A Don’s Life

Sat nav rage -- and chaises longues in the Fens

I've begun to accept that I am rather missing the old road atlas.

I mean sat navs are great when you are on your own, trying to get to a destination you don't know in some busy central city. How many times have I been on my way to talk at a school, got in the wrong lane and found myself back on the ringroad that I came in on... and ended up 30 minutes late, while the assembled junior classicists got more and more restless, and the teachers more anxious, wondering when I would turn up? (This was the era before mobile phones too.)

But honestly, if you've got a passenger, and if s/he is a reasonably competent atlas reader, then s/he's a much better bet than the electronic voice. "You're going to be turning right in a bit, so I'd get in the right hand lane" is a lot more engaging than the damn woman who intones in her cyborg tones "prepare to turn right".

In fact, I've ended up pretty aggressive against the disembodied voice in my car (even if I do still use it.. partly because -- of course -- we've thrown our atlases away).

Who were the Roman plebs? (Would Mr Mitchell have been one of them?)

This post is not an attempt to give a lifeline to Andrew Mitchell. In fact I have been congratulating myself a bit smugly these last couple of days for some rare prescience on my part. That is to say, almost as soon as he had, or hadn't said, what he is reported as saying, I observed that the F word was far less damaging than the P word..."plebeian" or "pleb".

Within modern British culture, since the sixteenth century at least, this bit of sub-Latin has been used with a decidely derogatory sense. "Hath not the pulchritude of my vertues protected me from the contaminating hands of these plebeians"... is a line penned by Sir Philip Sidney (who died in 1586). And the Oxford English Dictionary can produce examples almost up to the present day. "Why can't these plebeians live like the ants that they are in high-rise public-housing projects."... from the Boston Herald in 2004.  Or there's the shortened form: "‘A bit of a pleb, wasn't he?’ put in the military friend.".. that's from Huxley's Point, Counter Point.

But what does it originally mean?

The word comes from Latin (plebeius, or plebs). But the Latin story is a bit more complicated. Sure there is also a strongly derogatory use. Cicero was typical of the Roman upper class when he talked about the sordida plebs ("the great unwashed"). Just like the late first century AD poet Statius, could say as a compliment of a patron's house and bathing establishment nil ibi plebeium ("nothing common there!"). There is no doubt at all that most Roman toffs would have perfectly well understood what Mr Mitchell did or didnt say.

But it was more complicated than that.

Who is a pleb? And what price pissing off those in authority?

We have no idea what Andrew Mitchell said to the policeman at the exit of Downing St. And we probably never will. But there is something nasty about the incident (and it's not the use of "f***ing").

I can swear with the best and worst (ok I'll fess up to that, as many will confirm). So if some tired cabinet minister was biking up Downing St and was told by the cop that he couldnt cycle through the main gate, but had to get off and walk through the side gate, I can understand him saying. ..'Oh for f's sake, I've biked this way for years...' All this stuff we're hearing about propriety is a bit much. Like all those guys saying that they have never sworn in their life. WOT?

Fiona Bruce, grey hairs and the Emperor Augustus' joke

I'm sad that Fiona Bruce feels that she HAS to dye out her grey hairs to appear on telly. I'm perfectly OK with dyeing... the more shocking pink the better, I say -- but not with feeling that you HAVE to. And it's all so self-fulfilling. The more the grey is dyed out, the more women feel that that they have to. I cant help thinking that in a couple of hundred years time people will be writing essays on why women in the 21st century had to disguise their hair colour (at considerable cost in time and exoense), just as we now wonder about those Victorian women who wielded their crinolines).

It was funny, though, just as the Bruce article was hitting the headlines, I was reading about the Roman emperor Augustus' view of getting rid of grey hair (that's him above).

The death of little cat

Our cat has just died (sorry about the odd angle above, but you get the picture). At a good healthy old age (she must have been 11, I guess). And I miss her. I've never been a particular fan of cats. When I was a kid, we had a pair who lived mostly outside, but they weren't exactly cuddly moggies, and if anything were slightly menacing.

It was the husband who decided a couple of decades ago that we should have a cat or two. And after two fatalities (one traffic accident, one illness) we were left with just "little cat". She was "euthanased" (as we now say, but I still think of it as "put down") on Friday. She didn't really have a name. For the vet it was "June" (short for "June Bug"), but she was never actually called that. For us, she was just "cat" -- or "little cat", to distinguish her from her larger predecessors.

I still find it weird and sad, in all those diurnal ways that you do. I come back at night and there is no patter of little paws. I come down in the morning and I just make the coffee without having to get the cat fed. I miss it curling up on the sofa in the evening.

