Some more bad things

1. I suppose that both politically and as a human it would not be a good idea to start using this blog to chronicle the crimes against me of eminent professors. Still, grrrr! Maybe I could just designate them anonymously with asterisks, like the tender moments in old-fashioned novels, only instead of *** it would need to be something more like *!#!!*@!*
2. Language students in town trying to buy alcohol.
3. But mostly it's the professors.

Bad things

1. The "Lucifer Box" books by Mark Gatiss. I read the first one and thought it was rubbish, and then the second one got tons of good reviews and was half price in Borders, so I read that one too. It is also rubbish. Making a character camp and prone to seducing young men is no substitute for giving him an actual personality. They're just a cut-price rip-off of the Kyril Bonfiglioli "Charlie Mortdecai" books. I can't imagine why so many people claim to have enjoyed them so much. It's another example of the many ways in which Stephen Fry has lost it since he became happy. It's nice for him, but the rest of us have to pay the cost.
2. Facebook. It brings out the naff in anyone who uses it; there is nothing genuinely funny on it, and vast amounts of weak humour. Enough now! This is a modern complex world; it is quite appropriate to have different faces you show to different people, however much that concept gets booed down on Big Brother as hypocrisy. I behave differently to my friends, my colleagues, and my students, and that's called being a proper adult. Facebook should go back to being just undergraduates and the tutors who are keeping an eye on them.
3. How we behave towards people being rather complex. When I was about sixteen I had my hair cut from longish to a sort of Hugh Grant look, which being skinny in those days I could get away with. This had a strange impact on my behaviour; I used to go to school by train, which meant a lot of waiting around for trains that didn't turn up, and I suddenly found that I was asking guards when the train was due in a straight-forward business-like way, instead of a curly-haired, helpless, poor-little-me sort of way which I hadn't even noticed I was doing before. Today I am annoyed with myself for having in the past been similarly pointlessly conciliatory to my vet, who has given me the wrong medicine for my rats. They are sitting about looking miserable because he diluted it without telling me, and actually directed me to continue with the same dosage. I am feeling immensely patronised by this, and very guilty because I haven't cared for my rats properly. The thing is that he's patronised me before, but I just took it because I assumed I had accidentally been annoying, and I assumed my rats would get the best care if I wasn't annoying.

Some things which are good and one slightly disturbing thing

1. Calvin Harris's album I Created Disco. It's a bit like Jarvis Cocker crossed with the Human League. The Girls, Acceptable in the 80s and Merrymaking at My Place are the singles, and all good, and I currently love Disco Heat, which has great instrumental bits, expressing heartbreak in the brilliant way that only electronic pop can. I do hope he's not going to drug himself to death though -- he looks a bit out of it here, in a proto-Doherty sort of way, and all the songs seem to be about taking drugs with girls, without any of that "Just say no!" stuff for the kids.
2. Whistling Allegri's Miserere in an echoey place made of stone; to be specific, L staircase.
3. The tea place called Ti is actually quite good, and strangely soothing, even though I don't like tea. I hope they keep it going OK, because everyone wants to sit down and drink tea slowly, rather than sipping it as they wander about town like coffee, leading to a lower turnover.
4. It's Cambridge open studios this month.
5. The Sacred exhibition at the British Library. I promised someone I'd say what I thought about this, but I only had half an hour there which wasn't long enough. Still it seems like putting Jewish, Christian, and Muslim books side by side is genuinely interesting and not just the Blairite gimmick it at first appears.
6. Washing your hands in milk -- surprisingly luxurious.
7. Peter Callesen makes sculptures out of bits cut from a sheet of paper. About halfway down this page is a closet with lots of monsters in.
8. This video of a wishbone pulling the mechanical device which makes it walk is oddly disturbing.

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.

Best desk in the world ever

It's a bit cramped sometimes, but I want to acknowledge that there is not a better desk to be had.

