All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

  Most of us were singing pretty much from the same hymn sheet, not too full of doom and gloom about the British system, a desire to free teachers up a bit, and no passion for the kind of old-fashioned discipline that people of our age like to imagine is just what the kids need (and will ‘work’… whatever that means!). And there was plenty of praise for Latin!

  Not so Starkey.

  He was the only one of us not to turn up to hear the kids give their evidence. OK, he has obviously hurt his foot, which is some excuse. But it would in the circumstances have been wise to have taken the trouble to hear the pupils in action. For when he later opened his mouth to say what a wild undisciplined bunch they were, this was dramatically undercut by what the rest of us had just seen of them when they gave their evidence.

  By and large, he came out with the old Starkey stuff, interspersed with some silly ad hominem attacks on John D’Abbro, the Head (who Starkey had somehow failed to see was in the same boat as the rest of us, in a way, in relation to the TV).

  Now Starkey is not stupid, and not everything he says would I disagree with. But his claim that schools which strictly enforce rules on uniform do not have any ‘discipline problems’ cannot possibly be true. (For a start, ‘discipline problems’ is not a fixed and objective category … I shudder to think what got punished at my school).

  Overall Starkey is the victim of the kind of tunnel vision that affects many of the successful middle-aged. Because he is a success, he thinks that the kind of schooling he had was the right one. So it might have been – for him. But he has decided not to think of the ‘failures’ next to whom he sat, still less of the 80% of children who went to the local Secondary Modern. Grammar Schools, excellent as I am sure many of them were and are, always are seen from the point of view of those who got there … not the rejects. (Not that me and my chums are immune from this kind of glowing nostalgia. When we complain that the kids don’t sit down and read as much Latin and Greek during their degrees as we used to do, we tend to forget that ‘we’ were always unusual, even for Cambridge … of course we were, else we wouldn’t now be Profs there.)

  And Starkey could have done his homework better. He lamented the fact that, although he had taken Danielle up to see around Cambridge, and although she was very bright, she still wanted to become a beautician. What a waste, what a lack of ambition, he complained (and what a failure of the education system).

  What he had failed to notice was that Danielle has just landed a big part in EastEnders. Some ambition there, I suspect.

  Exam speak

  25 June 2011

  I have just finished marking exams (Part IB of the Classical Tripos). That means something like 130 scripts in all. Leaving aside what the candidates will get in the final results table (and that’s not decided till next week), I have two immediate reactions.

  First, the handwriting. There is something very odd about exams in the twenty-first century, because the kids don’t usually, through the academic year, handwrite anything. The good side of this is that you don’t recognise the author of any script at all. (In the old days you had marked so many essays in handwriting that you knew exactly whose script you were marking, even if it was formally anonymous.) The bad side is that they are so unused to writing anything by hand that a lot of it borders on the illegible.

  Happily the dyslexics are allowed to type their answers, and I found myself longing for the next dyslexic … or for the day when they were all allowed to type their answers.

  By and large, dyslexics apart, this is how it goes. One script in 20, you find 30 sides of crabbed, blotty handwriting. You can just about decipher it, but that probably takes about 5 minutes a side. At a certain point you get so cross that you are tempted to give up. ‘Illegibility will be penalised’ it says on the papers. Right on, let’s penalise.

  So what stops you?

  Well, in my case, it’s partly a family thing (or at least it’s put into higher relief that way; the truth is that I have always persevered with this stuff, reluctantly). My son has truly atrocious handwriting. But in Oxford last year some poor examiners persevered with his scrawl, enough to give him a First. For which effort I am truly, truly grateful. So now, when I spend hours on these scripts I can barely read, I think: ‘I am not doing it for you, you messy child. I am doing it for your Mum, who wants more than anything that someone will go the extra mile to read your scrawl’. And so I do.

  In fact, it can sometimes be very funny prose you end up reading. Exam speak afflicts almost all the candidates, drawing them ‘back’ to words they have never used … and indeed have not been used in normal writing for generations. I can’t count the number of ‘aforementioned’s I have spotted in these scripts (as in ‘the aforementioned legislation’). Not a single one has been penalised by me. But what on earth pushed the students into this archaic speak (how often have any of them used the word before, I wonder)?

