A Don’s Life

How do you insure a van?

The son has recently become proud possessor of a red ex-post-office van, which is sitting motionless outside our house. Motionless because he hasn't been able to insure the damn thing.

Here's the problem. He is 25 and he is going to Europe with some mates, two aged 24, one aged 23 and one non-driver. They have a van because they play guitars etc in a wee band, and past experience suggests that if you fetch up at hostels and offer to play a bit, you will likely as not get a free bed for the night. The slightly dodgy economic idea is that if you buy the van, you save money in the long run... especially as you sell the van again when you get back home. But the planned sale also means that you either want a short term policy, or one that you can cancel before the end of the year without horrific penalties.

So how do you get it insured? Well there are some really dodgy companies on the web, who'll give you the legal piece of paper for a fee. But you only have to look at the on-line reviews to see that if you had to make a claim you'd be in trouble. You know the sort of thing, loads and loads of one star reviews saying "never ever use this scam firm...", interspersed with the occasional five star review saying "I have used this firm all my life, and had brilliant service" (presumably posted by the firm in question).

But if you go slightly up market, you don't actually meet much more joy. You either spend hours filling in online applications or you ring up and give your details to some person who just puts them in a computer for you . . .  and the answer is always the same, "Sorry our underwriters wont cover this." So you say "Could you tell me why". Just occasionally there is some answer like... "no under 25s as extra drivers", "they wont cover that vehicle" ("Why"... "Dont know, they wont cover that vehicle"). Usually it's just, "Dont know mate, they wont cover it." Sometimes it blatantly conflicts with the come-ons on their website. A quite nice firm called Tempcover (with good reviews on the web) said it would do all sorts of van insurance ... transit and larger. But, for some reason not specified ("the underwriters"), they couldnt do this one.

The level of grip at the other end of the phone isnt huge. Conversations run like: "What's your occupation", "Post graduate student", "I'll put unemployed then.", "I'm not un-employed, I'm a student". "We've only got two choices, "employed" or "unemployed" and a student isn't employed."

Olympic opening: the other bits, Seb Coe's speech etc

I've already said in various places what a convert I was to Danny Boyle's Olympic opening spectacular -- I started off as a curmudgeonly refusenik and ended up a Boyle-style patriot. Boyle has a better ear for the passions of the nation than most politicians, and he got it right enough (not wholly, but enough) for me to feel proud. To hear the Sex Pistols played in front of the Queen, that was it... I remember how they were once banned for heaven's sake. Now the world was listening, and I loved it.

So, richly deserved plaudits for Boyle, but what about the rest of the three and a half opening ceremony? We seem to be drawing a veil over that.

First the parade of athletes. OK I know this has to happen (otherwise we might just as well have no more than Danny Boyle and forget about what the Games are really about). But, heavens, two hours of 204 nations in the world didn't make for hugely exciting viewing. And although the BBC commentating team did a hell of a lot better than in the Jubilee pageant, the Wiki style factoid, carefully up-beat stuff they came out with about the third world countries rather undercut the real version of un-pc inclusivity that Boyle had tried to host (next time get Boyle to write their fact sheets).

Try these snippets.

Rwanda..? 'Trying to get on the map' (according to its flag bearer, they said) "as a country of skilled cyclists". (It was only the next morning that the news came that British and other aid was being cut because of something other tham skilled cycling.. but who knows?)

Somalia.. ? "Finally on the road to recovery after renewed international efforts to defeat the piracy problems." Patronising..?

Tunisia..? "Probably the most successful transition so far from the Arab Spring that we were talking about earlier"....Err??

But OK (plus a  few jokes about languages with the longest alphabets and country names with only one vowel that were sprinkled into the commentary) so far, so necessary.

Damn footnotes

 

I am spending the summer trying to crack my book on Roman Laughter -- the Sather lectures I did a few years ago now. It's going OK, but inevitably slower that I hoped.

Part of the problems is the footnotes. On my very own home patch, I can be pretty straight, even cavalier -- I think I know what needs referencing and what doesn't. But on the margins, it's a different matter. For me, one of those margins is Bakhtin. I have just written what will be just a couple of pages only in the finished book, explaining why I think that Bakhtin's linkage of the Roman festival of Saturnalia and medieval raucous, lusty, laughing Carnival is seriously misplaced. Nice as it would be to imagine, Roman Saturnalia does not equal Carnival.

