Mary Beard's Blog, page 38

A 1950s childhood: 5 objects of nostalgia

Last week I was sent a little clutch of new book from "Shire Publications". You might remember them. They used to be rather austere little volumes on slightly quirky subject (British Pub Signs, Toby Jugs and so on). And they have just been relaunched in a more 21st century format. 

One caught my eye. It was entitled "1950s Childhood". Born in 1955 (the nice cashier at the station today asked me if I had a Senior Railcard.. only 11.5 months to go), I thought it might speak to me. And in a way it did.

I confess I haven't done more than skim the text. But I have lingered on the pictures. 

Some, I have to say, didn't ring any bells at all. My family didn't get a television till the 60s (from "Radio Rentals" -- and it didnt look all that different from what we have now), so the charming family group c 1957 gathered round a 10 inch screen triggered no memories at all. And I have no recollection whatsoever of ration books (which must have stopped just before I arrived in this world).

But other pictures did indeed bring it all back.  My five favourites run like this:

1) The toddler on "reins" held by his Mum. This one jogged a particular memory, as I spent many years (or so it seemed) listening my Mum explaining to her friends how I had done a runner from the bank aged 2 and a half, and that she had instantly invested in a set of reins, which she fully recommended to anyone with a straying toddler. A quick google suggests that this particular contraption is still available, but have you ever seen anyone using them in decades? (Actually they might be a bit more child-friendly than just strapping the damn toddler into the buggy, which is the modern way of stopping them bolting for it.)

2) A carnival queen...

 I remember vividly in Much Wenlock (actually in the early 60s) watching in awe as the Carnival Queen passed by on her float, looking unbelievably glamorous. There is a wonderful pic in this book, with a queen being crowned in all the tawdriness that I never noticed back then. Far from being glam, it looks like I am sure it ever was -- some sparkly sheets from an amateur dressing up box. (I shall still cherish the suspension of disbelief though.)

3. A booklet for "Singing Together". This was a wonderfu programme on the BBC Home Service, which did singing for schools that didn't have any music (which was certainly true of Church Preen County Primary School in my day). I remember that we would all sit down, with our little booklets, and sing "Cockles and Mussels" along to the music that came -- rather tinnily -- out of the wireless. 

4. The "weather station", with all its homespun meteorological devices. The idea of measuring temperature, pressure and rainfull is engraved in my memory. I'll never forget that, when I was about five, our teacher (actually my Mum) asked us all, just before the end of the school day, how we thought we could measure how much rain had fallen durimg the night. None of us could think of how. She growled at us (in a way that would be a disciplinary offence these days I guess) that none of us would be going home, and she would be stopping the school bus, until someone had got the answer. I assume someone must have ("catch it in something, Miss"), as we did get released eventually.

5. An NHS Medical Card ("each NHS patient was issued with a medical card and an individual identity number", we are told). The truth is, I thought we still HAD medical cards. Mine's still upstairs anyway. But this is a lovely piece of mid 20th century (sort of) socialism.

What did I miss in the line up? Well I liked the pic of the 1950s polar bear from London zoo. But where were those long extinct camel rides and chimpanzees tea parties? That was the 50s for me.

 

What's up with the escalators?

About a month ago, I was meeting the husband at Kings Cross. We had plenty of time to spare, so he took me to see his new "discovery": an electronic lady who stood at the bottom of the escalators and "spoke" to the passengers. If you had luggage, she warned, you should not use the escalators, but take the lift; and she finished up (as in the picture) with a cheery wave. 

Predictably enough, she wasn't having much success. As she couldn't do more than spout her script, she was resolutely ignored (as you can see on the right) by most passengers with luggage. We didnt think much more about it at the time -- except to wonder if it wouldn't have had more effect on changing people's behaviour to have stationed a REAL woman (or man) by the escalators at peak times. She could at least have fixed malefactors with a beady grin and/or helpfully directed them to the nearest lift.