I would read anything this author wrote

Thomas Pynchon: though he reminds me a bit of my PhD supervisor, in that sometimes the parts are greater than the whole
Barbara Trapido: though Frankie and Stankie was a bit disappointing
Barbara Kingsolver: Prodigal Summer is great, and so is her early stuff. (I discovered these two Barbaras at a time a few years back when I got so annoyed with the male voice in writing that I decided I had better not read anything written by men for a while, for fear that I might otherwise develop an unshakable and unjustifed intolerance. I'm pleased to report that this worked but I still wouldn't read anything by Martin Amis in case it triggered a relapse.)
Tibor Fischer: though his early stuff was better
Jonathon Coe: though he will never top What A Carve Up
John Irving: though Until I Find You was definitely not his best
Kate Atkinson: she can really write
Michael Chabon: ditto
Alexei Sayle: though I prefer his short stories
Allan Massie: am loving his fake twelfth-century narratives of the Matter of Britain
Pat Barker: obviously
Rose Tremain: natch
Iain Banks: as opposed to Iain M. Banks, though I do mean to try those one day
Barbara Vine: as opposed to Ruth Rendell, though I've never thought any of those were a waste of time either
P. D. James: though I wish she'd give the Book-of-Common-Prayer echoes a rest
Jilly Cooper: there's no point in being ashamed of this -- it's trashy reading but satisfying, like a twix
Iain Pears: the art-history mysteries are very good indeed, and The Dream of Scipio is the most moving book ever written about textual criticism
Arturo Perez-Reverte: buckles have never been swashed more intelligently
John Julius Norwich: though The Middle Sea is not as good as the Byzantium books
George MacDonald Fraser: we're officially owed one where Flashman makes sweet love in the Parker library -- Ray Page has the correspondence to prove it -- the main obstacle is presumably the dual improbability of anyone's getting into the Parker Library in the nineteenth century, and that person's being a woman -- it's going to tax his plotting skills
Salman Rushdie: the first time I read the Satanic Verses was to see what the controversy was about; the subsequent three or four times have been because it is a seriously good book; but he's definitely fallen off in recent years
Will Self: he is utterly original -- e.g. Great Apes, How the Dead Live, The Book of Dave, &c -- but do not, I repeat, do not read My Idea of Fun if you haven't already -- it's fouler than American Psycho
Julian Rathbone: he's annoying in many ways but gets away with it by being so good
Diana Athill: now she's stopped trying to write novels
Patrick McGrath: master of Gothic madness
Thomas McGuane: good on horses
Neil Gaiman: especially now he's grown up a bit
Liz Jensen: they've all been good in a lunatic sort of way

This is really quite a cheerful list -- these authors are all still alive so if they were each to produce a book every two years then I would have at least one appealing thing to read every month.

Oh good grief

The Guardian's Saturday travel supplement offers this nugget of brain-deadness:

The trend for weekend pampering is not a new one. Back in 1132, Yorkshire's Rievaulx Abbey was described as a "marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world". Almost nine centuries later, English Heritage is encouraging us to find inner serenity on a series of "Pampering Saturdays" within the walls of the ruined abbey, including t'ai chi demonstrations and classes and foot massages in the herb garden.

I really don't think that the monks were finding freedom through pampering. Rievaulx was one of the first Cistercian abbeys in England, and Cistercians were an order renowned for their austerity: the Trappists are Cistercians. It may even be that if you're looking for a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world, you're not going to find it in a foot rub.

I'm more and more convinced by the idea that almost all of the modern media is a sophisticated form of trolling. Trolling on a web message board is where you post something deliberately provocative and enjoy the ensuing attention -- for example, dodgy claims about the World Trade Center attacks, and suchlike.

Community

I've been thinking a bit about community, recently. A criticism often levelled against the church from within is that the people of the church have lost an understanding of how to be part of a group. We've all got too used to being individuals, and the understanding of the self gained from this has been at a cost which prevents communal action. This is a large part of an argument which otherwise seems incomprehensible to non-Christians, I think; the suggestion from people who don't think that homosexuality is wrong that we should nonetheless not allow blessings of gay marriage. (St Paul told the Corinthians that they could eat meat sacrificed to idols, but that they should refrain from doing so if their example was causing anyone difficulties with their faith. I suppose that at that time finding meat in Corinth which had definitely never been sacrificed to an idol might have involved you in more effort and more cost, but it doesn't seem to me so very equivalent to giving up permanently an entire area of your life, one which the preachers are constantly telling us is a beautiful gift from God, in order not to upset people who are often finding it upsetting for entirely discreditable reasons. But then I was raised a protestant, and the church has little authority for me.)