I don't doubt I'm right.. so far as I can see Saturnalia at Rome was (by and large) a relatively paternalistic festival not a celebration of liberation and the lower bodily stratum as Bakhtin would have it (or, for that matter, not a celebration of liberation minus the lower bodily stratum, as Sir James Frazer suggests). But I find myself increasingly and obsessively drawn to justify this, to reference at least 20% of the Bakhtin (and the books on Bakhtin) I've read. And to go on and on with references to  different interpretations of the Bakhtinian carnival, until more than half the page is "under the line": "for a different view see Bernstein/Burke/Habinek/Graf -- or whoever".

I know really that it's anxiety. And I also find myself thinking as I do it: "What is this damn footnote FOR?"

Then I got another useful perspective.

Sorting out the Agrippinas

One of the problems of the first century AD is that there are simply too many Agrippinas. Not only the "Elder Agrippina" (the wife of the glamorous prince Germanicus, who kept his memory alive after his suspicious death and was morally upright to the point of being a bit of a pain in the neck) and the "Younger Agrippina" (daughter of the Elder A, wife of Claudius and mother -- and lover it was said -- of Nero). There's also the virtuous lady that we tend to know as Vipsania, who was the first wife of the emperor Tiberius....the one he really loved but was made to divorce in order to marry the dreadful Julia. Vipsania was actually "Vipsania Agrippina", the daughter of Augustus' aide, Agrippa.

This last Agrippina is often missed. In fact the traditional title of the picture, below right (by Rubens, now in the National Gallery in Washington) was "Tiberius and Agrippina"... but has been changed to "Germanicus and Agrippina", partly because the traditional pairing seemed so odd (the Elder Agrippina hated Tiberius, whom she believed was heavily implicated in the death of Germanicus). But actually it's a pairing that makes perfect sense if you remember it could be what we would call "Tiberius and Vipsania". This is the sad loving couple who were forced to divorce by the imperial dynastic machine.

Now I have always felt a bit smug about my capacity to tell one Agrippina from another, but my visit to the Naples Museum suggested that was pride coming before a fall -- at least when it came to some famous Roman sculptures that go by the name of "Agrippina" -- although they almost certainly have nothing to do with any real life Agrippina at all.

 There is a famous sculpture in Rome, known as the "Capitoline Agrippina", which was one of the sites of the eighteenth century tourist trail.. and (to a rather more modest degree) still is.

Degree day

As I have said before, I am a real beginner where degree ceremonies are concerned -- never (until yesterday) having actually "taken" a degree in my life. I have heard about what goes on inside the Cambridge University Senate House (all that finger stuff and Latin), but have never actually witnessed it.

So when I got the nice letter about getting an Hon DLitt from the University of Bristol, I was not only dead chuffed (among other things Bristol has a great Classics and Ancient History department, with a distinctively radical profile) -- I also realised that I'd have to do the full ritual thing (I don't think it's quite on to accept an hon degree and then say "can I have it by post please?")

I have to say that I did feel a bit of trepidation about all this. You can see the basic get up at the top of this post (and I have spared you the hat!) -- not my usual style.

So how did it go?

A closer look at the tyrant slayers

As the husband rightly says, art history is pretty easy if you do it from books. It's when you take a closer look at the objects themselves that things get more difficult.

Well so it appeared today in the Naples Archaeological Museum, taking a closer look at the so-called "Tyrant Slayers" (or, rather Roman version thereof).

The standard story of these is complex in its own way, but has a relatively simple ending. The subjects in question are the Athenian heroes, a pair of lovers called Harmodius and Aristogeiton; these became canonised heroes of the fledgling Athenian democracy in 514 BC, when they killed Hipparchos --  the brother of the ruling tyrant -- who had (among other his other crimes) made up to Harmodius.

It was in fact a bit of a bosh shot. The pair managed to kill Hipparchos, but not the ruling tyrant Hippias, and they both ended up dead. But it was the first step in the deposing of the autocratic regime; and when Hippias had actually been got rid of, the new democracy put up a statue to honour the "tyrant slayers", by the sculptor Antenor.

This didn't last long. When the Persians sacked Athens in 480 BC, they took this symbol off with them, and it ended up in Susa. Although Antenor's version was later returned to Athens, the substitute statue that the Athenians commissoned (by Kritios and Nesiotes) quickly became the iconic image.

Neither the original or substitute actually survive, but what we are always told is that the Roman version in Naples (from the Farnese collection) of Kritios and Nesiotes' "Tyrannicides" is a fairly good approximation (unless you think that the Naples version actually copies Antenor's statues, which a few people do). And that's what you see above (Aristogeiton on the left).

