Catch-up
I see ten days have passed since the last news from the North. Apologies to old & valued clients, but last week was the one in which all the courses on which I lecture contrived to want me simultaneously with the exception of History of Science, and on top of all that, we also had both the feast of reason & flow of soul, and dinner with the boss. The occasion for the second-mentioned complication was, naturally, the first. The F of R etc. in question was inaugurated by a quondam Principal who decided that we required to be Uplifted periodically by exposure to Greek Art. I don’t know what the Uni knows that everyone else doesn’t, but it used to be several years between outbursts of Uplift while the kitty which supports it filled up. But we were Uplifted last year, and this year we are being Uplifted again — given the state of the world’s finances, this suggests that someone other than the speakers is being remarkably clever: if this goes on, we will end up being Uplifted as often as a congeries of ageing Hollywood beauties. Anyway, this year’s Uplift is jolly interesting and it is not its purveyor’s fault that I was not exactly in the mood last week. Then we had complications with the Professor’s computer, finally diagnosed with senile dementia and replaced, then we had complications with the replacement computer, then the Professor went to London where he still is. He gave a paper in Oxford which was apparently a success, though it was quite hard to tell at the time, since it was received with that peculiar Oxonian chilliness which gives the impression that they are all marking you out of 10 and seems further to imply that anyway they’d known all that all along, and didn’t everyone? We have both given enough papers in Oxford to be resigned to this but all the same, it would be quite nice if they came off it. It sounds as if his evening was a stark contrast to dinner with the boss in the previous week: the Northern Gentleman once asserted that the basic Scots personality is a combination of Dismal Old Edinburgh Lawyer and Jacobite Cavalry Officer in varying ratios, a bon mot with more than an element of truth, and for reasons not wholly clear, the Jacobite Cavalry Officer element in all those present rose to the top and frothed over like yeast. The four portraits behind the Boss’s chair, which are all of individuals who actually were out in 1715 or wanted to be, stared down with a ’seen it all before’ look on their painted faces, and the Distinguished Guest (Cantab.), though initially somewhat taken aback, um, entered into the spirit of things. I have a bit more Uplift tomorrow night, and will return (I hope) to find the Professor and Dr Brennan the Artist installed in my absence. It will be nice to have him back, and to see Dr B., and I’m sure the animals will be pleased: what with my being out for twelve hours a day on Monday and Tuesday, they must have been having a terribly boring time. I attempted to walk Miss Best Friend at 8 in the morning, but she was having none of it: she simply sat down on the gravel and gave me a hard stare. ‘I don’t have a walk in the morning’, she said. ‘I have a walk in the afternoon‘. I’m afraid she has got awfully set in her ways.