All in a Don's Day (17 page)

4) I have to say that I haven't seen racism in Cambridge admissions – far from it. I know that the answer to that is that institutional racism is invisible, so of course I wouldn't have noticed it. But the fact is that we DO get training in
interviewing, so that we don't just wreak our prejudices. And the university has a great campaign (GEEMA – that is, ‘Group to Encourage Ethnic Minority Applications'). A lot of people put a lot of time into this. Simplistic conclusions of the ‘Oxbridge is racist' variety only make their job more difficult.

And I don't think that it is true.

Can black kids get into Cambridge? Not as easily as white kids.

MIKE

When I was at Girton, there were women of all skin colours there. As a farm girl from Yorkshire, I was probably more exotic than they.

OURSALLY

25 December 2010

It is 8.00 in the morning on Christmas day, and I haven't yet opened my presents, which still wait around the tree until the turkey is safely in oven. (There was a minor hiccough last night when a fault in the electronic clock appeared to make it impossible to turn the oven ON – could you grill a turkey in pieces, we started to wonder? – but a bit of fiddling with the buttons sorted the problem.)

But one particular present has already made an impact.

Last Friday the husband texted me in Rome to say that there was a bit of a problem with an unexpected gift which had arrived at college. It was a suckling pig, which would not fit in the freezer … vegetarians, please don't read on.

As it happened, if I had known the cold weather would last, it could just have sat in the garden for a week or so, until we cooked it. (That was, of course, another challenge, given the
size of our oven, even when working.) But being on the safe side, I decided to find it a temporary home in a big freezer … So I made a mercy call to our butchers (the estimable Waller and Son, of Victoria Avenue in Cambridge), and they took it in for the weekend.

But where next? College was the obvious answer, so as soon as I was back from Italy, I drove to the butcher and took it round to Newnham. The trouble about that was that the catering manager was a generous host to the pig, but the kitchens would be entirely closed between 23 December and 5 January, and there would be no space for the beast after the 10th. So if I was planning to cook it (how?) over the festive season, it would be inaccessible.

Anyway, one of the advantages of getting older in a town like this is that you get to have friends who are institutionally equipped with big fridges and big ovens. So, explaining the problem to my friends Andrew and Jo (Mr and Mrs Sidney Sussex College), it quickly became clear that the Master's Lodge offered a solution to all problems … a big freezer and a big oven, and we all turned out to be free on New Year's Day, on which occasion the animal could be cooked and consumed.

So I went and collected it from Newnham and drove the beast to Sidney, where Jo and I received a lesson from the Head Chef on how long to defrost him (her?) for before cooking, and what gas mark was required etc. etc. And so we are all set.

And indeed not only has the pig given me a birthday party, but it has made a wide impact around the town. No sooner do I go into college than they ask about its fate, and when I went into the butcher's to pick up the turkey, one of the Waller's men said, ‘Andrew's looking forward to eating the pig' … how did he know? Well, he turned out to be the acting head porter of
Sidney … and had been filled in on the fate of the beast from many sides!

So thanks to the semi-anonymous donor (Patrick x x x x x x what a star you are!), and to all who have helped out (especially Jo and Andrew).

On other fronts, Christmas set to go … we even have a little tree in the new bathroom!

28 December 2010

There was huffing and puffing round the breakfast table this morning as we listened to the government's new gimmick – that successful on-line petitions should get a parliamentary debate, and even made into a bill. The Labour MP (Paul Flynn) had some sensible things to say about the idea … but as the husband pointed out, it's a pity the Labour Party hadn't been more sensible when they started this whole e-petition idea. It was, after all, their gimmick in the first place.

So what is the matter with the idea?

Well, for a start, it is a veneer of popular power, a substitute touted as the real thing. Mass e-petitioning looks as if it is putting power back into the people's court. But actually it is more likely to give an outlet to the computer-literate, with time on their hands and an axe to grind (which is a decidedly skewed sub-category of ‘the people'). Remember how the
Today
programme had to stop its annual ‘person of the year' competition because all kinds of maverick campaigns launched all kinds of very odd people into the top of the list.

Second, it is taking us in the wrong direction in terms of legislative activity. What we need is less legislation, fewer white papers – not more. That is to say, we need a bit more sense that the solution to every problem is not a new law. This e-petition idea risks turning us all into amateur lawmakers.

And finally, it turns the complexity of politics into a competition between single-issue interest groups (and that in the long term has the effect of taking power away from ‘the people', not giving it back). Of course we would all like to save the sparrows and the bees, stop rape and have a better public transport system … and no doubt you could get hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for those causes. But the real politics is not about signing up to some obvious good causes, it's about balancing and prioritising a competing selection of good causes. That's what, for us, the parliamentary process is all about. And anyone who wants to see the fatuity of the petition mode could well study the fruitless Californian system of ‘propositions', which serve to paralyse more than enhance government.

So far, I guess, so obvious.

But a quick look at the Downing Street ‘petition' site only makes one even gloomier – if for rather different reasons.

For a start, it's not clear that in practice this government gimmick is offering very much. Unless the site was having a hiccough over Christmas, there appear to be no current, open petitions at all (maybe people are fed up with the Labour gimmick already).