It all looks a pretty tight fit, especially if you take into account some classical Greek coins which show a pair of figures rather like that (on the left.. the little figures to the right of the owl), a few Greek pots showing the assassination in much this pose and a plaster cast of the face of the bearded Aristogeiton found at Baiae.

Looking at them yesterday, it all seemed a bit looser.

The f-word and the c-word

I haven't  the foggiest clue about the John Terry case, but the BBC reporting of what he is supposed to have said on the field is side-splittingly awful. It runs "f-word, black, c-word".

Who the f-word does this protect? Or whose sensibilties is it meant to uphold?

Ok let's imagine that you are listening to some news bulletin with your 10 year old. S/he says what an f-word, mummy? Do you then lie and say "oh it means funny word" or do you tell the truth and say "fucK'?

And what is the down side of telling the truth? Either they know the score, or they don't...so where is the corruption? (It reminds me, as I think I've said before, of going to Greece with the kids 20 years ago, and finding that all the Greek toddlers were supping their Coke and crisps in front of films that no under-16 would get into in the UK..and no apparent harm was being done to the Greek children.)

A glimpse of THAT TORCH

The Olympic Torch was due to pass our house this morning at about 7.00 am. After arriving in Cambridge yesterday, being run around Trinity College Great Court at 6.00 am ish (a strictly invitation only event -- just when we're trying to show the nation's young that Cambridge Uni is ACCESSIBLE....errr?), then loaded on a punt for a hundred yards or so, it was due to be relayed up Huntingdon Road, just where we live, before being put back in its bus to whizz along the A14 to St Ives.

You can't say that we weren't well prepared.

The local council had filled a good few web pages with nanny-state advice to local spectators:

"Check the local weather forecast on the day of the Relay," they advised, "and come prepared – big brollies or sun-cream and hats may be in order!"  (Thank you council, we might have forgotten the brollies I guess...that's us on the right!)

"Bring a bottle of water if you think you might be standing outside for long periods." (Another thing we might foolishly have forgotten.)

"Bring your camera and mobile phone to capture the moment" (... oh come on...).

And then the local paper carried a message from the Prime Minister, to commemorate the great occasion. "The Games give us a fantastic opportunity to sell the East <that's the East of England, not China> to overseas tourists. I want people to come to the UK and see what you have to offer: a walking tour of the university colleges and punting on the River Cam.'

Presumably someone in the PM's office adjusts the template of the leader's message for each local paper on the torch's route. In this case s/he scored a bit of an own goal: the last thing Cambridge needs is more tourists in central Cambridge, and more potential victims of the local punting touts; it's already full to capacity... and we need to get the tourists a bit more widely spread.

Anyway, not to be put off by all this (it was a close call), we trooped outside at about 6.45, and crossed the road, so as to be on the left hand side, where the free gifts were to be distributed to the cheering throngs from the Olympic sponsors. I was rather hoping that Samsung might be chucking out a few free mobile phones.

So what was the verdict?

Slow boat to China

I am a reasonably committed recycler. I have lived in a variety of towns and cities in Europe and the US where the rubbish/trash collection has been easy to sort into different bins, and where the local collection service clearly distinguished between the different sorts of container, and what should go where.

Cambridge has never been quite so clear. It's often been the case that you have diligently weeded one sort of plastic from another and then discovered (if you were around when the truck came) that the whole lot went into the same big garbage truck. Result: you feel good (so long as you didnt actually watch), and the stuff just goes to the same landfill anyway. Middle class angst assuaged, but no more.

The other trouble with Cambridge is that it has kept changing what you can put in which bin. Which sort of plastic container has been allowed in the blue bin has been over the last couple of years a specialist subject worthy of Mastermind (internal bubblewrap, yes or no?.. search me).

Now we have just had a new (loathsomely enthusiastic) booklet, explaining yet again what kind of rubbish can go where (ok, so it's aerosols in the blue bins now..thanks for telling us). And it also explains that our plastics are being sent to China for recycling.

Home thoughts from abroad

Cripes, no sooner had I said that my Mum, when she taught me at primary school, made us learn the first first verse of Robert Browning's "Home Thoughts from Abroad" (Browning above) than the government decides it should be a set text for the new British Citizenship test -- along with God Save the Queen (verse one... God save us from going to verse two).

Or so at least it has been reported this weekend. We are still waiting for the final syllabus.

For would-be citizens, out go questions about how to claim benefits, and in comes a test of British history and literature and poetry.

Now, when Bernard Crick was helping devise the original citizenship test, he argued strongly against quizzing applicants against a range of knowledge that 80% of natural born Brits would not have. And "Home Thoughts from Abroad" must be a case in point.