All in a Don's Day (20 page)

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.

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.

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

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 those 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).

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

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.'