Friday ramblings
Care of the Self: the state of my hair has been driving me nuts for several weeks now, and I finally managed to get myself and my hairstylist (who works a very weird schedule that seems to change from week to week) in the same place at the same time, so I am no longer peering at the world like the Dulux sheepdog.
I can haz being SRS enuff for Radio 3! - did an interview this pm for a programme that will be going out to the elite and intellectual listener in late December.
We can haz sex edycashun! (compulsory, from age 5.) Of course, as to the actual quality of the teaching involved, deponent speaketh not, but is inclined to suspect that it will be extremely variable.
A small way of saying thank you: Bennett donates his life's work to the Bodleian: Writer hands over archive 'in gratitude to nanny state': Oxford library thrilled with gift of manuscripts:
Bennett was originally prompted by a former Bodleian chief librarian, David Vaisey, a friend since they met as undergraduates, and said yesterday that he saw the gift as a debt repaid.
"I was educated free right from the start. I was educated free in Leeds where I went to a state school, and then I got a scholarship to Exeter College Oxford, and so at no point did my parents or me have to pay anything for my education.
"One didn't have much money, but one never really gave money a thought because you had just about enough to be going on with. Now that's a situation that students today can only dream of, really.
"In that sense giving the manuscripts to Bodley - it sounds rather pious - is a kind of small recompense for what I was given. And not merely given by Oxford, I also feel I was given it by the state, and the state isn't something that people would normally thank or think well of and hence the phrase 'the nanny state'.
"I was nannied in the sense that everything was paid for, the Leeds education committee gave me a scholarship and then I had another scholarship later on: now if that's being nannied, I'm all for it."
Oxford has recently led the demand for the elite universities to charge massive top-up fees: Bennett drew a firm distinction between his support for the library he loves and the university administration.
Awwwwww, bless'im. And leader column In Praise of Literary Bequests (though I wished they'd looked just a little beyond just the literary).
Win some, lose some, in cases involving up-themselves-doctors