Anyhoo, the idea that by being individuals we have lost the ability to work as a group interests me. Two things have brought it to mind in recent days. First, there has been a cigarette ban. About the only people I know who still smoke are fellows at the college where I work; colleges are, by their nature, appropriately some decades behind the times. There has been an unwillingness to accept that, passive smoking or no passive smoking, many people are negatively affected by smoke, especially now that asthma is on the rise. Secondly, we have been taking votes in groups. It's interesting to think about how we move on from divisive votes. A decision is taken which is binding on a group of which you are part, but it is not the decision you would have taken. I suppose you have to see it as a communal act, and support it. I don't know that this is very natural to people any more. Colleges are run in a medieval fashion which predates the rise of the individual (depending on how you date that -- it's usually seen as a late-/post-medieval thing). The closest modern analogy would be communities of nuns and monks, who also live according to pre-modern rules. The monks at St Bene't's were removed to other tasks; some of them really did not want to go, and would not have made the same decision if it were up to them, but they had vowed obedience so that it was never a question of whether or not they would do it, even the man in his eighties who had spent decades here, had to give up a job he loved, and feared very much a move to inner city London. There's a hugely impressive discipline in that.

Pirates

I've had a very draining day, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Rather than dwelling on this, and in the hope that it might be cheerful for other people as well as me, I have decided to put up something strangely comforting: a pirate's speech from the early eighteenth century, sounding just like pirates ought to. Captain Bellamy, the pirate, has captured a sloop, and would like to give it back to Captain Beer, its commander, but his pirate crew won't have it.

'Damn my beard', says he, 'I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do anyone a mischief, when it is not for my advantage; damn the sloop we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though, damn ye, you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich men have made for their own security, for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery. But damn ye altogether. Damn them for a pack of crazy rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make one of us, than sneak after the arses of those villains for Employment?'
Capt. Beer told him that his conscience would not allow him to break through the Laws of God and man.
'You are a devilish conscientious rascal, damn ye,' replied Bellamy. 'I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field, and this my conscience tells me. But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure and pin their faith upon a pimp of a parson, a squab, who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.'

It's from one of John Julius Norwich's Christmas Cracker anthologies. Equally good, and a great deal less verbose, is Sir Thomas Beecham's comment after conducting the Dance of the Cygnets from Swan Lake for the ballet of the Camargo Society at about twice the normal speed:

That made the buggers hop.

There's no i in teemocil, at least not where you'd think

My brother gave me the DVD of the first season of Arrested Development for my birthday, and it's making me cackle out loud.

The proper study of mankind

or, My amazing journey of self-discovery continues...

So I did a quick M-B test online and came out as INFJ -- very I, quite N, and hardly at all FJ (1% J apparently). I would have thought I was more sensing than intuitive, because in my academic subject I am very wary of people who do the whole big picture thing, rather than making a big picture from all the little pictures put together. Apparently I share this profile with Nathan, the prophet of Israel, which is nice. (Also Jimmy Carter, which is a bit hmmm.)

I'm not so sure about the other three, but the introvert thing is still making me happy. Because it makes sense of the fact that I actually like people and human interaction, if the problem is just that it's bad for me. It's like sunbathing; I enjoy going out in the sun, but if I indulge in it without care it makes me irritable, de-hydrated, and pink. So this makes my unsociable nature not my fault, and everyone knows that's the best kind of fault. Yay!

Introspective

I've always thought of myself as an introvert, and I've always felt bad about this. Yesterday in the Guardian Magazine "This Column Will Change Your Life", which I read because it's often interesting in an annoying sort of way, was about introverts. What was particularly interesting about this is that it defined introvert in a way which is a) not what I thought it was b) precisely like me and c) not something I need to feel particularly guilty about. I'd always thought that introversion was about being essentially self-centered, uninterested in other people, at heart selfish. Apparently it's really about energy; introverts feel drained by social interaction and recharged by being alone, while extroverts are the opposite, and it's even possible that introverts are that way not because they are uncaring but because they can't help empathising in an excessively-sensitive way which makes time spent with other people terribly exhausting. Which is exactly how I feel. I am certainly selfish, and pretty self-obsessed, and these are not good things, but it's very helpful to separate these bad qualities from something as intrinsic to me as being an introvert; it makes it easier to see how I can try to be better without attempting not to be who I essentially am.

