All in a Don's Day

ALL IN A DON'S DAY

Also by Mary Beard

It's a Don's Life
Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town
The Parthenon
The Colosseum
(with Keith Hopkins)
The Roman Triumph

Mary Beard

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Copyright © Mary Beard Publications Ltd, 2012

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84668 536 1
eISBN 978 1 84765 863 0

My blog, ‘A Don's Life', has been running for six years now, since early 2006, regularly commenting on a whole range of things that matter to me … from ancient jokes to A levels, political humbug to Latin mottoes. According to the usual life-expectancy of blogs, six years puts ‘the Don' well into late middle age (like its author, in fact). For blogging, as everyone knows, is rather like going to the gym: easy to start, and to work out enthusiastically for a few months, harder to stick at when the novelty has worn off.

Like most regular, long-term gym users, I have kept going for two main reasons: enjoyment and discipline. Enjoyment? Well, after a sceptical start, I soon found that I really relished writing these little essays, composed late at night on the kitchen table. It was fun to point out why that evening's television programme on Roman banquets hadn't got it quite right (p. 15) or to share a discovery I'd made in the library that day (p. 201). And it felt almost therapeutic to reflect on what was really happening day-to-day at the front line of university teaching (none of those long holidays you read about, and precious few claret-swilling dinners, I promise – try the truth about reference-writing, p. 100, or the Human Resources Compliance Unit, p. 140). I loved the immediacy of it all: you think, you write, you click on ‘publish' and it's out there.

And discipline? My firm rule has been two posts a week, rain or shine (with only very, very occasionally a third thrown in). The point about blogging – like the exercise routine – is
that you have to set your target at something manageable, and never waver. The best advice I could give to a would-be blogger is
don't post every day in your first flush of enthusiasm
; you'll never keep it up.

And after that, the best advice would be to try and attract a community of readers, who will comment on your site thoughtfully, wittily and politely. In general, blog commenters as a species do not have a good name. You don't have to trawl very far in the comment areas of even the most high-minded and liberal blogs, or in the ‘Have Your Say' sections of the BBC website or serious broadsheet newspapers, to come across pages and pages of abusive, uninteresting and often deeply sexist responses. (‘This is rubbish. Who got you to write this trash? Stick to your knitting, granny' and far worse.) What encourages otherwise perfectly ordinary and polite people to write like this on-line is a mystery to me (though I offer some suggestions on p. 245). But the ‘Don's Life' commenters, both the regulars and the occasional visitors, are a very different breed. They may disagree strongly with what I have to say, but they comment with tremendous style, as well as courtesy – contributing intriguingly arcane facts, quirky anecdotes, specially composed verses and multilingual jokes. The distinctive character of ‘A Don's Life' comes in part from this (rare) dialogue between poster and commenters.

It is for that reason that this second book of selections from the blog, covering the years 2009–2011, continues the tradition of the first selection (
It's A Don's Life
, 2009) and includes some comments as well as my posts. Both appear almost exactly as they did on-line. I have only occasionally trimmed, corrected the typos, inserted much-needed apostrophes (mine, not the commenters'), ungarbled the garbling and every now and then added a bit of crucial information that was originally delivered
through the hyper-links (which are one advantage the web has over the printed page).

Blogs are, in a way, a version of autobiography, or of a diary. And I'm struck, whenever I read my past posts (not a regular habit of mine, you'll be relieved to know), how much, in some respects, my life has changed since I started blogging in 2006. Over the past few years, I have been very lucky indeed. I've been handed some great opportunities and I've done things that twenty years ago (as an exhausted junior lecturer with two small kids and a pretty dismal publication record) I could hardly have dreamt of. No one back then – least of all me – would possibly have predicted that, well past fifty and uncompromisingly grey-haired, I would have ended up presenting television programmes on the Romans on BBC2. (You'll find some of the inside story on these programmes on pp. 173, 178, 226.)

