A Don’s Life

The road from Rimini

I am afraid that this post may end up reading a bit like a commercial for AA European Breakdown cover. But just occasionally, when minor domestic disasters hit, you end up not feeling infuriated with every piece of adminsistration you come across (the hours of "your call is important to us", interruptinng hours of tapeloop Vivaldi) ... but in the hands of efficient people who actually get you sorted, and nicely too.

This story is, of course, about the van. When finally the lads had found a way of insuring the thing before the European road trip, I had a sudden rush of maternal responsibility and insisted to the son that he take out a month's AA breakdown cover for Europe. Never has £160 (if I remember right -- which was the cheap rate for him as AA member) been better spent. Because in fact the poor vehicle did in fact break down on the Italian side of the Brenner Pass (as I briefly mentioned a few posts ago). It was terminal problem with the clutch.

Can anyone help me find Leslie Smith of the BBC?

This is a cry for help (again!). I'm trying to write up some of the work I did on Moses Finley's journalism. In particular, I'm hoping to put my paper into the published conference proceedings. But the best idea would be to publish with it a couple of Finley's unpublished radio talks or discussions, preserved in the BBC archive, because they really do add something to the basic story.

This isn't so difficult to organise if it is a simple talk by Finley himself (and I've got my eye on one of those). Then you just have to get permission from Finley's literary executors (and I'm optimistic on that one). It's more complicated if anyone else speaks in the broadcast, even if only to ask the questions, because then you have to get their permission too, or that of their heirs. Or you can omit their contributions entirely from the published version, which rather spoils the conversational feel in an interview.

Anyway, I am wanting to reprint an interview with Finley from an early 1960s BBC radio series, called "Born Elsewhere". It was a series of interviews with Brits who had been, as the title implies, born outside the UK. It was part of what was no doubt a noble BBC initiative to help us start thinking about multi-culturalism, diversity etc. The trouble is that I need to get the permission of the interviewer, Leslie Smith -- or his living representatives.

University publicity

I am not a dinosaur. That is, I know that universities need press offices and officers, and indeed our own press officers have helped me out of several scrapes. The idea that a university could now exist without someone to help filter the calls about access/Higgs whatever/ancient sex is pretty unthinkable.

But how pro-active should the press office be? The husband pointed me to a trio of jobs at the Open University advertised in the paper earlier in the week, which makes the heart sink. (Let me say straightaway that I am sure that the OU is no worse than any uni... so I'm not getting at them in particular, but at the 'system' in general.)

Ok. After all the introductory stuff about what an exciting time it is to be at the OU.. the first job is a for a "reputation manager".. this is the brief:

"You will raise the profile of our academic excellence by developing stories and replaying them across a wide range of channels and audiences, including media and social media. You will need strong communication and organisational skills to lead and coordinate activities across the University and harness the support of our ambassadors."

India, the Olympic Games and "poor sports"

I didn't confess that we had a long weekend in New Delhi last weekend. (I'd happily tell 99.99% of readers and commenters, but "social media warnings" now make it very clear that announcing that your whole family is away on your blog is a bit like leaving a note for the burglars on the front door, saying "key under mat".)

The husband was partly on the search for the architecture of W. S. George (who worked in Greece and India), and I went along for the ride. The truth was, in the midst of Olympic fever, that it proved interesting to see what the Olympics looked like from the point of view of a nation that hadn't just won 65 medals.

India had got 6 medals (doubling their total of 3 in Beijing) -- and that included the woman boxer Mary Kom (who was trumped by our Nicola), and Sushil Kumar (above) who got a silver medal in the wrestling.

There were some striking differences (and wry similarities) in what the Indian papers were saying about their athletes' achievements, compared with ours. For a start, class and wealth were pretty near to top of the agenda. There was a bit of breast-beating about how Indian hockey was in free-fall . . .but the main question was -- what should a country like India do? Well, said one Indian ex-Olympian in the Times of India, invest in "poor sports". "No rich family boy will go into sports like weightlifting, boxing or wrestling. These are clearly poor man's sports." That's where India could hope for medals in the future (not dressage or canoing, in other words).

Modern tax farming: and the Roman dangers of private enterprise

In an hour or so we shall hear which bid has been accepted to run the West Coast Mainline  railway route: First Group's or Virgin's (and by the time you read this, you'll probably already know). And the news broadcasts are full of dire warnings about how the government should decide. It's not just a question of accepting the highest bid to run the service. If a company bids too high for the contract then, they find it much harder to make a profit -- so they start cutting services and the public get cross (= political votes lost), or worse, they have to renege before the contract is finished (=more egg on face, and more votes lost).

I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the ancient Roman precedent here. Because they had just these problems and their form of private enterprise gone mad was one of the factors that led to the end of Roman republican democracy and ultimately the rise of autocracy.

The jewel in the crown of Roman private enterprise was tax farming. When the republican Romans wanted to (say) impose taxes on a province, they didn't collect the taxes through state officials, but by offering the tax contract to rival bidding companies -- of "tax-farmers" or publicani (the 'publicans' of the King James Bible).