  Nerves must be the answer, I guess. But it’s a very odd idiolect that results.

  Comments

  As a Classics finalist this year with shamefully spidery handwriting, I must say … THANK YOU! Your patience is deeply comforting.

  CJM

  AFOREMENTIONED seems to me a very practical word for its purpose. What are the alternatives? ′The widget MENTIONED ABOVE′ uses the same number of letters but ′above′ suggests a viewpoint other than the author′s own, as of someone perusing a document. ′The BEFORE MENTIONED widget′ uses one more letter and anyway is hardly idiomatic English. Why the prejudice against (so-called) archaism?

  PL

  ‘Saepe memoratum′ is one of the Venerable Bede′s favourite locutions – usually qualifying a mention of the controversy about the date of Easter.

  OLIVER NICHOLSON

  To me, the most striking feature of illegibility in handwriting is its gender-specificity. I have sometimes amused myself while marking exams by guessing the gender of the writer from the look of the script, then checking my guess. I can′t quote my success rate in this (I′ll be a bit more scientific and keep proper records next time), but I think it is close to 100%.

  If it′s easy to read, and especially if the letters have a nice round form, it′s written by a female.

  CHRIS JOHNSON

  Actually, Prof. Beard, most students write a great deal during the year. Just glance down at the Seeley Library one day in full term and you′ll see only one in ten (at most usually) using laptops to make notes. What they may not do is write extended pieces of continuous prose by hand – although some, like Dr RWS at Trinity, force this on their charges′ weekly essays.

  R STUDENT

  I think it′s appalling that students are required to handwrite extensive exam scripts in 2011. They never handwrite anything else in the academic year, and wherever life leads them they′ll never handwrite anything longer than a Post-it note again.

  This seems to me to be a gratuitous piece of meanness only slightly less pointless than demanding they submit their scripts in Caroline minuscule.

  CHRIS Y

  Why bother to visit the Colosseum?

  21 July 2011

  OK, it’s one of the most memorable buildings in Rome – indeed in Western culture. And the reason I co-wrote a book on it is that I truly believe that its history from ancient gladiatorial arena to nineteenth-century botanical garden is more fascinating than most people realise. It looks absolutely tremendous from the outside. But is it really worth a couple of hours queuing to see the very battered ruins of the interior?

  I’m not so sure.

  I have just been in Rome for a few days, doing a recce for a new little TV series on ancient Rome (from the point of view of ordinary Romans, not the emperors and generals etc.). I’m not going to give away exactly what we’ve been seeing – it will ruin the surprise when you watch. (How’s that for a tease!) But what has struck me as we have gone round the city of Rome is the mad concentration of tourism.

  Everyone wants to see the Colosseum, the Forum and Palatine (all tho
se are on a combined ticket – which you can buy on-line – that’s a good tip), the Capitoline museums (on the Campidoglio) and the Vatican.

  There are crowds of people, and a dreadful line to get in at almost all times of the day (the later the better is my experience). But go to the wonderful collection of sculpture in the Palazzo Massimo (near the main train station) and you will not have to queue for a minute, and you will find some of the most stunning works of Roman art to have survived (Livia’s Garden Room from Prima Porta is here, for example, and you can’t get better than that).

  Even fewer people make it to the nearby museum in the Baths of Diocletian (less stunning for art, but some great material on early Rome, a beautiful Michelangelo cloister – and some extraordinary ancient terracotta sculptures, the medium everyone tends to forget).

  But the prize for the best least-visited museum must go to the Centrale Montemartini – which houses some of the overspill from the Capitoline collections in a disused power station down the Via Ostiense past the Pyramid. First of all, the juxtaposition of ancient sculpture and industrial machinery is brilliant (like Musée d’Orsay, only better). But it includes some real treasures (the pediment of the Temple of Apollo Sosianus – a first-century BC building which ‘re-used’ a fifth-century BC set of ‘original’ Greek sculptures; or the tremendous statues from the emperors’ pleasure gardens in Rome). Stunning, and when we were there, we saw two other visitors.

