This Is Where A Classics Degree Gets You. Help Me Save Them Anyway.
I'm doing something I've never done before.
I am eating an ice lolly in bed. A Mini Twister, to be exact.
I feel I ought to clarify that this isn't a long held ambition or anything. It's just that here I was, in bed, eating a Mini Twister, and I thought, I don't believe I've ever eaten an ice lolly in bed before. This is a New Life Experience.
Bear with me, it's been a very long day. Also, I miss my moustache.
In other news, they want to close down the Classics Department at Royal Holloway, which is my alma mater and a sanctuary for brilliant and entertaining eccentrics. It's also a very very good Classics department, and those are few and far between now. I'm speaking as someone who dumped the Classics course at Oxford after a year to transfer to RHUL, and never regretted it for a second; this department would be a terrible loss to the world of Classical academia. (Which I realise is not a sentence to spark a revolution, but it would). Also, it was the first university anywhere to offer a Classics degree to women, starting a hundred and twenty-five years ago. Be a shame to lose it now.
Here are some things my world and the world in general would be poorer without;
-Doctor Nick, who started my first Greek Lit lecture by hiding under a table when the Head of Department walked in unexpectedly, wore socks and sandals even when it was snowing, inexplicably had pockets that were larger than his trousers and was probably the best teacher I've ever encountered.
-Richard Alston, who has nothing to do with modern dance and once put his shoe on the lectern to prove the point that we wouldn't remember anything about that lecture except that he put his shoe on the lectern (he was right).
-The ineradicable memory of a corridor full of jittery and caffeine-demented Latinists trying to jam in last-minute revision by singing about Latin grammar to the tune of "Do The Locomotion' ("The dative and the ablative just don't make sense/but it will all be perfect in the future tense...")
-The fact that I can recite elegantly obscene poetry in Latin, and that is a skill not enough people have these days.
There is a Facebook group here. Please go and join it. There's a petition you can sign and stuff.
Classicists are a dying breed as it is, and the world may not need more people who eat ice lollies in bed and post about it on the internet, but it sure as hell needs more people who can do it in Latin.
I am eating an ice lolly in bed. A Mini Twister, to be exact.
I feel I ought to clarify that this isn't a long held ambition or anything. It's just that here I was, in bed, eating a Mini Twister, and I thought, I don't believe I've ever eaten an ice lolly in bed before. This is a New Life Experience.
Bear with me, it's been a very long day. Also, I miss my moustache.
In other news, they want to close down the Classics Department at Royal Holloway, which is my alma mater and a sanctuary for brilliant and entertaining eccentrics. It's also a very very good Classics department, and those are few and far between now. I'm speaking as someone who dumped the Classics course at Oxford after a year to transfer to RHUL, and never regretted it for a second; this department would be a terrible loss to the world of Classical academia. (Which I realise is not a sentence to spark a revolution, but it would). Also, it was the first university anywhere to offer a Classics degree to women, starting a hundred and twenty-five years ago. Be a shame to lose it now.
Here are some things my world and the world in general would be poorer without;
-Doctor Nick, who started my first Greek Lit lecture by hiding under a table when the Head of Department walked in unexpectedly, wore socks and sandals even when it was snowing, inexplicably had pockets that were larger than his trousers and was probably the best teacher I've ever encountered.
-Richard Alston, who has nothing to do with modern dance and once put his shoe on the lectern to prove the point that we wouldn't remember anything about that lecture except that he put his shoe on the lectern (he was right).
-The ineradicable memory of a corridor full of jittery and caffeine-demented Latinists trying to jam in last-minute revision by singing about Latin grammar to the tune of "Do The Locomotion' ("The dative and the ablative just don't make sense/but it will all be perfect in the future tense...")
-The fact that I can recite elegantly obscene poetry in Latin, and that is a skill not enough people have these days.
There is a Facebook group here. Please go and join it. There's a petition you can sign and stuff.
Classicists are a dying breed as it is, and the world may not need more people who eat ice lollies in bed and post about it on the internet, but it sure as hell needs more people who can do it in Latin.