised in a Classics "drive" within the shop.

Last night we were asked to pitch a couple of them, in 3 minutes-ish, to an audience who were enjoying a late night book shopping trip, with a glass or two of wine.

So what did we choose?

Not winning a BAFTA (...phew???)

Last night was BAFTA night. The Pompeii documentary that I had been part of was nominated for an award in the Specialist Factual category ... so we all got dressed up in our best to go to the awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Needless to say, I am not a regular at this kind of event, and found myself full of both admiration and loathing at the whole slickness of organisation. I met up with some members of the team (Richard , Caterina and Daisy on her first post-baby outing -- just remember, ladies, how wonderful and stressful that is!) in the bar of the Dorchester, before we drove up to the red carpet at the awards HQ.

This is where admiration and loathing kicks in. You get out of your car and instantly the ushers know whether to to say "to the left" or "to the right".. On the left are the paps, with their cameras getting the celebs; on the right are the poor bloody public who have really come to see the celebs, but actually get M Beard et al walking along.

Admiration? Well.. it IS fantastic how these guys instantly know whether you are photo-worthy or not. Loathing? Well, obviously don't get me going on celeb culture.

Inside, after a glass of champagne, I was on a BBC table -- with mates and new mates (including Tom Hugh-Jones, son of a Cambridge colleague who made "Human Planet" nominated in the same category as we were). And we waited till our category prize was announced (.."and the BAFTA goes to...).

We didnt win.

The sentence for "serious" rape?

The most depressing thing about the most recent version of the "rape debate" is way it has come down to how long the rapist should be banged up for. The worse we think the crime, the longer they should spend in clink. For what?

On the Today programme this morning Vera Baird was attacking the proposal that rapists who pleaded guilty should have a 50% sentence reduction. The argument was  that if the average sentence for a rapist was 5 years, then a 50 % reduction meant 2.5 year which with remission for good behaviour would mean 15 months. Just 15 months, she said.. for rape?

Well, there are all kind of factors to weigh up here. As Ken Clarke has pointed out the 'average' sentence includes those sentenced for 'statutory rape'. for any sexual encounter with those aged under 16 however consensual. So the 5 year average is already an odd, and far from from average, figure.

But leaving those figures aside, and assuming the 15 months sentence, is that a fair punishment?

That's where the 'bang em up" mentality seems hopelessly misguided. Most websites today have deplored the idea that a rapist should be let out in under 2 years. WOT 15 months for rape?

No-one stopped to say.. well 15 months in the nick, that means total loss of job, probable mess of any family relationship, disintegration of family itself (ie punishment for them), plus the conversion of a wrongdoer into a hardened criminal (that's what prisons do). Well done judicial system. Cant we think of something more humane and better and more designed to stop them doing it again? Isnt there something we can do better for the victim as well as the perpetrator?

Now before you say: you wouldn't say that if you had been raped .. let me say I have been raped.

Newnham to the Louvre

Yesterday I went (with husband and third year Newnham Classicists) for a day at the Louvre -- early Cambridge start, museum, lunch (above, my calvados), more museum, and back in time to tumble into bed.

It was the first time I had seen the Louvre's "re-hang" of the classical sculpture. It is visually very attractive -- I particularly liked the two Roman versions of the Capitoline Aphrodite lined up next to each other, as twins -- but the labels are out of the ark.

Every marvellous bit of Roman post modernism is labelled as if it was some Greek "original", and only in small letters confessed to be "Roman" in date and patronage and dissemination. There's Praxiteles' lovely little Sauroctonos, but it's only by very close reading of the text that you find out that this particular statue is not by Praxilteles at all...but was done 500 years or so later by a clever Roman imitator.

An extraordinary denial of Rome.. in a Museum that is really all about Rome.

That said, the students (and me and the husband) got a huge lot out of autopsy, as always. We all agreed that you couldnt understand size unless you actually saw the piece: the Venus de Milo was bigger than everyone expected, the sleeping hermaphrodite smaller. And there were other surprises. I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that there were some herms (on the right) found in 1820 along side the Venus de Milo (does anyone understand the context?).. now nicely displayed next to her. And we had a great time looking at a proto Corinthian pot showing the murder of Ismene by Tydeus (what myth is that? and dont just direct me to the fragement of Mimnernus please, it doesnt really help).

Anyway, this was the annual pre-Tripos Newnham jaunt. Cambridge to the Louvre and back in a day, lunch included. It is hugely fun, and about the best kind of revision you can ever do, getting up close to some half familiar works of classical art.

BAFTAs and Emmys

My good news is that the Pompeii programme I was involved with (made by Brave New Media, Lion TV, with the BBC) has been shortlisted for a BAFTA (specialist factual category).Whatever happens at the next stage, that is jolly good news for all of us involved. And it's a reassuring confirmation that people can really appreciate programmes about Pompeii that do not feature CGI versions of exploding volcanoes, or B grade actresses dressed up in revealing Roman kit pouring out the Falernian from a reconstructed Roman bar.