But a couple of weeks later, we realised that there must have been some kind of escalator + luggage safety alert -- because at Terminal 5 at Heathrow there was a large notice urging people trying to get from ground floor/shuttle level to arrivals/departures to take the lifts not the escalators. This was a bit of a blow for us, as the escalators at Heathrow are more inviting, but the lifts much quicker .... yet as soon as everyone is trying to use them, you have to queue to get into the damn things.

We began to suspect a Health and Safety alert (born out by this promotional video). Now in this case I wouldn't knock Health and Safety. I was once on an escalator on which someone tumbled at the bottom. And there was nearly the escalator equivalent of a multiple pile-up on the motorway. 

The question is, how do you get the safety message across? It was interesting that the straightforward notices at the airport were having more effect that the electronic lady. Are people just much more obedient at airports?

I didnt think much about it again until I went into the University Library after Christmas. Here I discovered a new twist: we were all being urged not to use the lifts, but take the stairs.

Now I know that the intentions in this are entirely good, and I can see that it is trying to be light-hearted. But for some reason it really brought out the counter-suggestible in me. I found myself bloody-mindedly taking the lift between adjacent floors, and in a donnish way going through endless possible reasons why this stair option might be a very bad idea (should the elderly -- quite a lot of those/us in the UL -- really be pushed in this direction? and anyway if you were carrying a load of 10 large books, couldn't it actually be dangerous?).

Then I started to wonder what kind of behaviour-changing notice might actually work on me (and others like me). Probably, I reflected, something a bit less wholesome -- and with a bit more donnish wit. And in my dreams I thought of scraping together £100 for a little competition for the cleverest "pro-stairs" poster.

Now there's an idea...

Apotheosis of Minerva

Today is my birthday (sorry if I have banged on about it a bit much), and one of the presents that came to the door was a polypin -- and that's -- 36 pints of the first brew of Minerva that I helped come to fruition in a rather unenergetic way last week. My bit of the job was putting the hops in, and I swear you can still taste them. (That's the design of the pump-clip you see above.)

Anyway, it lasts a week to ten days, so we may end up needing a bit of jovial help. But a jolly nice beer it is too.

Actually, the welcome beer wasn't the only interruption of the day (earmarked for finishing tax, and for finishing book correx -- both just about done). There was also the SkyNews bit.

The truth is that if someone wants me to speak out for learning Latin, any time any place I will do it if I possibly can.. even if it is my birthday and I am toasty-ing up with the lap-top in front of the fire. So today I said 'yes' to Sky News, and had a few minutes on their lunchtime broadcast from my front room. An excellent camera woman showed up on her way back from Luton airport (we can only  guess whom she might have been on the look out for there) -- and we did a few minutes live at 1.30.

This is the item. It doesn't include me yet, I dont think. But it does have some attacks on Latin from Francis Gilbert , Errr -- pardon the irritation --  but last and only time I remember talking to him, he didn't seem to know that Oxford and Cambridge, not to mention loads of other uni's, offered ab initio Latin; he's a smart guy and I had hoped (too arrogantly) that I had made a little bit of impact -- but wrong. My fault, I must concede.

Anyway, I talked the talk in which I believe... Latin is intellectually empowering, it takes you to the centre of how language works (just as important as how number works), and it gives you direct access to the most influential books of all western literature, Virgil, Ovid etc..)

And then I went back to my footnotes, and -- appropriately enough -- another glass of Minerva.

A working Christmas

The real truth is that it has been a bit of a working Christmas for me, apart from the day itself. I still haven't finished the copy-editor's  corrections for my laughter book. It's all a bit like Zeno's arrow -- however much closer you get, there always remains some distance to travel.

And it's a funny mixture of emotions and reactions too: gratitude-cum-self-flagellation. Each error spotted by the editor produces a huge sigh of relief (phew, thank heavens, Juliana spotted that I had a) omitted Silk et al 2014 from the bibliography, b) typed 1968 instead of 1986 . . .and so on, and on), followed by a stomach churning, "how-could-I?", sort of feeling. Am I really capable of using one edition of Terence for the quotes in the text, and another for the quotes in the notes? (Answer: yes, but it's been fixed).