A lot of life's worries seem to come down to working out which things are intrinsic and which things are not. Go Reinhold Niebuhr!

Also, I wonder if many introverted people keep pets? One of the best things about pets is their non-human quality -- it annoys me when people suggest that they're some sort of human substitute (enough people have suggested that I have rats instead of a boyfriend, or occasionally, children...). They're so straight-forward in comparison to people that they make good restful company. They completely lack the tiring quality of people because their wants are so simple in comparison -- in my experience, a rat who can't be cheered up with a yogurt drop will have died within about thirty-six hours. (Thankfully my two are currently bouncy and eating their antibiotics with every sign of pleasure. At the moment they are curled up in their hammock, and too lazy to open more than one eye to look at me as I go past.)

Professors on the loose

I worked on the tills at M&S to earn some money when I finished my PhD. It's a sort of matriarchy there, probably loosely based on the WI. It was great because if, for example, an old lady came by who had a lot of shopping and was struggling, you could call up a young man from the loading bay to help her carry things to the car park, thus gratifying two powerful human impulses: the desire to help people, and the desire to order people around. And on the whole the customers there are quite polite. We got a lot of elderly people in and the queue behind would wait patiently while they hunted through their change or wrote out cheques in tortuous longhand. I was putting one old lady's shopping through one time when she suddenly remembered that she had got the wrong sort of milk, because the grandchildren were coming to stay, and they liked full-fat not skimmed. So I called up a young man to sort out the milk situation, thinking she was rather an old dear, and then she handed me her credit card and the name on it was U. Dronke. Suddenly I realised that I had met her before: she was Professor Ursula Dronke, an extremely sharp scholar. I had recently heard her give a very good joint lecture with her husband, Professor Peter Dronke; they're one of those old-fashioned scholarly couples where both are very good but the wife is the scarier of the two, with a mind like the jaws of a bulldog.

Today I went into Pret to get lunch. There were quite a few late middle-aged couples in their anoraks there who had gone in to get a cup of tea out of the rain. Squeezing past to nab a Classic Tuna sandwich I suddenly realised that one of the men there was one of the most eminent Professors I know. For a moment I wondered if it was my conscience paying tricks on me, because he ought really to be in Chicago or New York, and I owe him a major piece of work, deadline end of June, which I need to polish off this afternoon and e-mail off. He was there with his equally eminent Professor spouse, who is very nice but rather frightening -- she used to be a nun. Really these people shouldn't be allowed to wander the streets startling us at the weekends. (And I ought to stop displacement-activitying and get on with the work I owe him.)

Ponders

It's a shame I couldn't go to Bec. If I were there I would have sung compline by now. It closes with Salve Regina, to an old plainsong melody, and asperging. Otherwise it's all in French, including the Psalms; it's a very good language to chant quietly, with its growly 'r's and soft 'j's:

Sur le fauve et la vipère tu marcheras . tu fouleras le lionceau et le dragon
Puisqu'il s'attache à moi, je l'affranchis . je l'exalte puisqu'il connaît mon nom.

It's very peaceful there. I wish I could have gone.

Nonetheless, I'm also glad that I stayed to look after my rats. They are being very friendly at the moment; I think the antibiotics are making them feel a bit more themselves. Muesli is beginning to put some weight on again, and for the first time in quite a while she climbed up onto my shoulder, leant on my chin, and started making the teeth-chattery noise which is the rat equivalent of purring. It seems like there's not really much meaning to caring about things if you don't give things up for them.

Television

Even if we've lost Scrubs, TV is still great. My Name is Earl is excellent happy television. I have also been catching up with Rome, which I missed yesterday because of graduation dinner. It has HBO swearing, full frontal nudity, exotically-coloured poisons, and gratuitous references to baboon training. Yay!

That shark

The pre-credits teaser of the new season of Scrubs has only just finished and I'm already worried that it has jumped the proverbial.

Abjuro te!

I abjured the Church Times some while ago, but in a moment of weakness after lunch today I picked it up again. I had only got to page 5 before it annoyed me very much and I have now reabjured it. There was a story of how young mothers are less likely than older mothers to want their children to grow up with religious values. Apparently we should be upset about this. But who on earth wants their children to grow up with "religious values"? I'm not even sure what religious values are -- a proper respect for the household gods, maybe. Tony Blair has religious values. If I had children I would want them to have Christian faith, and I would want them to question things. I'd rather they were atheists than that they attended church through faithless piety.

