A Don’s Life

Giving up booze for Lent

As I hinted in my last post, I have gone dry for Lent. I am not doing this for religious reasons -- so why? Two reasons...

First of all, I want to make sure I can do it. According to the government guidelines, I drink too much. I'm pretty sceptical about the guidelines. Where did they come from?  And who actually decided how much was too much, and on what basis? And who invented this word "unit", which seemed to spring from nowhere sometime in my 40s? All the same, I'm pretty clear that if I couldnt do without the demon drink for a self-imposed month a year, then I'd have problems. So it's a checkout against alcoholism, I guess.

Second, I am sure it must be good for me, and for my hardworking liver. The stuff is poison after all, so a break from it is bound to be restorative. Detox basically.

Why in Lent, if not for religion? Well because there is a supportive culture of abstinence around in Lent that makes it a bit easier. That means you can go to a party and say you're not drinking because it's Lent, and no-one will say "Oh go on, just one". They might think, "I didn't know SHE was religious", but they won't force a glass of Pinot Grigio into your hand.

So is it easy? And do I feel better?

Funerals and remembering

Today I went to the funeral of my friend John House, an art historian who worked on Monet (inter alios). I had met him sometime in the early 1980s, at a party given by a couple of friends in London (him and her) -- one of those parties you still vividly remember a few decades later, even if you cant remember exactly what year it was. If you'd have told us then that, all these years down the line, we'd end up shedding a tear at each other funerals, we wouldn't have believed you.

John was only 66 (and yes, if you'd have told us then that one day we would be saying "only 66" we wouldn't have believed you either). He apparently had a heart attack while taking the cat to the vet -- which for him, I guess, must have been as good a way to go as you could hope for. For anyone close to him, it was a complete knockout, a bolt from the blue. (Everyone was talking about when they last saw him -- for me it was at the opening of the Hockney exhibition, and indeed he was one of the people I met who had the most caustic things to say about 'late Hockney').

Anyway, especially in the circumstances, it was a brilliantly choreographed and very moving farewell... a cremation first, followed directly by a thanksgiving in a stunningly restored Victorian church, St Stephen's, near Belsize Park tube station. A church, but there was no God (instead of the Lord's prayer, there was a passage of the younger Seneca). And the wine didn't only follow, it also accompanied the proceedings -- so thay everyone could toast John from their chairs as we finished the formal proceedings (this was actually a bit of a bummer for me and the husband as we have given up the demon drink for our non-religious Lent... and we dont get an indulgence on day 2, even for a funeral).

Les Ebdon and Million+

I suspect that no one quite knows what Les Ebdon (above in academic rig) will do as the head of OFFA. In the run up to his appointment I have been torn between distaste, on the one hand, for the vested interests of fee-paying schools and their parents (gosh, what are we paying for if some bloke is going to come along and take away the privilege) and, on the other, for the apparent lack of concern by Ebdon and co for subjects that I suspect they don't really understand (if you wnat Classics or Music to survive as high level, international subjects in this country, you'll have to do something to schools as well as to Uni admissions offices). Honestly, there's something vulgar about both sides.

I did, however, decide to take a look at the website of Million+, the think tank backed by a group of new univesities of which Ebdon is the chair. First let me say that it must be right that universities come in many shapes and sizes. I dont want every university to teach Latin, any more than I want every university to teach Sports Science (worthy as both those subjects are or may be).

That said, alarm bells rang looking at the stuff Million+ has just put out.

Germany in charge of Greece...the history

To vary the diet of misery stories about Greece and Germany, newspapers have turned an occasional backward glance to World War II. It's hardly surprising, so the argument goes, that the Greeks -- particularly the elderly ones -- don't have much time for the Germans. Look at what the Germans did in the war. One intrepid Telegraph reporter made it all the way up the motorway from Athens, to the village of Distomo (near the monastery of Hosios Loukas), where one of the most notorious German massacres took place. More than 200 civilians were killed in terrible reprisals for the murder of three German soldiers. . .  and reparation claims are still on-going (the bleak memorial is above).

There the reporter dug out an octogenarian survivor of the massacre, fourteen years old at the time, who dutifully -- and poignantly, to be honest -- talked about "a German knife held to our throats" (he was actually talking about now not then... but the point was made).

What's odd is that there hasn't been such interest in the first time, more than a hundred years before World War II, that Greece was quite literally under German rule.

Do I have any favourite apps? Well three...

I confess to being a bit too fond of my smart phone. Yes, I check my email with embarrassing frequency, and I tweet a bit too often (@wmarybeard). But I have never really got into apps, as such... or at least not into the ones that go beyond the very basics. I am awfully impressed by their cleverness, but I am never quite sure why I'd want them.