A gold for bronze

Last night we (that's me and the husband) went to the opening of the Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy (rather bittersweet for the husband, as he had been involved in an exhibition of Syrian Art, which would have been opening there next year. . . well, you can guess what's happenedto that).

Let's say to start with that it is really worth going, and it features wonderful stuff you'll never have seen, or not all together. One star of the show must be the extraordinary Greco-Roman dancing satyr (at the top of this post) rescued from the sea off Sicily, but then there is also the Crosby Garrett helmet and some pretty damn stunning modern stuff (a brilliant bit of Anish Kapoor, and the Louise Bourgeois spider (on the right).

It's gorgeous. But one of the points of the exhibition is to destabilize you, in time and space.

London Met University: immigration & the personal side.

There must be a hundred reasons why the government's move against London Metropolitan University is at best a sledge-hammer to crack a nut, at worst a misguided attack on GB's tradition of offering its educational expertise to the world.

But I found myself thinking, when all these visas were cancelled, what were the individual stories of sadness and disappointment that were involved. I thought that especially in this case, because a friend of the daughter (above) had just got a scholarship to come to London from South Sudan to do a Master's Course. Luckily at the University of Westminster, not at LMU.When I thought of what he had been through to get to be here, if he had had that suddenly snatched from him at the last minute . . . .

It's easy to think about foreign student's comng to the UK as the matter of just filling in an application form. In fact, for some, it can be a real marathon, stressful, labyrinthine, and a real outlay of cash (which you don't have) if it isn't actually successful.

All in a don's day?

This is, I fear, a piece of bloggish narcissism. But on Tuesday we had a bit of a get together at Profile books  for all those whose comments had been published in the lastest volume of a don's blog. (If you comment was included and you didnt get an invitation, please can I say that we went to every trouble to get in touch). The husband was in Greece, but the son and the daughter were there (on the door, and at the bash); as was the brilliant Debbie, whom many of you know.

Anyway, that's a survivors' photo above (taken in Profile's offices). I suppose I ought to be offering prizes for the number of correct identifications anyone can make.. PL, SW Foska, Cerberus, A Dennis, and a couple of Stroppy's (Author and Liz).

But really, this is another chance to say to you all THANK YOU for making this blog what it is. In my speech (a rather aggrandizing description ???) I did say that I was so pleased that together we had made a blog in which we all contributed without that weirdly aggressive ranting that you find on plenty of websites (none of that "what a load of  f****** tosh, what does this f***** woman know, who does she f********* think she is" -- more the wry dart, the poem and the Latin quote)

 So onwards and upwards all; and thank you..... keep on commenting.

(And some sort of prize will go to any non-attendee who gets 90% of the above attenders right! Noms de blog will do)

What purpose are exams supposed to be fit for, Mr Gove?

I'm beginning to feel that we (... ok the media, and various other organs of public opinion) are beginning to get as fixated on exams as we are already are on prisons. Any time we find something else we dont like, we reach for a prison term to punish its perpetrators -- no matter how inappropriate.

Now with kids, almost all we seem to get really worked up about it how we examine them. It's not an exact parallel of course. It's easy enough to sound off about standards and how we ought to test and re-test the little buggers. But luckily an awful lot of people in the country have children, and watching what they go through tends to dampen the enthusiasm for wall to wall exams. None the less almost everyone can get worked up by grade boundaries now, modular systems and whatever. (Here's a bit of a background from Michael Gove himself from this morning's Today Programme; and here is the official data on what it takes to get an A* at A level.)

I have to say that I have some sympathy with Michael Gove's dislike of modules and course work (with a helping hand from the middle class mum and dad) and retakes at will. But I can also remember the kind of rhetoric (and it was by no means stupid) that brought to an end the whole idea of sudden death exams -- the idea that everything hung on what you did in 3 hours after several years work.

Anyone my age will remember this too. The argument went that a kid might have done brilliantly through the year then entirely cocked up the three hour exam (teenagers for God's sake). Was that fair? Of course it wasn't. There was also the worry that girls performed less well in such exams than boys. I don't know if that was true, but it was certainly one plausible reason for moving towards different methods of testing.

The odd thing is that most universities are still travelling in the opposite direction to Mr Gove. For all kinds of reasons (including gender, but also the question of what skills we think we want to test) we are moving away from the trad 3 hour exam, towards all kinds of methods of "alternative assessment" (dissertations, portfolio of essays, open book exams, etc etc).

I'm not sure that any of these methods of assessment are "fair". In fact the worst thing is probably to imagine that there really IS a fair method of testing that we just have to find or devise. There are pluses and minuses in every system, and we delude ourselves to think anything else. Maybe in fact a bit of a mixture evens things out.