Beware the eminent

Two major responsibilities which I have really enjoyed are pretty much ended now, and for a few months past I had been feeling sad about this, until a couple of weeks ago I realised how much more pleasant my life will be without them. Both are responsibilities without much power, and that's very frustrating. I've always been one of the least of the many on the college governing body; and in some way directing the studies of students is even worse because while it is much more interesting and of more immediate practical value, it's also one of those things where the possibility of messing up is huge, and the capacity for doing well is very small. The students run their own lives, and while you can advise them, remind them, or tell them off when necessary (which is rarely), in the end you can only trust that they will be able to deal with things themselves. Also, it's difficult for me not to worry about the students -- we do ask tough things of them -- and then I end up feeling like a complete mug for making my job harder than it needs to be. Anyway, both these things officially come to an end in September, but the Cambridge long vacation means that they are essentially over now.

So for the first time in at least two years, maybe longer (I forget), I am facing the prospect of only working full-time. (I've mostly given up teaching for rather sad reasons to do with the demise of palaeography, which I won't go into here.) I have two half-time jobs, which involves quite a bit of juggling between them, and switching from one to another involves more mental effort that I at first allowed for, but still, it seems almost incredible that that's all I have to do now. I can actually reopen the files on my computer of nearly-finished articles and notes on ideas for future work. It feels like a wierd treat -- like when I was working at M&S and if Igot a whole day together for my own work the UL felt like the Earthly Paradise.

There is one small problem in all this, which is that an eminent Professor has promised a learned society that I will be producing a book for them by September. I last talked to him in February, when we agreed to have a coffee to discuss the possibility of my producing a book for them at some point, but he never replied to my e-mails trying to arrange said coffee, and it's only because I work with another eminent Professor who was at the society's AGM that I know that September was mentioned as a deadline. I need to e-mail him about it but hermes is down. It's not impossible that I could do it by September, because it's really just a revised version of a book I have already published in a department series in a very humble form which involves my folding all the foldouts myself (consequently I have a bad callous on my right index-finger and I can't make more than two or three at the same time without my RSI flaring up). It's sold about 200 copies so far, and I'm ready to retire it from that series and get it into production in some way which does not cause me physical pain. I wrote it while I was doing my PhD; I don't know whether it would be good advice to a post-graduate to have another related but separate project on the go while doing their PhD, but it worked very well for me.

Probably the first eminent Professor didn't really mean for the deadline to be taken seriously, because he's a bit like that. When I was applying for my PhD and unsure whether to be a palaeographer or a hagiographer he told me just to make up a topic, apply, and then decide what I actually wanted to do once I had secured funding. Unfortunately the eminent Professor who was my PhD supervisor (this is yet another eminent Professor, different also from that e. P. who got me to publish my little book in the department series; Cambridge is stuffed to the gills with them) took my initial proposal very seriously and was very averse to my changing. I wanted to move from a topic where all the manuscripts were in Germany to one where the manuscripts were mostly in Cambridge, London, and Oxford, but for some months he resisted fiercely, the mainstay of his plan being to find me a German boyfriend so that I would want to visit Germany frequently. This involved a few embarrassing occasions on which he would introduce me to some suitable post-grad he had found with helpful ice breakers like "You're about the same height, aren't you?". It was a shame because I remember one in particular was doing what sounded like very interesting work but obviously I could never get in touch with him to talk about it and if I had seen him in the street I would have had to have run away. My supervisor is quite a sentimental man, happily married to a short series of otherwise intelligent women, and I really think he thought he was doing me a favour. Eventually I forced him to let me work on another topic, though that one only stuck for about eight months because we couldn't stop arguing about Eadwig Basan. So I ended up well over a year into my PhD without a topic, which is why I had to write my PhD on something I still find somehow mildly revolting.

Anyway, theoretically I could challenge eminent Professor 1 about the September deadline, but the problem is that he really is eminent Professor 1; as undergraduates we all called him "The Prof", and I still have a good deal of residual respect and fear for him, engendered by Latin classes where he let our year off doing Frithegod of Canterbury because he said we weren't bright enough, and Old English classes where he would suddenly randomly pick on someone and demand to be told what class a verb was. (The secret to this was to pick a number from 1 to 7; you had a 6 in 7 chance of getting it wrong, but if you got it right he would give you respect for ages, so it was worth the odds.) Also it would do me good to get the work finished, and it would be extremely cool to have a black-spined gold-lettered book in a series started by people like Bishop, Gasquet, Deslisle, Wickham Legg, and all those mad old liturgists. Also it will have to be an outsize volume in an otherwise mostly uniform series, and even though I am very fond of Gill and several other librarians, many of whom are excellent people and deal with academics in a patient way worthy of a medal, it somehow gives me a perverse little thrill to think of people trying to work out to how shelve it. I'm not sure this post really has a point, beyond the obvious one of displacement activity, but I suppose the moral is: beware of eminent Professors.