All in a Don's Day (27 page)

But Christmas isn't just a great case study for the anthropologically inclined. Classicists get a toe-hold in there too.

That's because, somewhere lurking behind our celebrations (though, in truth, the connections are a bit hard to follow) is the Roman festival of Saturnalia – eventually a seven-day holiday at the end of December; just like our Christmas break, it got longer as time went on. There's nothing a Classicist likes doing better at this time of year than sounding off about the similarities and differences between our festivities and the Romans'.

The basic point is that the Saturnalia wasn't really a match for the over-consumption of Christmas dinner. That has a Roman feel in its own way (and I bet the Romans would have loved the ritual of lighting the brandy over the Christmas pud, if only they had invented matches). But much more similar are
the rituals of gift-giving, games and silly hats. And even more distinctive is the idea of role reversal. For once a year, on the Saturnalia, Roman slaves are said to have sat down to dinner, served by their masters. (No one is very explicit about who actually cooked it, but I suspect the slaves …)

It was in other words, almost the spitting image of the classic ‘office party', in which the Managing Director makes a gracious display of serving the wine, while trying desperately and unsuccessfully to remember the names of all the lowly staff (thus rather ruining the point of the occasion). Presumably the same problems emerged in ancient Rome, with the toffs repeatedly mixing up their poor Lurcios and their Pseudoluses.

Not sure if it counts as one of the better Roman inventions.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Heinrich Böll, in 1947, wrote a short novel called
Und nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit
(′And Not Only at Christmas′). The basic story is that an elderly woman, unable to celebrate Christmas from 1940 to the end of the war, makes up for it big-time after the war by having her family celebrate it every day (a form of of ′Christmas tree therapy′ for her), until members of her family, unable to stand it any longer, stop attending the festivities and eventually scarper, having themselves replaced by actors. One of them, a professional boxer, ends up as a lay brother in a monastery.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

I was once asked by a very American person, ′And what do you do for Christmas, Paul?′ I said, ′I buy a bottle of whiskey, go to bed, and come out when it′s all over′. He was profoundly shocked.

PAUL POTTS

31 December 2011

I am in a couple of hours 57 years old. My rather elderly (aged 40) mother gave birth, old-style, in Much Wenlock Cottage Hospital on 1 January 1955 … with a midwife and the local GP, who (as he and Mum always used to joke, for years after) only got there when everything was more or less over. (This isn't just self-obsession – it's a story I heard repeated at the said GP's Xmas party for years and years in my childhood and adolescence … with greater or lesser shades of embarrassment, on my part.)

So my birthday has always been (for me) a New Year occasion. And always bound up with New Year's Eve … everybody is pissed and enjoying the ‘rite of passage', and at some point after midnight I nerve myself to say (or not to say) ‘and … errr … excuse me … it's my birthday.'

Anyway, at 57, happily and very very gratefully married for more than a quarter of a century … five thoughts on birthdays as you get old(er).

1)
Bloody lucky (version 1)
. I am still alive, 57 years on. I've survived two children and various bits of medical intervention (including a benign breast lump/aka clot of milk, when I was breast-feeding, and that seemed like imminent death at the time). Most of the people I work on (the Romans) were dead or dying by their late 50s. So thank the Lord, and modern medicine.

2)
Bloody lucky (version 2)
. By immense good fortune, things have gone really well for me in the last few years, and I've done stuff that my Mum and Dad would never have dreamed of, though would have loved. Some of the little triumphs seem a bit silly. But I am really chuffed that I've been on
Desert Island Discs
, and
Any Questions
; and I've written books that colleagues have liked, as well as the ‘general public' … I even got a book prize. And I now get offered more books to review, or radio programmes to make, than I could ever do. (OK, in the great order of things, not a key indicator … not a big deal maybe, but when I think back 20 years, I would have felt it a huge success when anyone asked me to do anything like that.)

And let me say to any young female academic with a brood of kids, who thinks her career is going down the tubes … so was mine (as several of my more waspish male colleagues enjoyed saying) back then, a couple of decades ago … I hadn't written enough stuff; I had too few outcomes; and in fact people talked about the ‘tragedy' of my career. But stick in there, keep your name on the map and don't let the buggers get you down. Don't, don't give up. And accept that offer to review a book …

3)
Anxious
. Well anyone my age is anxious about what happens next. One of my best mates said to me when he turned 60 that the bad thing was that, after 60, any illness might be your last. And indeed it was almost true for him. He died almost a decade ago. So, let's face it, each visit to the doctor is more loaded now.

But I'm also anxious about ‘the media'. So far, with only a very few exceptions, they have been very kind to me. I have blathered on about the ancient world, and worse, and the critics haven't said ‘Oh for f***'s sake, shut up.' But who
knows what next? (I am just making a mini-series for BBC 2 that I hope you all like; but I'm on tenterhooks, honestly.)

4)
Memories
. When I was a little kid and asked what happened when you died, my Mum always came out with the old cliché about ‘living in people's memories'. It wasn't nearly good enough at the time, but I begin to see what she meant. For me, as for most of us I imagine, memory is a bigger and bigger thing, even in the fleeting, just-a-nod-to-it, sense. And that includes all kinds of stuff from schoolroom trauma to long-past, ancient passions – in a way I would never have expected.