No; instead it was me and Andrew Wallace Hadrill down a real ancient sewer talking about the real ancient shit and the historical secrets it could divulge. The ancient up close and personal and without the distracting frills.

Anyway this means that I will probably get to go along to the ceremony later in the month, where the final winners are announced; and to act the star-struck academic in the midst of the celebrity soap stars, the leading actors from Downton Abbey, plus Stephen Fry ('specialist factual", I have quickly realised, is a bit of a minnow of a category compared with "comedy").

The son and daughter are worried that it will be wasted on me, as I wont recognise enough people to make it worth while (I havent even been watching much Casualty lately, which used to be my regular weekly hospital soap).

What makes a good lecture?

At the airport again. I've just done the last Mellon lecture and am coming back home for good (sadly, because it's been a wonderful time here in Washington).

The last lecture was very much work in progress right up to the last minute. I had it mapped out and pretty much written (bar the last ten minutes) by the time I got to DC on Friday night. On Saturday I went into the office and went over the lot, made the powerpoint better and got the last ten minutes down on paper.

This last bit was the story of what had happened to the Roman sarcophagus from Beirut, believed to have been once occupied by the emperor Alexander Severus and brought back to DC by Jesse Elliott in the late 1830s (in the picture above). He offered it to President Andrew Jackson as a last resting place -- who instantly refused it, because he didnt fancy being buried in an emperor's coffin. Surplus to requirements, it was put on display on the Mall, until the mid 1980s, when it was sadly moved to storage.

This was all a great symbol of some of the big themes I'd been talking about over the last few weeks, pulling together issues of republicanism and monarchy, contested identications .. etc etc ..

In fact, for me, all was going well until about 4.30 on Saturday when I was swinging my legs under the desk and inadvertently disconnected the power supply from the computer. Luckily the autorecovery programme kicked in for the lecture, but not for the bloody powerpoint, which reverted to the form it had been in some time around lunch time. That was another two hours catch up... in the process of which I realised that the end wasn't right either (far too preachy).

So after a great dinner (thanks Sarah and Sheila), I had to get up at 6.00 on Sunday (today)..tinker with the powerpoint and make the end a bit more to the point, more humble and more funny, before clearing up the apartment to vacate, packing up the books from the office to be shipped to the UK, meeting my old friend William for lunch, test driving the powerpoint at 1.00 and turning up at 2.00 for the lecture itself.

Then, virtue rewarded, it went better than I could have ever hoped. In fact, at the end, people got up on their feet and clapped. A 'standing ovation' I guess (not much you can do, but be grateful and gracious and very very pleased... lectures don't have encores). But it did lead me to reflect on what made a good lecture (or lecture series).

Last exit to Washington

When I arrived at my apartment block in Washington last week to give Mellon lecture number 5 (a hubristic attempt to talk about Titian inter alia...) the concierge said as I walked in: "welcome home Miss Mary".

And yes, I thought, Washington HAS become to feel like home (note how I just wrote MY apartment block, as natural as anything). That's partly because I've lived in this little bubble between E St NW and the National Gallery, hardly straying outside it ... and enjoying the kind of wall-to-wall work that I havent for ages. Get up and read, then have coffee and read some more, plunge into the library, until it's time for half a botle of wine and some more reading. (The picture at the head of this post is part of my buble -- the moving walkway between the two wings of the gallery.)

Of course, there's nothing like the fear of facing 500 people on a Sunday afternoon to make you get your ideas and thoughts together . . .

Sorry to gush, but I have had a great time, and the most pleasure has come from some of the simplest things. Number one: people who will share their expertise in whatever, from medieval tapestry to Renaissance drawings (I can't begin to tell you how much more I know about tapestry than I did three months ago; I used to be the sort of girl who would walk briskly through any tapestry gallery...with the speed that my children aged 8 and 10 could go through a gallery of Etruscan sarcophagi). Number two: I never realised how wonderful it was to have a complete run of sales catalogues from all the major auction houses on open shelves in the library; it's amazing what I've found (someone tell me please that we have this in Cambridge...)

Anyway this Sunday is lecture number six; the end . . .

University democracy -- and the end of the Reporter

I have been away and only just caught up with the fact that the excellent University Reporter (the weekly magazine which carries reports of discussions, proposals for change, Tripos regulation, job vacancies, appointments and obituaries etc etc) is going to stop publishing a print edition and go entirely online.

OK, it's no doubt an obvious up front saving, and the info it contains (more than almost any other university in the world shares with its staff) will still be in the public domain online. All the same, it is still the case that in medium sized institutions like Cambridge, print disseminates some forms of information much more quickly and more effectively than electronic media. The combo of an electronic and print edition (as we currently have) has the greatest reach of all.

So what 's the matter with electronic only?