But Christmas work is, however, gratifyingly different from the usual grind. Apart from the occasional emergency dash to the library, I've been settled in at home, in a comfy chair, in front of the fire -- with the occasional glass of wine (carefully calibrated to aid resilience, but not effect concentration; yes, it's tricky).

One consequence of this routine -- clearly out the fire at 8.00 a.m., laying it again by 8.30 (with a profligate use of firelighters to make 100% certain that it's roaring within minutes) -- is that one gets extremely hot after a few hours.

Which raises the other issue, in second place on the work agenda over the holidays -- accounts, bank, tax forms etc. In an effort to find out what we had spent on the energy (apart from the coal and logs, provided at very reasonable cost by D. K. Till and son-in-law), the husband went on to the E.ON website. In order to get to the figures, he had to go through a "socially responsible" page, which helpfully informed him (in a slightly finger wagging way) that our energy bills were 157% that of average of similar properties in our area.

Hang on, we thought, how do they know what our property is like, and what is similar? Fortified in our puzzlement by a drink or two, we emailed E.ON to ask exactly that: how the f*** do you know?

A bit surprisingly, we got a reply. They had obviously had questions like that before, because this is how the "one we prepared earlier" reply went:

Hello Prof Beard and Prof Cormack.

Thanks for asking about the Similar Homes Comparison.

Our goal is to provide you with a comparison that is valid and meaningful to
you. Currently, our report comparisons include a group of similar, nearby,
occupied E.ON customer's homes that we think have similar characteristics
such as building type (Detached, Semi-Detached, Apartment, Bungalow etc),
number of bedrooms and occupancy..

Our research shows that, for almost all residents, this provides a good
indication of typical usage. However, there are some factors for which we
don't account for, such as your personal circumstances - for example where
you are at home all day or work full time, or how limited you are for making
energy saving improvements due to the age of your property.

To help make your comparison more accurate you can provide additional
information about your home in the 'About My Home' page. You can find this
by clicking on 'Tell us about your home' on the Home Page section of the
Toolkit.

 That was just the beginning of several more paragraphs that finished by advertising its great new tariffs, including the special one for the over-60s (which seems to have been designed to be specially expensive -- surely I must be misunderstanding something here..?)

"This tariff is especially designed for people aged 60 and over. Age UK Fixed 2 Year protects you from price increases for 24 months, subject to VAT and regulatory changes, and has no exit fee. Prices on this tariff are more expensive than our standard variable price tariff, E.ON EnergyPlan (As at 18 January 2014)."

Anyway, never mind the senior tariff, we decided we would go and visit the "About My Home" section and fill in some details, and see if we could get a bit closer to the average that way... trouble was, we couldn't actually find the "About My Home" section.

So back to the correx.

 

Christmas rituals

Happy Christmas everyone.

I an writing this on the worse side of Christmas lunch: turkey, spuds, sprouts, carrots, parsnips, bread sauce, Christmas pud, and a great Italian cake thanks to the graduate student who joined us.

Long standing readers of this blog will know that I am a bit of a fan of Christmas. I particularly like the way it is a ritual of pleasure that somehow manages to trump other obligations. I was sitting in the library yesterday afternoon around three o'clock (going through the excellent copy-editors suggestions on my Laughter book), and the imperative to go home and "do Christmas" suddenly trumped the imperative to finish the corrections. 

We'd been doing the tree for a few days ( and the last few days have added some excellent decorations, from the USA and Edinburgh). And there had been some last minute work on the Christmas cake (thanks to the daughter).

 

By and large, though, the day's rituals played out accrding to our own invented traditions -- to the letter. Up at 8.30, and make the stuffings, light the fire, sort out the pudding, and get the turkey in the over c. 11.00. Just after 11.00 open a bottle of champagne and sit down to the present opening (we had read an article in the paper to the effect that 11.6% of the nation had had their first drink by 11.00 am on Christmas day, and we were determined to be in the soberer 89%). 

Then it is bread sauce making, vegetable peeling, shoving more in the oven, more booze (a lot), until Her Maj's speech (rather a lot of ribaldry this yesr), and sit down at 3.30. 

