A Don’s Life

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The alibi for the trip to New York was a visit to the Metropolitan Museum. The husband is part of a team organising a Syria exhibition at the Royal Academy and wanted to look out some early Christian Syrian material and talk to the curators who might lend it (interestingly -- or horrifyingly -- it turns out that a Syrian exhibition would not be possible in the USA, as Bush's legislation about not dealing with terrorist states extends to cultural objects and projects). We also wanted to "do" the new Roman galleries in detail.

Let me say to start with that there is some fabulous stuff in these galleries -- and interestingly different from what you find in European collections. There are no big bits of 'state art' in New York... it's by and large smaller in scale, but almost everything would provide the subject for a whole lecture. It also shows the necessity of actually SEEING the the things you write about.The bronze image of the goddess Cybele pulled by lions in her chariot is often illustrated in books on Roman religion (including my own). I had never realised before that it was part of some water feature, with the lions' mouths acting as spouts. That makes it something rather different from the cult object it is usually assumed to be.

So the whole visit was tremendously worthwhile.  In particular the glass, like this gorgeous blue piece -- which I suspect, if one saw it in an antique shop, one would never guess was Roman. Eighteenth-century perhaps?

It made me think that if I was starting my research career all over again, I'd seriously consider going into ancient glassware.

But despite the tremendous riches, there were some problems. Notably some of the labels and information panels. Now, I know from experience that writing museum labels is much harder than people imagine -- and it is too easy to carp.

But the Met didn't come out very well.

Kings Cross to Cambridge: how nasty can a journey get?

I am afraid that this post will have most to say to those who travel by train between Kings Cross and Cambridge; but I suspect that my story will resonate with most other people who use London commuter  lines.

OK, first off Kings Cross -- and, I guess, a minor quibble. The underground station there serves both Kings Cross and St Pancras (now the Eurostar terminal). Until a few months ago, if you came into Kings Cross on the mainline train you went straight down to the tube -- and, within a minute or two, to whichever line (Northern, Circle, Piccadilly, Hammersmith and City) you fancied. The Eurostar-driven redevelopment of the station means that anyone wanting to get to (say) the Northern line from Kings Cross mainline station has now to walk through a labyrinthine series of passages by a circuitous route which seems to take you over to St Pancras, and then back to the relevant tube platform (10 minutes, briskly) -- even though you know the trains go from just underneath where you started out.

If anyone's worked out how to avoid this marathon, do let us know. I am sure there are some short cuts if you ignore al the forbidding notices saying "No entry to the Northern Line" or whatever (I think this means that there IS an entry to the Northern line this way, but we dont want you to use it.)

But the main whinge of this post (which is unashamedly a whinge) is the misery of the mainline train service, from Cambridge to London.

Should May Balls be banned?

Every year the local Cambridge paper runs a story about local residents complaining about May Balls --  the conspicuous consumption, the binge drinking and, most of all, the noise. May Balls were presumably (like most other things in Cambridge) a nineteenth-century invention, though they now come in various more or less politically correct forms.... those where you can buy a single ticket, for example, or those that call themselves a  "June Event" not a "May Ball".

But the basic principle remains the same. A lot to drink, a lot of noise, and a very late (or alternatively 'early') finish.

The campaign against this style of jollification has been led this year by the esteemed Professor of Palaeography at King's College London (who happens to live in Cambridge -- who would like all May Balls to end by 1.00 am).

There are some arguments against May Balls. Sure, this is after the end of our students' exams -- but there are still school students struggling with GCSEs etc. Why should they be kept awake by the uni students having fun? And it is also true that the DJ style (as pictured above) doesn't do much for out non-socially-elitist image.

But hang on. Can't the middle aged get a bit too curmudgeonly about the whole thing?

Should universities teach better?

In the 1980s, my clever friends who had gone into the Civil Service used to complain about the press they got. There they were, young people working 15 hours a day, trying to improve the conditions in prisons (or whatever); and there was Thatcher saying they were a load of expensive lay-abouts, and that they were a waste of space. My friends always said that, however much they had good arguments against that, the Thatcher rhetoric still got you down. It made you want to change your job.

Well, it isn't all that different in UK Universities right now.Mr Willetts is telling us that we should all teach better. As if we were all letting down our students with poor teaching. We are, in other words, doing badly. Or so the coalition says.  Really?

Pliny -- the elder and the younger

It has been a good and bad week for the family Pliny. The "elder" was that unsufferable polymath who wrote the multi-volume Natural History and was killed in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 (a combination of curiosity about the eruption and a rescue mission for some stranded friends). The "younger" was his nephew, the eye-witness of the eruption. It is his letters to Tacitus about the event that give us our best account of it  -- even though, they were written almost 30 years later (Angelica Kauffman's reinvention of the scene preceding the eruption, with young Pliny and his mother, is at the top of this post).

As for Pliny himself, he would no doubt be disappointed to find himself best remembered for witnessing a natural disaster. The highspots of his career must have been his consulship in AD 100, plus his special imperial commission in Bithynia. He seems to have allowed the letters he exchanged with the emperor during that commission into the public domain -- and a crawling collection they are, with Trajan scarcely able to contain his irritation at Pliny constantly bothering him with trivia (one of the bits of trivia being the inconvenient Christians in his province). 