  And just outside Rome, there’s the port city of Ostia. Now, this is not in truth quite as impressive as Pompeii or Herculaneum in terms of sheer survival. (It was abandoned and gradually covered by sand, not taken out by an earthquake.) But unlike Pompeii, you have the streets more or less to yourself, and you can get a feeling of what it was like to walk through a densely populated Roman town … with series of blocks of flats built in brick. (This was a multiple-occupancy place unlike Pompeii…)

  What could be done to entice people away from the ‘big few’ sites into these other amazing places? They all come fully recommended by me, but do a bit of Googling before you go; the info available on site is not always all it might be. (Amanda Claridge’s Archaeological Guide covers the city sites well too – though it doesn’t do Ostia).

  Comments

  Similar good advice for anyone visiting Florence is not to miss the Museo dell′Opera del Duomo (ossia: Museo dell′Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore). Among other unique treasures, it houses Luca della Robbia′s singing galleries, Ghiberti′s original Gates of Paradise reliefs and Michelangelo′s last Pietà. Everything is well displayed for the serious visitor, the only kind, in my experience, who go there.

  PL

  My favourite unsung hero in Rome is a five-minute walk from the Colosseum: the Case Romane del Celio (http://www.caseromane.it). Some beautiful paintings and you can have the place pretty much to yourself. (Honourable mention would also go to the Crypta Balbi and, had the roof not fallen in, the Domus Aurea.) If you can handle the bus ride, the Villa dei Quintili is a worthwhile (and quiet) trip to make – come to that, the Villa Adriana isn′t exactly overrun either…

  CATERPILLAR

  ‘What could be done to entice people away from the ′big few′ sites into these other amazing places?′

  Interestingly, those of us who work at universities other than Oxford and Cambridge often discuss this question :-) It′s a very similar problem.

  PWG

  Ara Pacis!!

  I used to spend entire days in the quiet glass enclosure. Occasionally a tour bus would slow down, but few people ever came in.

  IUNIPERA

  From El Bulli to Apicius

  1 August 2011

  I found myself decidedly unmoved by this weekend’s obituaries of El Bulli (‘the best restaurant in the world’). A friend of mine did make the gastronomic pilgrimage a decade or so ago, and came back full of stories of its brilliance. He had been especially impressed with the way the waiters had held appropriately scented flowers under their noses as they ate particular dishes. My reaction was not ‘What brilliant attention to synaesthesia!’ but ‘How bloody pretentious can you get?’

  Try some of his specialities: liquid pea ravioli (that’s ravioli shells, filled with pea soup) or flower paper (that’s flowers pressed into a sheet of candy floss) or the ball of frozen gorgonzola. All this brings out the culinary philistine in me, or the ‘Arts and Crafts, Truth to Materials’ approach to cooking. (If God had wanted flowers pressed into a sheet of candy floss … etc. etc. Or why bother to freeze good gorgonzola?)

  The husband is with me on this one, but for slightly different reasons. He hates the control exercised by these celebrity cooks; the ‘eat what I deign to give you’ philosophy. He can’t even abide the amuse-bouches so beloved of more ordinary pricy restaurants. You know, where the waiter comes up with a little pot of something you hadn’t ordered between courses and explains its ingredients to you in a carefully practised French accent. His line is: ‘If I’d wanted a ‘mousse of dew-picked mushrooms with ginger and cointreau’, I’d have asked for it.’

  At first sight, all this is much like posh ancient Roman cookery, where again things are not always what they seem. Think, for example, of the dinner party of Petronius’ Trimalchio, where half of what the diners eat is not what it seems (quinces masquerading as sea urchins, for example). Or think of one of the signature recipes in Apicius’ Roman cook book: ‘Casserole of Anchovy without Anchovy’ (‘at table no one will recognise what they are eating’ – and it’s actually made of sea nettles and eggs).