This is the pud!

Then a movie on dvd (largely slept through by yours truly). 

And now I have recovered enopugh to watch the Downton Christmas special, and to ring Samuel (our S Sudanese friend who was with us last Christmas and has just managed to leave Juba and get to Kampala).

And tomorrow it will be back to those corrections. Great to have a day off though.

***********

Here is the boy at more important things

A Christmas brew

I have always quite liked beer (especially of the "real" variety), but never really to the same extent as a good glass of wine. Best taken in a hot climate, or (to go back a good few decades in my case) after a hard day on an archaeological dig. That said, I recently got involved on Twitter with one of the local real breweries (Milton Brewery, who have a great line in classically named brews -- Pegasus, Nero, Justinian, Augustus and so on.

Anyway we got into a discussion about some possible ladies' names that could grace a classical brew . . . Medusa? Minerva? .... (any great ideas?). And this led to an invitation to see the inaugural brew of Minerva being made and to give a very amateur hand.

We (that's me and the son) went out to the brewery at Waterbeach; it's no longer in Milton -- but expanded to bigger premises! It was the first time I had set my foot in a brewery, piss up or not (and yes, plenty of excellent were samples were sampled).

First thing, let me explain, a brewery in December is a pretty chilly place -- but this was soon mitigated by not only the beer, but also the toasted crumpets (great combo). My job, I confess, was the easy one. I poured the hops into the brew -- as you can see at the top of the post. The boy had a rather more energetic task to take on -- cleaning out the mushed up, sodden barley from the tank.

We got as far as the beer being run off and cooled, into the fermenting tanks... tastes, I can confirm, pretty bitter right now (like a Negroni Richard, our instructor, helpfully suggested). But after a few days fermenting it will have mellowed into something nice and slightly hoppy (thanks to my addition to the brew).

In fact, I started to reflect there might even be a polypin (36 pints) of it ready for New Year and the Beard's birthday (59, oh s**t). There's thought.

Now don't expect to find Minerva down at your local Tesco (they don't sell it by the bottle), but you can get it in quite a few pubs; and the Brewery have some pubs of their own too.

So there she'll be, with her own specially designed "pump clip" featuing goddess and owl. Brewing a good beer is just the kind of skill Minerva would have been proud of.

 

Panto-time

 

On Friday, we went to the Cambridge pantomime -- "Robin Hood", this year. The truth is that I had a great present of two tickets, so we went along. I hadn't been for at least 15 years, probably more, since the kids were little (and the other truth is that even back then we tried to get other people to take them if we could).

Reactions? Well at 6.00 pm we were probably the only people in the audience who were not accompanied by an under-11, which made it interesting in itself. Otherwise, yes, it was funny (and fun) in a variety of different ways. And no regrets, far from it, for going at all. Great evening (do go if you get a chance!).

What struck me most was the way that the internet generation of kids really seemed to get a kick out of this old fashioned entertainment.

What I mean is that all the under fifteens (or so) -- that's the majority of the audience (I reckoned a ration of one adut to two kids) -- who we tend to think are committed to their laptop screens, to the exclusion of everyone else, were there screaming "oh no you're not" with the best of them. Not just that, they seemed to understand the rules of the face to face pantomime exchanges between actors and audiences. The one chant is clear: "oh yes we are" versus "oh no you're not"; but they could also adjust the responses from "I wish I could" to "I wish you couldn't" (OK not rocket science, but it's still an indication that the kids could improvise to cue, according to the conventions of the genre and the particular lines that gave the prompt.)

There were also some great jokes about the Lib Dems, among others. (After a bit of repartee about people being cowards, there was the quip about it all sounding like a party political broadcast for the Lib Dems). And there were some nice visual effects (loved the skeletons, by the way!). And there was a good variety of old fashioned pantomimic interaction with the audience. There were the kids brought up on the stage and at one point the great "Dame" (Matt Crosby) came to the audience and said, "we used to throw sweets to you, but Health and Safety doesn't allow it now, so i'm giving out a single sweet -- suck and pass along."