Anyway both "elder" and "younger" got an outing on Radio 4 this week.

The Much Wenlock Olympics

I have only just caught up on the 2012 London Olympic mascot called "Wenlock" (on the left). Truly ghastly it is (what designer could really have been proud of this, and what insult to children who are, presumably, the intended audience/market?) But it still strikes a bit of a chord with me, as this horrible creature is named after Much Wenlock in Shropshire, where the first modern Olympics were held (and where, as it happens, I was born -- in the Lady Forester Cottage Hospital, pictured below).

When I was growing up there (after an early spell in Church Preen -- compared to which Much Wenlock  seemed cosmopolitan), we always went in for the Olympics. Not the athletic events which brought rather glitzy runners to the village), but all the peripherals that made the "Olympiad" (as we  called it) much more like a local fete: I mean the prizes that went for the best animal made out of felt, or the best face made out if a potato (I still remember the agony of making a potato face and not realising that you had to put salt in the water to preserve it, and discovering the next morning that it had all gone irrevocably brown).

Better off in Brussels

I am in Brussels for most of this week, interviewing for the European Research Council Starting Grant programme (and what you see is the view from our interview room in EuroTower; the less scenic aspect below). Which is probably just as well, as it means I escape the rumpus caused by my last post on the sigma on the new Faculty doors (or rather the absence of the sigma).

This little squib has now been picked up by the Cambridge News, The Mail, The Telegraph, Corriere della Sera, and Anglia TV News -- to name just a few. That itself has a moral. In the old days bloodhound reporters would get out in all weathers to track their scoops down (or that's the myth at any rate). Nowadays it's easier to find them via Google.

But why on earth did this particular little item of news capture the imagination?

Well, in part, it must be that the idea the boffins getting it wrong always has a certain pleasure.  In this case a load of journalists who didn't have the foggiest clue about the difference between a Roman 'S' and a Greek 'Sigma' laid into Cambridge classicists for getting their spelling wrong. (In fact The Mail was so muddled that the first version of its headline said that we had got our LATIN wrong . . .)

In any case it wasn't a question of spelling -- and my first blog never said that it was.

Door rage (and wedding bells)

We have a sparkling new extension to our Faculty building in Cambridge, which wonderful in every way -- except for its FRONT DOORS. They look OK (although the photograph here doesn't quite bring out the best in them). The problem is opening the damn things. Because they are both (that is the exterior ones and those  that then lead into the lobby) fitted with Health and Safety approved disabled operation.

This means that, in order to open them, you have to press an electronic 'open door' button -- and they then sweep aside dramatically in front of you. Dramatically and slowly. So, at busy times (like, on the hour, when lectures are changing over), there is a mass of bodies trying to get into and out of the building, but needing  to wait for the stately pace of the doors' operation.

Can't you just push them anyway? Yes you can, but they are very heavy indeed (because of their motor), and not for the frail or those carrying a pile of books. In any case, as soon as you come along and push them open and then someone pushes the button from the other side, the doors take on a life of their own and come back and attack you.

The Cambridge vote

No I don't mean the vote that has just closed. I'm writing this in front of the television before the first result from that one has come in....and already I am fed up with the Labour crew mouthing the phrase "strong and stable government" (which is their euphemism for trying to do a deal with Clegg and waltz back into Downing St), and with the Tories crowing about "a decisive rejection of the Labour party" (when the exit polls suggest that it hasn't been half as decisive as they hoped).

But we shall see in a couple of hours.

The vote I'm talking about is the University vote (closing tomorrow) on "disciplinary, dismissal, and grievance procedures" -- or on what we call "Statute U".

One of the several advantages of working in Cambridge is that it still retains a semblance of democratic self-governance; big decisions still get voted on by all of us. In this case the issue is about emending the University Statute (U) that was brought in, as I recall, when Mrs Thatcher demanded that we should have a procedure for making academic redundant. Before that, redundancy was thought of as a potential threat to academic freedom -- and no university officer could be made redundant. (Contrary to popular report, they could be SACKED, simply not told they had become surplus to requirements -- that was what "tenure" meant.)

Everyone, even the people who wrote it, recognises that Statute U in its current form is unsatisfactory. That's different from knowing what to do about it.

10 dotty (well meaning?) ideas from the party election manifestos

After a serious study of the main party manifestos, let me reveal some of the dottier ideas that have got by the party committees and into their official promises. How on earth, one wonders, do these things get the nod....? Have you noticed them?

1. Establish a new prize for engineering. This is a Tory idea (to "make Britain the leading hi-tech exporter in Europe")... may not be so bad an idea, but IN THE MANIFESTO? (No prize for Classics. I note!)

2. Create a specialist Mandarin teacher training qualification, so that many more primary schools have access to a qualified primary teacher able to teach Mandarin. So offers the Labour party. A worthy aim.... but when we can't teach French effectively? And where are these Mandarin teachers coming from?

3. Control bullying, including homophobic bullying. Another virtuous aim (this time from the Lib Dems), but is this an appropriate manifesto commitment? I mean, how are they going to do this?

4.  Launch an annual Big Society Day. Another holiday, on which "to celebrate the work of neighbourhood groups"...and, presumably the work of the middle class mums and dads who plan to set up their own schools. A Tory idea, needless to say.