  But it isn’t quite so simple. For while Trimalchio is showing off in an El Bulli type way, Apicius is trying to save money (sea nettles and eggs being, I imagine, cheaper in the Roman market place than bona fide anchovies). Which reminds us of the iron law of cookery, that (William Morris or no William Morris) the whole discipline from top to bottom is riddled with (or rests upon) attempts to turn things into something they are not: chicory into coffee, Quorn into bacon, nuts into cutlets, flour into bread. It’s not just the rich turning soup into ravioli parcels: the poor try to make you think sea nettles are anchovy – and all of us prefer a crusty loaf to raw flour, water and yeast. What the El Bullis of this world are doing is only a development of the essentials of cookery (turning ‘the raw into the cooked’). So shouldn’t I stop the moralising?

  And indeed when you actually experience (i.e., eat) one of those really clever confections, it is actually rather exciting. It is easy enough to huff and puff in theory, but when I had a lemon mousse in Washington that looked for all the world like a soft-boiled egg, I was truly enchanted.

  ‘Truth to materials’, I guess, doesn’t have quite the role in cookery as it does in architecture.

  Comments

  Oh joy, I can finally be as pretentious as I like, knowing full well I′ll be outdone by El Bulli. Years ago, at La Côte St-Jacques in Joigny (Burgundy) – then a mere 2-star; now 3 stars – my partner and I had the waiters remove an elaborate flower arrangement from a nearby table as its perfume interfered with our tasting the foie gras. Thank heavens they obliged rather than holding the offending blooms under our noses.

  JUDITH WEINGARTEN

  Since the dawn of time, there have been only two truly great cookery books.

  1. Edouard de Pomiane, La cuisine en dix minutes.

  2. Caroline Blackwood and Anna Haycraft, Darling, You Shouldn′t Have Gone To So Much Trouble.

  RICHARD BARON

  A plea for Apicius: trying to cook meals from this is tremendously illuminating. Of course, the food will never be quite ′right′, but it may be delicious. The strangeness and complexity of flavours provide an immediate (and unexpected) awareness of the sophistication and irretrievably remote complexity of another world. (If you′re too squeamish for dormice or garum, try the dates: Apicius recipe no. 296)

  JH

  I am reminded of the British Library café. I felt rather shortchanged when ′avocado and celeriac remoulade with harissa dressing on a white bloomer′
turned out to be a coleslaw sandwich.

  LIZ C

  If you want to explore Apicius’recipes, try C. Grocock and S. Grainger (eds), Apicius: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation (Prospect Books, 2006).

  The Cambridge Chancellor election – in 1847

  11 August 2011

  I haven’t been to the Manuscripts Room of the University Library for a year of so (chance would be a fine thing). So I hadn’t caught up with the new policing regime that I found when I showed up there this week: you now have to sign in on a separate admissions list, and you aren’t allowed to take in even the small-size bags that are allowed into the rest of the Library; instead you have to leave it in a locker outside … and you end up having to get the key back (because, wisely maybe, they don’t trust you to keep the key on your person) every time you want to get 25p to buy a new pencil, or whatever.

  I’m sure that this is all very sensible, and a good way of protecting the collection. But it does have a nasty way of criminalising you, and of raising the uncomfortable possibility that you and every other reader in the room might be liable to snitch some precious document as soon as anyone’s back might be turned. (I wonder how many people it pushes to crime, at the same time as it makes it harder for them.)

  Anyway, I was not to be put off, as I was there on the search of more things about the history of the Fitzwilliam Museum. One thing I wanted to get to the bottom of was the celebrations in 1842 in honour of the new chancellor, the Duke of Northumberland, part of which took place in the Museum before the building had even been finished. Just how unfinished, I wondered.

  One likely-looking document was catalogued as the description of the election and installation of about five new Chancellors over the course of the nineteenth century, a manuscript written by eager, obsessive and rather smart nineteenth-century bureaucrats, keen to pass on the proceedings to their successors.