Ha ha, you say. But it was actually dead funny. We laughed and (I confess) I had a little weep later when the marriage of Robin and Maid Marion finally happened.

My question as I went out though was a bit different. I began to wonder about the demographic of the occasion. Who were these kids enjoying the panto, the cross dressing, and so forth. Were these the kids of Cambridge academics? No, of course not. But was there a really wider constituency here (it was a largely white audience, and the names of the kids who went upon the stage were pretty "middle class". And Cambridge, let me tell you, is a very mixed city. I guess the tickets are quite pricey (but not THAT pricey). Maybe panto has always been a pretty elite sport.

 

 

 

 

Editing

You have been spared "Laughter" for a few posts. But I myself haven't been much spared recently. The downside of finishing most of the book by the beginning of October, but with a chapter still to write was obvious: no sooner had I got the final chapter and the afterword off my desk to California than I had the copy editor's questions, queries and edits of the rest of it.

Usually there is a nice little break, of a few weeks at least, between pressing the send button and getting the edited copy (and, of course, in the interim you get to feel rather calmly remote about what you have written). Not so this time.

But the truth is, I am a huge admirer of editors. That's partly self interested, of course. When I get to the TLS I spend my days editing other people's copy. This gives me a fairly grounded view that there is hardly any prose in the world that doesn't get better with another few pairs of eyes (even if the author doesn't always think so).

Of course, I know that some people really have it in for copy editors. And maybe there are some copy-editing dragons on autopilot out there, who indeed do go through a manuscript, style-book in hand, simply deleting any "But" that has the nerve to make its way to the start of a sentence. If so, I haven't met any for many a year.

By and large, I think most books could probably do with MORE editing not less; and that those who squeal about their prose being altered normally need to think again, and reflect on its possible defects. 

 

On my book, over the last couple of weeks, Juliana has been a hawk-eyed gem to work with. I'm not going to agree with everything she suggests and I think, for example, that we still have to work out whether the word "gelastic" needs a gloss when it first occurs (suprisingly, perhaps, it's me that thinks it DOES, she DOESN'T ... any views welcome!). But I have been thankful that my errors and infelicities have been highlighted and queried.

Most amazing is the way that another careful reader exposes the unconscious "tics" of writing that one didn't know one had, and which it might be an idea to tone down. I had never quite realised before how often I reached for the passive voice when the active would be a lot better -- not always but often. And in what I sent off there were rather too many "nominativi pendentes" (vel sim) than I would have thought had got left in... I mean, "loving the sound of the sea, my instinct was to..." (it wasn't my instinct that loved the sound of the sea, as this formulation suggests... but it's dead easy , and jarring, error to make).

As anyone who reads this blog will know, I am not a grammar tyrant (even less an apostrophe czar). But it is very good to have a bit of expert scrutiny on one's deathless prose (and with it one's deathless argument). And I am very very grateful, even though it will take me the whole Christmas holidays to "review". AAAGGH.

Flying visit to Formia

 

Last week we escaped for a few days to Italy. The lead reason was to see the exhibition on the emperor Augustus (the 2000th anniversary of his death) in the Scuderie del Quirinale -- which I am intending to review for the TLS. It makes a fascinating comparison with the Mussolini exhibition in 1937, to commemorate the 2000th anniversary of the great man's (or the wily old bugger's -- depending on your point of view) birth. Anyway, more of that in due course.

But we also able to take a couple of days reading time in a lovely spot just between Gaeta and Formia, on the coast roughly half way from Rome to Naples. That's the view from the terrace (thanks to Kiki, Jennifer and Ugo for great hospitality!). We broke up the reading with just 2 trips out: the first to Sperlonga and the Grotta di Tiberio, the second -- just before we left to go back to the airport on the train -- to Formia. 

We gave the famous "tomb of Cicero" a miss (certainly isn't his tomb, even though he was killed nearby), but headed for the local Museum -- which turned out to be a real gem, if you're ever nearby.