I still vividly recall all those unlikely and memorable sites of serious adolescent love with unserious (or wholly unsuitable) partners … from Hawkestone Park to Rose Cottage, Ironbridge, or the in-your-face rhododendrons at Attingham. Every day I find those guys, and those places, come through my head – as my dead parents do, usually in a nicely teasing way. (I guess it never stops … years ago I reviewed a biography of Naomi Mitchison, and I called attention, with a degree of disbelief, to the moment when she made love to Wade-Gery in a snow storm outside Oxford; she sent me a card, aged 80-something, to say that it really was snowing that day.)

5)
Humility
. Obvious really … but when things are going well, just remember how different it might be, how easily.

And this, I guess, is the time to say that we plan another ‘don's life' book picking up where the last left off. Hope you'll all be on board. As I've said before, the commenters make this blog. Thanks everyone, and good luck for next year.

It is not just the ever-increasing stock of personal memories that is a pleasure. As one ages (I am three years behind you), the proportion of the population who can remember more world events than oneself diminishes. This creates at least the illusion of relative wisdom, and possibly the reality. In our youth, the majority of the population had at least some memory of the Second World War, even if only childhood or teenage memories, and there was a sense of a gap in one′s own experience. Now the majority don′t even remember the Moon landings. The youngsters are the ones with the gap.

On the scary side, we must face the fact that people younger than ourselves now have their fingers on the nuclear button. At least Angela Merkel, whose finger is on the Euro button, is older.

RICHARD BARON

I can still vaguely remember when you came into the library of the British School at Rome, insisting that Derrida′s book
On Grammatology
was a work without which no self-respecting academic library could do. The poor librarian had no idea what you were talking about.

The road from meaningless intellectual gibberish to
Desert Island Discs
has probably been hard, but worth it.

ANTHONY ALCOCK

I never read
On Grammatology
properly when I should have done, but I still have a copy, and my next project is to go back to it. One effect of that nonsense (or gibberish) is that it makes readers realise how little they understand what they thought they thought.

PAUL POTTS

Times change.

Only three years ago I ended my first book of blogs (
It's a Dons Life
) with a serious few pages justifying the whole practice of blogging. It was not, I wanted to assure readers (and no doubt myself too), a cheap, dumbed-down form of journalism; the hyper-links could open up a whole range of learned information that could never be included in a traditional print article; and the instant international reach of the web made blogs an important new medium of political comment and protest. (Don't forget that in 2009 the TimesOnline site was still calling its blogs, ‘web-logs'.)

Three years on, that all sounds needlessly defensive, if not quaintly old-fashioned. Who could possibly question the seriousness of a blog of 600+ words, not to mention the links, when the world is now full of 140-character tweets. As you will have spotted (p. 165), after a bit of heart-searching I now have a Twitter account, but then so do such august institutions as the British Academy and the British Museum. And, in fact, we're told that the ‘Arab Spring' was launched by Twitter and Facebook. I'm never quite sure if I believe it, but if it's even half-true, it takes ‘the new medium of political comment' to a rather different level.

I also stopped to reflect, back then, on the edgy relationship between print and on-line reading. Turning my blogs into a proper book, I suggested, was to provide a different reading
experience (browsing and flipping) and to give them a life beyond the screen:

No one I know reads their laptop on the Underground, in bed or in the loo. So here we have
A Don's Life
for the journey to work, for going to sleep – or for the smallest room in the house.

That too now seems a bit quaint – as all of you reading these words on your Kindle screen in the loo will be able to confirm.

But in those last few years the relations between print and on-line news media have changed even more radically than that. I don't just mean that print journalists now often find their stories from trawling the blogs (as happened to my little squib about the college grace, p. 32, and left me with a bit of explaining to do with the colleagues). But some newspapers are actually busy turning themselves into what is in effect a ‘mega-blog', with the print paper as just an optional extra.

I have become more laid-back, less worried, about all this. Personally, I'm a great fan of the traditional book, and I hope that many of you are reading this between soft paper covers. But what really matters is not the medium of the writing – but whether the writer has got anything to say.

I am still not entirely convinced that many tweets
do
have anything to say; I hope these blogs pass the test better.

A blog is a communal enterprise, so my first thanks go to all those who read and comment on ‘A Don's Life' and especially to those who have allowed their comments to be reprinted here. You may not know it, but I get up in the morning and go to the blog … wondering what you have had to say.

Then my thanks go to all at the
TLS
and
TimesOnline
who first thought of the idea and have hosted ‘A Don's Life' ever since: especially now Michael Caines, Lucy Dallas, and Peter Stothard (who was the blog's
fons et origo
). My family has been patient of my blogging habits; they have suggested topics and allowed themselves to be discussed. So thanks to Robin Cormack (‘the husband'), to Zoe (‘the daughter') and Raphael (‘the son'). My colleagues in Cambridge have been similarly tolerant, even when it has been inconvenient. Thank you, Newnham and the Classics Faculty.

At Profile, this book was again the brainchild of Peter Carson (who vetoed any moaning posts about the train from Cambridge to London, you will be relieved to know). And I am grateful too for all the support of Penny Daniel, Andrew Franklin, Ruth Killick, Matthew Taylor and Valentina Zanca.

Last, but emphatically not least, Debbie Whittaker in Cambridge has helped with the selection of posts and comments, the permissions, and almost every aspect of the conversion of the blog into a book.

So, thank you one and all.

All photographs are author's own except: p. 25 and p. 227 photos reproduced by permission of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge; p. 129 photo from Wikimedia Commons (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Column_of_Marcus_Aurelius_-_detai14.jpg
); p. 168 and p. 194 photos © R. Cormack.

While every effort has been made to contact the authors of comments quoted and copyright-holders, the author and publishers would be grateful for information about any they have been unable to trace.