So, for example, I really dont want to go round a museum looking at my phone, rather than the stuff (and actually I dont observe many people doing that, awesome as some of the museum phone guides are cracked up to be). And further down the food chain I am baffled why anyone would want to buy themselves a hypochondriacs phone guide to medical symptoms.. or even a free app calculator for dividing a restaurant bill (err pencil and paper??).

But I have got three firm app friends, two old and one more recent.

Hatchet Job Announced

Last night was the Hatchet awards at the Coach and Horses in Greek St, sponsored by the Omnivore. I'd been shortlisted for my (mildly donnish, finger wagging) review of Robert Hughes' Rome. But wasnt remotely expecting to win against the illustrious competition... which made the evening all the more enjoyable, as there were none of those anxieties of anticipation,  or of "what am I going to say if I win" (or, more to the point, of 'if I have another glass of wine I wont be able to say anything if I win").

The well-deserved winner was Adam Mars Jones for his review of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall (who was presented with a gilded hatchet, a cake in the shape of a book (into which the hatchet went) and a years supply of potted shrimp, that well known omnivore (supplied by the Fish Society.. who also did the food all evening).

But the highlight of the evening for me was the dramatised reading of the cautionary tale of contemporary reviewing ... a "boy who cried wolf" riff -- performed by the young ladies of omnivore (in my wobbly photo above).

You can probably guess the plot . . .young reviewer starts out on his trade, he has a book which he doesn't much like but has got all kinds of connections with the author, so says that it is dazzling etc... his reviewing career goes on and he's always saying the books are dazzling...then he gets a book to review that he really does think is dazzling, but by then no one believes him.. it sells 70 copies, the author kills himself and the publisher goes bust, and....

(That hardly captures the hilarious cleverness, but you get the message....hope the omnivore will podcast a rendering on their website...?)

In truth a good time was had by all. As you can see from the pics. Spot Lachlan Mackinnon, one of the others on the shortlist.

And as so often, I cam away with a classical puzzle. If you were opening a motorbike and moped shop (mostly maintence not sales) and wanted a nice classical name for it... but not too abstruse, one that might resonate widely...what would you go for?

 

Cicero's words still hit the spot: Hungary 2012

A few years ago, I spent some innocent hours checking out how often Cicero's words, at the beginning of his first speech against Catiline, had been re-used in modern political debate. Cicero, as you'll remember, is trying to drum Catiline, the internal terrorist, out of Rome in 63 BC .. he gets up in the senate, where Catiline himself is sitting, and off he goes...

How long will you abuse our patience, O Catiline...?

Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

There turned out to be literally hundreds of re-applications of this neat little slogan, from the Congo to Brazil, in protests public and private and intellectual (Camille Paglia claimed to have based her campaign against Foucault on Cicero's campaign against Catiline).

I hadn't picked up too many of them recently. But then I saw this picture (at the top) in the latest issue of THE.

A couple of the guys protesting in Budapest against the Fidesz party's attempts to rewrite the constitution were carrying a banner reading "Quousque tandem . . .".

So there is life in the old dog yet (though maybe I'm doing them an injustice, but I wasnt sure that the caption writers on THE had a clue what the banner meant . . .  I suspect they thought it was Hungarian).

 But the odd thing about Cicero's slogan is the way here (as almost always in recent years) its political "direction" has changed. When Cicero first spoke this, he was the voice of authority, attacking the revolutionary counter culture in the shape of Catiline. In Hungary, his words are being used by the opposition in their struggle against authority . . . I wonder whose side Cicero would have been on.

Equality and Diversity Training: Cambridge University's Own Goal

I have just scored 100% on the most worthless exam I have ever sat -- the Cambridge University "Equality and Diversity Essentials" test online.

I have had some experience of the futility of online tests from the USA, and had always rather boasted that the Brits hadn't gone down this silly route. So when I was notified that I would not be able to be on my Faculty Appointments Committee or my Faculty REF Committee (of which currently I am the Chair) unless I took the Uni online training course, I felt I would pass on the opportunity...

Look, if I don't do the training and the test, just think how many days I save by NOT being on the Appointments Committee or chairing the REF (probably, if you take into account writing the REF statememts,  a good 21 days.. attractive eh?). But, in the end, I thought of my mates who are trying to run the Faculty and how difficult it would be for them if I didnt do it (we havent got enough senior women, after all).. so I gave in.

And I suppose I thought that, resistant as I was, I might learn something .. like I had learned somethimg from the Speed Awareness Course I did a few years ago.

No such luck. This was a very bad way of spending 90 minutes.