A Don’s Life

Please can I open the window?

I'd better start by saying that in broad terms I am very strongly behind "robust" planning laws, and I think that the Tory suggestions of watering these down are ikely to lead to towns and cities that we don't want to live in or much look at. Likewise, inconvenient as it may be to have the Building Inspector round, I have no doubt the Building Regs are a good thing . . . if they only catch the occasional rogue contractor skimping on the foundations, that has to be worthwhile. (And I should point out that they are no new idea; they go back at least to the emperor Nero after the fire of Rome.)

My complaint is only a little one: I dont see why it couldn't be up to me to decide, if I live near a road, whether I want to have double glazing or windows that will open for a bit of "fresh" air.

The art of smart criticism

Over the last few weeks I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on how principled disagreement can get morphed into crude abuse. That is to say, when I say something about migration with which some people I disagree, quite a few people on social media decide to say that I am "stupid" or "evil" or a "disgrace to the academy" or whatever. Hang on, I think. We disagree... that doesn't mean that I am nasty/ignorant (nor you), it means we disagree.

And I'm not the only recipient of this stuff. Maybe I have missed the irony here (dont think so), but there was a blog by John Rentoul recently which criticised the London Review of Books' stance on Israel. Fair enough, it's hard to see a single good line on this one.  But the idea that the paper's stance made the LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers "evil" (as Rentoul put it it) seems bonkers to me. Since when has expressing or supporting a different view meant you are "evil"? Wrong maybe, or controversial or whatever. but "evil"?(And since when has "Mary-Kay Wilmers" been an anagram of "Cruella de Vill"?)

One of the main arts of criticism surely rests in part on a sense of humour... and on sticking the knife in in a way that the victim would see the point, and possibly grin. Unless you make an impact on the person criticised, what's the point?

This happened to me recently. 

Getting to grips with Tolstoy

I have been spending the weekend some way off my usual patch. When my editor Peter Carson died in January, he had just finished, literally the day before he died, translating Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych and Confession for a US publisher (Norton). It will come out later in the year and I am to write the Introduction.

Don't worry, I am not getting above myself. There is also to be a more specialist essay from a Russian expert. My job is to set the scene  -- and also to celebrate, and discuss, Peter's role as translator (on which I have quite a lot of interesting stuff). All the same I thought I needed to do a bit more background work on books concerned and their author. Up to now, my knowledge of Tolstoy has been like many people's I imagine: that is to say, some familiarity with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and rather less interest in the spiritual, pacificist, social reformer that came later -- in the period when both Ilych and Confession were written.

So I've done a day and half's immersion therapy (with more to come), and of course -- as always happens -- I have begun to regret that I haven't been more interested in all this before.

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?