I texted my mother this Christmas from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was distressing me, and she texted back "Avoid religion where possible; it's the relationship that matters". This is because my mother is quite wise.

Anyway, I think I might have to give up on the idea of posting happy things, and reserve this blog as the place where I rant about things that annoy me. The web-related concept of trolling is a good one, I think, for describing the media as a whole, and there's sadly no reason why the Church Times wouldn't join in.

I heart my rats

One of the endearing things about rats is that sometimes, when you're offering them a treat, they stretch out to take it, and with their mouth open, just millimetres from the yogurt drop or whatever, they pause and look at you sideways, as if to say, What's in this for you? Cats tend to be all Of course you adore me, while dogs are more Of course I adore you, but rats sometimes stop and wonder what's really going on. You can't say that's not very lovable.

Plea for help

If by some chance you have read James Wilson's The Woman in the Picture and understand whether or not her mother killed herself and if so why and if not what happened then could you let me know? I was enjoying it til it suddenly ended without telling me; it made me feel all stupid, and that's really not the point of reading Borders 3-for-2 novels.

In other entertainment news, the first half of the Rihanna album is the better. Some of the songs are a bit Nelly Furtado and some a bit Kanye West; I'm betting Timbaland was involved and whoever produced Kanye West too (maybe Mr West himself, I don't know). "Don't Stop the Music" is absolutely brilliant -- it has this excellent beat like the sound of loud music on the other side of a door. It has gone to the top of my itunes favourites playlist, together with the Freemasons remix of Beyonce and Shakira's "Beautiful Liar". (Don't listen to any version which wasn't mixed by the Freemasons.) Between them they're helping me not to lose the will to live as I tackle the Old English boundary clauses of the charters of Wilton Abbey, one of those unpleasant tasks in which you know you're bound to make a total fool of yourself. It's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of knowledgeable help before I can even get them into a state in which they can bearably be sent to some experts to have the errors pointed out. This is because there are people out there who really care about boundary clauses. They are not necessarily the same people as the ones who really care about Tolkien, but they share some attributes.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Now I have to go and find out my students' results. I've been looking after about a fifth of my department this year, and vicariously caring about their results has given me nasty flashbacks to my own results experiences. First year wasn't fun because my boyfriend got a 2.i not a first, which made him grumpy. I bought him a nice runny camembert, but somehow this failed to make it all OK. My whole second year was unpleasant, and I just stayed in bed until someone phoned me to tell me the results at about half past two, and then I went back to bed again. This worked well: I would recommend it as a strategy. But in my third year I went down to the boards alone, feeling as pressured as I ever have in my life, because unless I got a first I was not ever going to get funding to do an MPhil. I had to recite poetry in my mind to stop it exploding -- as I recall it was Strange Meeting by Wilfrid Owen as I was walking past WHSmith's. If my mind had exploded I don't know what I would have done -- run about the streets waving my arms shouting The horror! The horror! perhaps -- I'm amazed one doesn't see more students doing that at this time of year. Anyway I got the first, so it was OK, but the sheer terror of the whole thing is still vivid in my memory ten years later.

It would have made a big difference to my life. Most likely I would then have become an actuary. Although they like you to have a scientific degree I had looked into it and some firms would be happy with my predominantly-science A-levels. It's about seven years' training, so I don't feel it's really an option at my age, but by now I would have been qualified, established, earning pretty large amounts of money... I'm sure I would have regretted not knowing more about medieval manuscripts, but I'm also sure I would have been quite fine. I would probably have eventually done some evening classes, like the ones run by the wonderful Michelle Brown in London, and by now I might have been looking into a career-break self-funded masters. Or maybe I would have gone another direction -- hieroglyphs or cuneiform, perhaps.

I know with complete certainty that I would have been alright -- maybe even better because of not being exposed to the particular unhealthy neuroses of academia. That's a good thing to bear in mind when I check my students' results, I think. It makes me sad to think of all the stress we put the students through here, to drive them on to achieve things which are good but not of overriding importance.