A Don’s Life

Telling a book by its cover

It would be a gross overstatement to claim that choosing the cover was one of the biggest tasks in writing and producing a book. But it is one of the most memorable ones -- and fun and communal (unlike the rather solitary experience of writing). Everybody from author to editor, artist to publicity person, can put a useful oar in. Does this cover capture what is in the book? Will it encourage people to pick it up in the bookshop? Or linger online?

My book that's just coming out comprises, as a basis, some of the favourite reviews and essays I've written over the last 15 - 20 years. But they have been rewritten, re-edited and reordered to make what I hope is a convincing WHOLE .. which introduces readers (in roughly chronological order, starting from Minoan Knossos and ending with Astérix the Gaul) to the ancient world, and more to the point to what the current debates about it are. What's going on in Classics now? What are people arguing about? (Plug over)

We spent a long time with the cover -- and even with the title. 

What meat we used to eat

Out at dinner the other evening, we 50-somethings (and more) fell to talking about the food we had, or had not, eaten when we were kids in the (non-metropolitan) UK. It was an object lesson in the speed of dietary change, as well, perhaps, an object lesson in our own social and cultural mobility.

We started with some of the 'nots'. 

Top of the list here was olive oil. So far as we could recall, in the late 50s and early 60s olive oil wasn't something you bought at the grocers, but at the chemists. The reason for that is that it wasn't generally used for cooking, but you heated it up and used it to dampen the cotton wool that you put in your ears when you had earache.

It follows that salad dressing was not on the menu either -- or at least not the oil and vinegar variety. What we poured over our unadorned lettuce leaves and tomatoes was Heinz Salad Cream (still on the supermarket shelves but hardly a best seller, I imagine).

And pasta was striking by its absence too, or at least in the Italian dried or fresh variety. It wasnt until we were in our late teens that most of us had tasted anything other than spaghetti out of a tin (Heinz again).

And as for what we did eat?

Money laundering at the Post Office

This is one of those complaints about the absurdities of modern regulations . . . so if you really can't bear wry moans about modernity, better not read on.

Earlier this week the husband had to acquire a postal order for just over £100. He is going to India and must get a visa. Time was when you just queued up at India House with your cash, left your passport in the morning and picked it up later that day. Now the whole Indian visa operation has been out-sourced, it's shot up in price, and you have to pay by POSTAL ORDER -- a kind of currency that I imagine most people in the land didn't realise still existed. 

So the husband trots around to the local sub post office last week to acquire the postal order. 

It turns out to be a pricey piece of paper. I scoffed in disbelief when he said it cost £12,50 (didn't he mean 12p?), but checking on the web I discover that there is indeed an admin fee of 12.5% of the value of the order, capped at £12.50. Makes even your credit card look cheap.

Man ist was man isst?

I am still finding it hard to get a grip on exactly what is going on in the great horsemeat scandal. Or rather, it seems that significantly different objections are getting lumped together.

For some people it is a consumer/trades description issue: the packet said the contents were made of beef when in fact it was horse, so the consumer (in this case literally) was being cheated. On this line, it would have been just as bad if the packet had been labelled "horse" but the contents had been beef. 

For others, it is a question of health and safety. That is to say, it is not just that the contents are wrongly described, but that the illicit horse meat might still carry traces of the harmful chemicals with which the living horses, never intended to enter the food chain, had been injected.

Still others are concerned about the simple fact that it is horsemeat. Mutton masquerading as beef would not have caused such a stir; but we British just don't eat horse -- and so a food taboo has been broken. Most of us know, deep down, that most animals are perfectly nutritious. And it is striking that, so far as I am aware, none of those customers who tucked into their Findus lasagne seem to have had any inkling on the taste buds that something was awry (have we heard from anyone who claims to have said "it didnt taste like beef to me"?). But cultural identity is heavily embedded in the particular range of those animals we choose to put on our plates. For the British that does not include horse or frogs or dog or cat (though I am grateful to a friend who recently reminded me that Elizabeth David referred to a celebratory dish of roast cat in Sardinia).