A nice new fragment of Augustus' Res Gestae -- so there!

OK, this is a niche blog post. But it's what I've got curious about just now, and it's a nice example of the little ways in which the story of the classical world gets changed -- so let's share it.

One of the most extraordinary documents to survive from the ancient world is the "autobiography" of the first emperor Augustus (text here). This was originally written by (or for) the emperor himself, and inscribed on bronze pillars in front of his tomb after his death.

Those don't survive, but in the nineteenth century a largely complete bi-lingual copy, in Latin and Greek, was discovered in the Temple of "Augustus and Rome" in Ankara (above), also inscribed post mortem. This has become one of the most important documents in the whole of ancient history, and not surprisingly. It's a first person account by a Roman emperor, but not just any emperor --but by the young thug who slaughtered his enemies (Octavian), then re-invented himself as founding father (Augustus) of a paternalistic autocracy. (Mussolini had the whole Latin text inscribed on retaining wall of his reconstructed Ara Pacis, just next to the emperor's Mausoleum -- preserved in the new reconstruction.)

I teach the Res Gestae a lot.. in fact it's a "set text" for the students on our 4 year course who come to Cambridge to do Latin and Greek from scratch (the Latin of the RG is quite easy).

And now there is a new fragment of this amazing document, which takes away some of the things I've usually said about it.

How many words can you write in a day?

I am being -- so far as the outside world is concerned -- a very dull girl. That is to say I am blissfully happy, hidden away, writing. I get up in the morning, do the emails and stuff, then go to my (newly tidied) study, lie on my library bed (yes, above -- a rather nifty  and cheap auction purchase a few years ago, which allows you to semi-recline with laptop conveniently on knee, books to either side), and I type away.

The project is to get a draft of my book on Roman laughter done by the end of the long vacation. I had 20,000 words already, and I reckon I have done 25,000 more.. and another 60,000 to go. To put that another way, I am just finishing chapter 4, and I have some 6 chapters left (but they are much closer to the lectures I gave in Berkeley so I am hoping they go quicker).

The truth is that I know, honestly, I am NOT going to write 60,000 new words by Oct 4, but if I could be within sight of the target, then I would be happy. Because I really have to start the next project seriously on 1 January.

I could go on, but you can no doubt see already the kind of calculations that are going on in the Beard head, as the paragraphs don't come. How many words can you write in a day.. or how many good words?

How good a role model ARE these Olympic athletes?

I happily confess to having enjoyed the Olympics much more than I ever thought I would. Indeed I have changed from my slightly sneery attitude on the first few days of competition (OK, so where are those medals we all heard about?) to being rather jolly when we win another one. Indeed I have the BBC live text commentary open on my laptop screen -- and I don't think I could ever get keener than that.

All the same, I do think we have got a bit over the top on whole sport thing, on how it is going to inspire the nation (to what??) .. and so on. Every newspaper, even the usually cynical, is just full of it.

So let me share a couple of these doubts.

DOUBT ONE. I think we can take it as read that the country's health and well-being would be improved if most people did more exercise, just a bit more. Mens sana in corpore sano and all that. But are these hugely over-trained athletes really any kind of role model for that?

OK I realise that what counts as "discipline" and what counts as "cruel over training" is always a fine distinction. We're very happy to point an ethnocentric finger at the "fanatical" Chinese, while patting ourselves on the back for having made champions of the "girls next door". And I know it must differ a bit from sport to sport. But so far as I can see there is very little "healthy" in the normal sense of that word about what many of these sports-people have done to themselves. You only have to look at some of their legs and arms on the telly to see that they are not "normal" on any spectrum of normality, but that they have obsessively exploited the further reaches of the capacity of the human body, to turn in a minutely better time in some running race.

Take Jessica Ennis, for example. Actually I have quite a soft spot for her and am dead pleased she won. But a quick glance at her website shows just what a "worked on" machine she is: "Team Jennis" includes: a physiotherapist, a soft tissue specialist, a coach, a javelin coach, a physiologst, a biomechanist.. and that's before you get the the "management". Most of the athletes (even the shooters) are "training" at least 5 hours a day.

Now, sure, obsession comes in various forms. And there would be many peope who would say that my desire to spend 14 hours a day writing at my laptop was generally bad for my health both short and longterm. But God knows what the long term effect of all this athletic physical pressure is. (A quick visit to the Centre for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina is a bit depressing on that score, I can tell you!)

Frankly, it seems to me that if we all were to follow the model of our Olympians we'd probably cost the NHS a lot more eventually than if we all stayed couch potatoes.

So much as we love watching and cheering, can we stop thinking of these sports stars as "fit". At least, it's a bloody odd, and hugely immoderate form of "fitness".

DOUBT TWO, of course, is where they all come from. I'm picking up here on the many press reports that point to the "disproportionate" number who went to independent schools. Now if you teach at Oxbridge, you are used to this kind of thing. And I was seriously waiting for someone to attack the Olympic selectors for class prejudice.