But the changes are only at the margins. The bottom line is that most of my time and energy goes to my day job, as a university teacher and Classicist, and as part-time Classics editor at the
Times Literary Supplement
(where I've worked for almost twenty years now and which is the generous host of my blog). At the
TLS
I commission reviews and then patiently wield an old-fashioned pencil to edit them (inserting all those apostrophes that the commenters complain I so often omit myself). In the university I'm occupied a good twelve hours a day giving lectures, researching in libraries and archives, supervising undergraduates, setting exams, writing articles, marking essays, advising doctoral candidates, attending seminars, visiting schools, ordering library books, responding to government ‘targets', assessing theses, interviewing would-be students … and all the other things that come with the territory of being a professional academic. I suspect that
some of this work doesn't come over very loud and clear in the blog, and as a consequence my life appears a bit more glamorous than it really is. The reason for that is simple. It's perfectly OK to blog about BAFTAs and filming, or about flying round the world to conferences. It's even occasionally OK to sound off about the university's HR department. It really isn't fair to share with the world your day-to-day frustrations at a student's lousy essay, at the silly things some unfortunate candidate said in an interview or for that matter at the incomprehensible last paragraph cobbled together by an inexperienced reviewer. But those things are my bread and butter.

The university that has employed me for most of my working life is the University of Cambridge (and I am a fellow of Newnham College, still – I'm glad to say – for women only). As I hope ‘A Don's Life' does capture, Cambridge is a wonderful and in many ways a privileged place to work, and it has some quirks and customs, both charming and irritating, that you will not find in any other university anywhere, except perhaps Oxford. For good or ill, there are only a handful of educational institutions worldwide where the wording of a Latin grace could possibly a cause of controversy between students and teachers (p. 32). But Cambridge is also a much more ordinary university than newspapers, television and movies like to suggest. It has cash shortages, cuts, early retirements, new-style management rules and jargon, risk assessments, impoverished students, compliance units and exhausted staff – just like any other. The vast majority of us – students or teachers – don't live the ‘Cambridge myth'; we don't punt or drink port or wear blazers. And we haven't come from dynasties of Oxbridge graduates (for what it's worth, I
am the first member of my family to get a university degree, Oxbridge or not).

But if you're smart, you won't study or teach in Cambridge for long without finding a way of
coming to terms
with the myth – knocking it on the head (p. 91), parodying it or, best of all, somehow find a way of turning it to your own advantage. And that's exactly what we find the intrepid investigative journalists of the student newspaper doing in the first post in this selection, when (tongue in cheek) they decide to do a survey on how rich the Mummies and Daddies of Cambridge undergraduates really are, and which the poshest colleges might be …

29 January 2009

One of the local student newspapers –
Varsity
– has got another scoop. Last term it conducted an online questionnaire, which apparently revealed that 50% of Cambridge students had at some time or other in their university career ‘plagiarised' (whatever that meant).

I wasn't sure how much weight to put on these anonymous confessions, honestly. But now
Varsity
has run a new questionnaire to find out how rich the average Cambridge student is and how much their parents earn – and, for the benefit of the punters, they've broken this down by college and Tripos subject. It's the lead story this week, even upstaging the article on that burning Cambridge controversy on the wine served to students at St John's Formal Hall. (That's irony, by the way, before you write in …)

Some of this new scoop plays to our usual prejudices. History of Art comes out top of the subject ‘rich list' – with a claimed average weekly budget per student of £182 per week and an average parental income of £118k. Not enough to buy young Rupert a Caravaggio to work on, but still a generous cushion against poverty.

But there were other, surprising, results.

I'm not sure whether to believe the stories of students who claim to have to feed themselves by scavenging from supermarket bins or, for that matter, the stories of those who claim to drink bars dry of champagne. They are both boasts, of a different variety, I half-suspect. Of course, if they're
true, I have hugely more sympathy with the former than the latter, but (rather primly) would advise both to go and talk to their college's financial tutor. Most colleges have funds to help students who are really short of money, and they also understand the problem of student debt – which certainly is getting worse. They no doubt have plenty of advice to dispense to the stupidly spendthrift too.