The End of June

Some of you may have heard me bang on in my classics voice - which is loftier and more stentorian than my non-classics voice - about the thesis I've just submitted for my Masters degree. If you've made the observation that such a degree is redundant, since I was long ago promoted from the ranks of Master to Mister anyway, you're probably right. Nevertheless, you may call me Master of Philosophy - if I pass, that is - at any point after 16 July. That's right, I became a deep thinker behind your backs. You know, Descartes n' shit. It's all up here. I'm pointing towards my nostrils.

In reality, not many will have heard me bang on, because I prefer not to bang on full stop (what's this blog then?), let alone about stuff that trips a switch to make the hearer's eyelids stutter and break down. But this approach, which I played in an Australian environment of rich occupational diversity, trading awkward silence on my part for awkward silence on the interlocutor's, is fast becoming outmoded. The other day I registered a point of blinding obviousness to most people, occult mysticism to myself. Here it is: everyone in Cambridge is an academic. Most are interested in what you're doing, and can engage very closely with it if the zoom is withdrawn but a little. Years of social training in dealing with obscurity have made it difficult to wean myself off the assumption that no one wants to hear it. So it's taking me a good while to get better at talking about what I do every day. That's unsurprising, given I've just had the realisation that it's worth talking about.

With the exception of a few shrunken chip packets of humanity, most students here have had a pretty liberal education. So I'll give you an example of a conversation I've had which illustrates the obsolescence of my time-honoured principle (no talk, no bore). Standard practice is to start wide and then narrow, testing the limits of recognition and enthusiasm on the listener's side. But I found myself repeatedly underestimating the other person's knowledge, along these lines:

Dude: So what do you work on then?
Tom: Classics. Latin and Greek. Yep. Latin and Greek.
Dude: I know what classics is. What area?
Tom: Mostly Latin poetry, around the birth of Christ.
Dude: I know who Christ is. Which poets? Virgil?
Tom: Yes! Sometimes. Have you heard of Ovid?
Dude: Of course. Metamorphoses, Fasti...which work?
Tom: Fasti actually. It's one of his lesser known poems, based on the Roman calendar...
Dude: I've read the Fasti. I found it intensely boring. Turning a calendar into poetry! The whole structure is unsound in the first place.
Tom: Sir, I have misjudged you. What do you do?
Dude: Astronomy.
Tom: Stephen Hawking. Black holes. Ok, see you later.

That's a stylised and extreme example; but it's not so far from the more egregious moments of real life misjudgement I've indulged in over the last nine months. I'm mentally redrafting a manifesto for talking about things academic in Cambridge as a result. First principles will be 'omniscient until proven selectively ignorant' and 'fascinated until proven bored by performing acts of self-harm to drown out the pain of classical noises'. Nine months and finally adjusting. They didn't test my reaction time when they let me in, evidently.

None of this is to say that you Oz pals are raging philistines who invariably put me off by deflecting the conversation from Horace to beer, Lucan to barbecues. I locate the fault squarely in myself: I'm a man of habit, and not talking is a bad habit. I know that most of you are genuinely interested, so don't shy from asking me for that crossword answer. We could even use the crossword answer as a springboard for wide-ranging incursions into the classical world. Only if you want, of course. No pressure.

Now that the contract code-named 'permission to bore' has been signed, let's roll. I noticed (tardily yet again) a neat simultaneity between art and life this week. The poem I wrote my thesis on - Ovid's Fasti - is indeed based on the Roman calendar (see implausible dialogue above). It promises to go all the way and deliver entertaining stories behind festivals and stars sequentially for all twelve months of the year. But it breaks off at the end of June. We only have six months. It's the best textual apocalypse I know of: time literally comes to an end. Note that June 30th is today. So the time I've lived with this thesis (I started thinking about it seriously at the New Year) pretty much corresponds exactly to the length of time covered in the poem. I've held Ovid's hand from January to June - and both our works stop. Ovid claimed it was exile (see 'The Pitch' post) that broke the Fasti. I'm not headed for an eternal winter in Bulgaria, but I am going to see my mum in Italy soon. Ovid wanted his work burned after exile, drama queen at heart. Of course nothing was burned and copies proliferated. I burned a copy of my thesis and maintained electronic versions. Ovid wrote verse when he tried to write prose. I write prose when I try to write about his verse. The parallels are astoundingly tenuous!

You'll note I spend a lot of my time trying to get Ovid into bed - a bed spanning 2000 years. It's a big bed. But enough on that. Let's talk about sex. I mean, summer. Cambridge has fallen into a different kind of quietude now: it's hot as western Sydney in November (chose unfamiliar terms for that one - don't really know what western Sydney is like at any time of the year, nor most probably do you, ye of affluent centrality), tourists block your thoroughfare and fan your self-importance, and every man has his shirt off with a view to boiling those back pimples until they shrivel into freckles. The undergrads have upped and left, dwelling on the disappointment or thrill of a 2.1 (exam results are divided into classes: oversimplified, a 1st is 70 and above, a 2.1 60-69, 2.2 50-59, 3 40-49 - by far the majority gets a 2.1). But not before they've enjoyed what a friend described as the only period in which Cambridge is a mentally sanitary place: May Week. Yep, it's always in June. But I like to think of the name as not so much a temporal reference as an index of license. This is the week in which students ask their studious consciences: 'May we have guilt-free fun for once?' And their consciences benevolently reply: 'You may.' Every college runs a ball/party/garden party, which means that there are multiple events crammed into every day. The balls of the monerable (my term for Trinity and Johns etc: both moneyed and venerable) colleges are famed for elegance and extravagance. Black tied men, frocked up ladies, illimitable booze and food, fireworks, music, fun fun FUN till the sun comes up, and then some (they usually close about 7am). I didn't buy any tickets to this sort of thing in 2009 for two equally moral reasons: because I hate stuffy decadence (non-stuffy is permissible), and I couldn't afford to go (tix cost upwards of a hundred pounds a pop). Maybe when I get a job. You'd think I would have realised the problems with that wistful sentence of pleasure deferred by now: for of all things on the event horizon, a job is at the singularity. Black hole reference. That's my conversational trump card reserved for astronomers, as above.

Even if I could afford a ticket to a May ball proper, I think the problem would be the capitalised FUN, the pressure that 120 pounds compressed into 9 hours creates, especially for an Australian. You can perhaps predict where this is going; but I'm going to go, blessing or not. I much preferred the King's answer to a ball: theme, but no dress code, endless basic booze, snacky festivalesque food, inflatable rides, five stages of bands/djs from 9pm-5am. And all for a comparatively modest 60 pounds. Which still sounds pricey to a western mind, hardened in the fine arts of price-taggery, but when you think about the setting - King's college turned into a multi-coloured playground for one night only - this cynical punter thinks it 'worth it'. In so far as experience can be monetarily quantified (which it has to be - and before the event too - otherwise we'd all be paying what we got out of that gig according to our own idiosyncratic conversion rates), I thought the King's Affair landed it spot on.

Thus my past two weeks have disappeared in lazy flights of drinking, punting, unsuccessful mushrooming, Londoning: summering. From tomorrow onwards, the symbolic first day of the rest of the year, where the Fasti's tentacles don't quite reach, I'm stocktaking for the remainder of the season. But for one more day, I plan to revel in the time I have to do everything, and the prohibitive poverty tagging alongside, tugging its loose shirt: yeasayer and naysayer walk, arm in arm, towards the end of June.