And of the closed petitions, I reckoned that since 2007 only eight got over the magic figure of 100,000 that would give them any parliamentary time. Three were about fuel and other motoring issues (and I don't think that these were being neglected, even without a petition … MPs aren't
that
unrepresentative!), one was about creating a military hospital, another about having a Remembrance Day public holiday and another about letting the Red Arrows fly past at the 2012 Olympics. The other two were asking for the abolition of
inheritance tax (128,622 signatures) and the abolition of plans to build a ‘Mega Mosque' (281,882).

Now some of this amply confirms the arguments I sketched in the first part of this post. I have no idea what campaign was driving the more than half a million signatories who wanted to see the Red Arrows at the Olympics, but as a rather pained government response makes clear, they hadn't been banned from appearing anyway:

This allegation is not true. The Government has not banned the Red Arrows from the London 2012 Olympic Games. The organising committee of London 2012 will decide what to include in the Opening Ceremony and other celebrations – but with almost five years to go, decisions are yet to be made on what these will look like.

And, as for the inheritance tax lobby, this is exactly the kind of single-issue campaigning that gets in the way of joined-up financial thinking. (So where do they want to find the money that is ‘lost' to the public purse?)

But a closer look at the website gives a different slant. The whole thing is so monitored that it is only the ‘voice of the people' in a terribly sanitised way. The most depressing part is the list of ‘rejected petitions' – those that have been deemed off-limits, not qualifying for a response. There are more than 38,000 of these – more than the total of those allowed through the system.

And what have they done wrong? In some cases they have talked about things that people really care about, but are sub judice or outside the Prime Minister's remit. (‘It is not appropriate to petition the PM regarding legal cases over which he has no jurisdiction.') Or they have written rather too frankly. A whole host get the chop because they ‘contained
language which is offensive, intemperate, or provocative'. (Well, offensive is one thing … but are we not allowed to be provocative in a petition?) Others are banned because they contained links to websites (so much for new technology), were funny, or because they ‘contained party political material' … err isn't this part of the political process?

So much for letting the people have their say. I can't stand this gimmicky idea anyway, but if I did think that it gave us, the public, some direct influence over the political process, a good look at the website would make me think I'd been shortchanged.

According to the BBC website, one of Paul Flynn's comments was: ‘The blogosphere is not an area that is open to sensible debate; it is dominated by the obsessed and the fanatical, and we will get crazy ideas coming forward′ It is a great comfort to know that Government and Parliament are not at all like that.

RICHARD BARON

The Classical precedents for popular power in politics are not encouraging: was it not popular power that exiled Anaxagoras on a charge of heresy (for saying that the sun was a red-hot rock somewhat bigger than the Peloponnese) and condemned Socrates to drink hemlock?

DAVID KIRWAN

Petitions may not be a good idea, but good old Ostracism might be worth giving a try …

TOM TILLEY

8 January 2011

I have just signed up to a Twitter account. Many people (including some commenters) had urged me in this direction. But, in the end, the reason I took the plunge was very simple. Fiona Maddocks had given me a bit of much-needed support on Twitter in the face of AA Gill's review of my
Pompeii
programme and his ‘How could someone from Newnham understand a willy?' line. (Let him come to Newnham, I say … There's an invitation, Mr Gill!) I couldn't find her email address to say thanks, so I signed up to Twitter to do it that way.

Soon enough I found had some good friends ‘following' me.

So what now?

I haven't quite managed to tweet ever since. That's partly because I haven't worked out how to do it from my phone.

But it's partly because I haven't worked out what to say. The world might be interested in whether S Fry is at that minute intending to drop by Starbucks, but sure as anything they are not remotely interested in M Beard's coffee-drinking habits.

I have speculated on a more academic approach … ‘just read a great article on the Quindecimviri Sacris Faciundis in
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik
, but wasn't sure how that would go down. I am tempted by the ‘message from the front line of the lecture' – which Charlotte Higgins has done very nicely … ‘here I am sitting in Nottingham and Prof X has just said that the Romans didn't cut their toenails'. But I haven't been to any lectures lately.

So what? I am shortly to decamp from Cairo to visit some
Roman sites in Egypt (on the hunt for images of Roman emperors). If you would like to give me some suggestions on what to tweet and how to do it, I will try my best.

I'll keep following as long as you don′t boast or tell us you′ve just cleaned your teeth and cut your toenails.

SUSANNAH CLAPP

I′m giggling about the notion of the Romans and their toenails. (I′d certainly tweet that if someone said it!) The key thing is reciprocity – I use it as a way of disseminating information, picking up information and making contact with a bunch of people I don′t see a lot (or indeed have never met). It′s a great way to pass on, or find, interesting reading material via links. It′s like being at a crowded cocktail party set in a library (and as such, distracting). Don′t tweet that you′re making an omelette for lunch is my only advice, unless you have something so devastatingly cool to say about it that it′s unmissable.

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS

Tweeted to her
Twitty ways
Has left me
In a baffled daze
With wits like
That I tweet you too,
A little line
From twit to you.

A DENNIS

12 January 2011

I have wanted to see the Colossi of Memnon for ages. These are two huge statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III which have stood since the fourteenth century
BC
outside the remains of his ‘mortuary temple' not far from Luxor in southern Egypt. It isn't their Egyptological history that interests me particularly. (In fact, even after a few days in Egypt, I'm just as bad as I ever was at telling my Nefertaris from my Nefertitis … or my Amenhoteps from my Akhenatens; and indeed I have been known to glaze over when having them explained.)