What is clear, though, is that the whole business is completely mired in the murky international food trade.

The Oldie's pin-up

This is a heartfelt thank-you to the Oldie .. for making me the Oldie's pin-up of the year at their brilliantly louche awards ceremony today. 

When I got the invitation to the Oldie of the Year lunch, I have to say that I thought it was a great reward for having hosted an event at the Oldie's Soho Lit. Festival. It wasn't until the management were more than a little concerned to find out that I was really attending the event that I realised that I might have won something. (I took this from what I have read ... ok, lets compare little and large here .. about the Oscars etc: if they get very keen on knowing about the car you are coming by, it means you have won). 

The truth is that the whole event was damn brilliant. And if I have ever before sneered at Terry Wogan (which I may have done) please let me take it back. Both he and (the co-host) Richard Ingrams were great forces for pleasure and amusement throughout.

Part of that was the feisty (self-)presentation of the over 60s (or over 60-ish). The guests weren't the grannies and grandpas of the senior railcard adverts, whose life seems to consist only in visiting the younger generation by very long train journeys. These were powerful people, and grey funsters, with projects still underway. I'm sure you know the kind I mean.. Joan Bakewell, Maureen Lipman, Libby Purves, Lucy Lampton (and that's only a few of the ladies).

New York Review of Books reaches 50

I am just back from a couple of days in New York. I can sense some of you thinking some wry thoughts about this jetsetting life: eurocrat in Brussels one week, then the Big Apple the next . . .  not exactly the hardworking academic image you've been trying to give. 

I see the point, but I would say this was all a bit punishingly mad, not glam. I'm not allowed (nor would I want) to skip any teaching, so it's a question of fitting five days work into the three that are left etc etc ... BUT, the fact is that I wouldnt have missed the New York trip for the world.

It was the celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Review of Books. There was a party (filmed by regular reader Martin Scorsese, yes honest), and I was giving a mini lecture at the anniversary symposium. 

Richard of York gave battle in vain?

Trust me! Just when I have the sympathy of half the nation for being the victim of some vile trolling, I go and throw it away by issuing some curmudgeonly tweets about everybody's favourite skeleton under the car park: namely Richard III. Will I never learn?

Now, actually, the twitter exchange on this one has been good overall, with fierce but polite disagreement. But I still think it might be an idea to explain what I was on about in rather more than 140 characters ...

As it happens, I am in New York and got up early to write the contribution I am to give at a symposium tomorrow. And sure, I was curious to see what the University of Leicester was going to say about their skeleton, so looked on the laptop -- and had quite a lot of qualms about what I saw.

Now there are also loads of good sides to this, as people have been rightly tweeting. If a discovery like this can turn people on to history or archaeology, then that must be a good thing (someone reported the delight of their child at learning that there could be the body of a king under a carpark -- spot on). And I have a frisson, like most people do, at coming face to face with "the real thing/person" (rocking the Roman cradle in "Meet the Romans" was really exciting). Besides, there has obviously been a lot of good archaeology and science going on, which was clearly explained (including the osteology done by someone who had been at my Cambridge college).

So why was I so put off, as well as being intrigued?

What's fun to teach?

It is easy to imagine that university teaching gets more fun, the more advanced are the students that you are teaching . . . third year undergraduates more rewarding than second years, second year undergraduates more rewarding than first year, and postgraduates more rewarding than undergraduates.

Now, I would be the first to claim that it is often truly exciting sitting down with a PhD student who is trying to say something really new, and going through their work, word by word. And it's also huge fun to pick one of your own specialist subjects and to engage third year student in its intricacies too.

But all the same, for me, there is something just as exciting (and in some ways even more difficult) about teaching the first year students. For one thing, you make an even bigger difference to the way they think about the subject. I hope that this isnt the power trip it might sound. But to take students from A level and to push them quickly up to the next (more vertiginous) styles of thinking, and to help them acquire the skills that will enable them to get their own teeth into the subject . . .  well that's a pedagogical pleasure that's hard to beat.