 

Formia was obviously a pretty swanky place in the early empire. The whole coast was dotted with seaside villas, and caves and grottoes much on the lines of "Tiberius"s water installation. (I put "Tiberius" in inverted commas there because -- although the whole development at Sperlonga is so over the top that it really must be a "royal villa" -- we really dont know whether it was planned by Tiberius of not; nor, despite much false certainty on the question do we know if it was where Tiberius was when a cave roof collapsed and he was rescued by Sejanus.)

So the Museum, though it isnt big, has got some top of the range stuff on display. We were particularly taken with the small piece of wall painting (above), which looks as it if came from something close to Livia's Garden Room at Prima Porta. 

Of the sculpture -- passing over a pricey but vulgar Leda and the swan (why DID the Romans like this particular coupling?) -- we couldn't help noticing a probably Augustan period figure, with loads of surviving paint, partly on the toga, which must have original been red or maybe purple, but also on the eyes . It's a really nice illustration of how Roman marble sculptures didn't originally appear so glazed over, so un-alive. Here he is (and you can see also that his head and over-the-head toga have been made separately, just like on the Via Labicana Augustus (currently on show in the Scuderie).

 

And here is the full version, and I think you'll be able just to pick out the red in the swathe of his toga across the chest.

It still raises the question of how many of these statues were painted like this -- I really cant imagine that those in very highly polished marble were (except for the eyes and other such details).

Anyway in guide-book speak, Formia museum is well worth a detour.

Sex segregation on campus

There has been a rumbling news story over the last week or so, which has bubbled up in newspapers and the radio and the web: about sex segration on campuses. At first I thought this was to do with me -- being at a single sex college and all that. 

But it turned out to be not about that at all. It was all about forced or unforced segregration at meetings (especially Islamic ones) on campus. This was what Yasmin Alibhai Brown had to say:

"This capitulation is a disaster for feminism. , progressive ideals and above all Muslims."

And most of the rest of the coverage was along the same lines. And the villain was UniversitiesUK (again thanks to Alibhai Brown): " this august body has published guidelines on gender segregation at universities."

Now, I dont think you'll need me to tell you what I feel about segregrated meetings (and in case you're wondering, that isn't what a single-sex college is all about -- but that's for another occasion). But I was curious whether UniversitiesUK really had recommended gender segregation, as claimed.

No it hadn't.

 This had all come from a UUK briefing document, which aimed to explain to university authorities what their obligations were under the law to freedom of speech for outside speakers on campus. It is a trickier area than you might think, and this was a short pamphlet trying to lay out the legal guidelines.

And it gave a few hypothetical university examples to illustrate the points, and for university authorities to get their teeth into.

The first was about the invitation to a BNP spokesperson by the Politics department, to give a seminar in the run up to a General Election -- when the students' union has a "no platform" policy in respect of the BNP. The third was about a Law Faculty event intended to explore different cultural attitudes to law and punishments -- and how should you deal with a radical spokesman for Sharia law, which some members of the university said was anti-democratic and would endanger the university's statis as a charity. The fourth concerned a meeting of the Palestinian Society, with a radical pro-Palestinian speaker -- which is being attacked by the local rabbi (violence is threatened and the proposed student chair of the meeting is very inexperienced). The fifth was about the hiring of a hall to a local Pentecostal church, whose pastor had "expressed negative views on homosexuality".

It was the second case study that caused all the outcry. It was the case of the spokesperson of an "ultra-orthodox" group (nothing was said about his partticular faith), who insisted on speaking to a group of student segregated by sex (and it just happened to coincide wth campus celebration of International Woman's Day).

The UUK document was trying to give advice about the law in these circumstances, and to give a few guidelines about practical handling. Who is to chair the event? Is the segregation to be "voluntary"? Can you make sure the women are not at the back, but that the different groups are side by side.

I'm not sure that all the practical advice was that acute. Voluntary segregation is a tricky concept (all the men are sitting on one side, and the women on the other... and I go and sit with the men, on the grounds that the segregation is voluntary?) But the last thing that UUL was doing was "promoting segregation by gender". 

Just read the document, folks.