To the Future of the Past: a Gingerly Toast

History's flux aside, the Cambridge Classics faculty must have always fancied itself at the rear, van and centre of ancient world study. If its position has largely remained constant, what has changed is the aptness of that opening metaphor in the articulation of what classics is about, what classics does. As 'classics' has precipitated into a field like all the others - one tightly regulated range of Dewey numbers in the sum of human knowledge - it has also, simultaneously, turned into a battlefield. Fighting off attacks on all fronts, classics has become an exercise in self-defence as much as anything else; the anxiety of relevance has been so deeply internalised in the discipline that even the greatest practitioners of the thing, the beacons in an intellectual twilight, are wont to be asked repeatedly, and ask themselves repeatedly: 'why?' To some extent, the existential pangs are common ground among all the humanities at the historical moment: sweep the soft carpet of public money out from under anyone and they'll feel those raw floorboards splintering their back and puncturing their self-worth. The murmurs of the classicist are bound up with the nail-biting of the philosopher and the goosebumps of the historian. The hunched back and atrophied muscles of the professor are finally being called up to fight for survival - and, surprise of millennia, it's not going that well at all.

Those tidbits of gloom-mongering were a dime a dozen at a gigantic classics conference held in the Cambridge faculty last week. Recognising full well that you can't do classics without picking up a heightened sense of irony along the way, the brain behind the meeting chose to call it 'Cambridge Triennial 2011: a Celebration of Classics'. Pre-colon was solid enough: this Oxbridge effort happens every three years (alternating between Oxford and Cambridge), one of the best (well, quality if not quantity) conferences on the calendar for our fair subject. Post-colon on the other hand was, in the course of the proceedings, unveiled as a cruel joke. 'Celebration' turned out to have the lugubrious resonance of a 'celebration' of someone's life at their funeral; half-hearted smiles and fond memories vainly claiming to compensate for the grim fact that the person is DEAD. And all the while uncle Tom sat in the corner getting drunk, screaming that he never liked the fucker anyway.

I predictably exaggerate; but the question 'whither a whimpering Classics?' was certainly a refrain of the conference whose frequency made it difficult to ignore. The tone was perhaps set by the timely announcement that the teaching of classical languages at Royal Holloway (one of the colleges of the University of London) was about to be scrapped, with sizeable staff cutbacks to match. Everyone knows that UK humanities, and tertiary education in general, are gurgling down the plughole thanks to those brave Oxonians in government; but the Royal Holloway news had such talismanic force for many classicists precisely because it seemed so safe there. Like Oxford and Cambridge, the University of London is one of those dusty places the classicist would always retreat to in her weaker moments, one of those few institutions with synecdochic importance for the discipline, containing the message blazoned across its chest in Carolingian Minuscule: 'Classics: If Not Here, Then Nowhere'. The number of British classicists that googled 'civil service jobs' on the day the Royal Holloway music died must have been astronomical. I certainly started dreaming of a kind of paradisiacal bank that would need my sensitivity to poetic ambivalence in order to turn a profit: 'You tell me to buy or sell as if they were disjunctive phenomena; but are they not - I submit to you, Mr. Goldman Sachs - two sides of the same coin?' I was promptly fired and forced to sell my sensitivity to poetic ambivalence for hits of crack diluted with cornflour.

My own personal nightmares were what they were; but needless to say the general mood was severely affected by the fog over Royal Holloway. And of course it didn't help that the first plenary address of the three-day ancientfest was given by none other than a great scholar from...Royal Holloway. Edith Hall had written a famous book called 'Inventing the Barbarian', so the obligatory reference to the barbarians at the gate of classics was already knocking in the chair's introduction. Her speech itself was about deliberation and democracy in the Athens of Sophocles, and the processes of such that filtered into his tragedies. Her last powerpoint slide drew the barbed point that everyone knew was coming even if they couldn't quite see how (a bit like tragedy itself): no deliberation, consultation or democracy to be seen in the university administration that ravaged one of its departments at the drop of a hat. People loved this conclusion, and allotted a good measure of applause accordingly; I myself lapped up the energy and politicisation of a crowd which, in the long light of history, is not quite famed for broad social conscience. But I still (as ever) felt tremours of guilt and reservation vibrate between the vigorous claps. Was this not the very definition of middle-class activism - only devoting yourself to a cause when your immediate interests are threatened? It's certainly difficult to make a clean case for the indispensability of classics to humanity from the position of someone who gets paid to do it. To a (cynical) outside observer surveying speaker and captive audience, it would have looked like a wholly consistent collection of self-reinforcing 'you would say that's and 'you would clap there's.

A central bind, as I see it, is that those who are best qualified to expatiate on the value of classics in terms of knowledge (the people that do it, that is) are least qualified to preach in terms of moral position; and yet, self-evaluations delivered by someone whose neck is in the noose are neither innocent nor trustworthy, but they are still more accurate than the executioner's own valuations, the person that looks and sees only a job to do and a nuisance to get rid of. The classicist is made into a precarious mix of advocate and defendant, the one that isn't necessarily, but could well be, saying anything to save their own skin. One of the grand arguments deployed in the humanities tends to monopolise humanity itself, claiming something like 'the humanities make us more human' or 'humans are no longer human without the humanities'. I've always been sympathetic to this warm and fuzzy sentiment, especially when fleshed out convincingly in a book such as Martha Nussbaum's recent 'Not For Profit'. But as I drank in the programmatically and ambitiously titled first conference paper 'Reception: A New Humanism?', I found myself bristling a little over the implicit hubris. There was talk of classical reception (a recent growth-area of classics, in simplified version a charting of the classical world's influence on and afterlife in the history of art, literature, philosophy etc) stepping up to become the 'saviour' of classics - as if the subject had messianic value not just for classics itself, but for humanity in general. There was talk of ten year plans and setting the agenda, controversy over the pedagogical worth of the canon or a canon...as if we were determining the future of humanity that very day, in that very cramped lecture room. Again, I couldn't help positing the outside observer, perhaps the cleaner who would come in the evening, to whom these debates would be so many half-empty plastic bottles and a couple of scrunched-up handouts. Even if we were to let stand the very circumscribed and elite definition of humanity that 'humanism' throws at humans, even if we were to agree that the human would be irrevocably impoverished without the humanities, the jungle would merely thicken the further we hacked; for the question would have to be begged: 'Humanities, ok - but why Classics?'

And yet I couldn't even beat the first hurdle. Does the study of the humanities really create more sympathetic human beings, equipped to flit fleetly into the lives of others, tolerant, compassionate, generous? Or does it create shrivelled husks of humanity that prefer their books to their fellow beings, rendering them misanthropic carriers of some kind of torch - but a torch that would only illuminate the 'cultured' half of humanity as they worked at their desks, and happily incinerate the rest? Classics, second perhaps only to mathematics in the high-level autism it generates/attracts, doesn't exactly specialise in positive exempla of humanity. Plenty of people I've met in this discipline wouldn't quite fit the open, calm, smiley prescription of humanity that you might want to put in photographs for a 'Welcome to Planet Earth' brochure. Nor is this wholly their fault; the pressure of the academic climate is not the best at producing collaborative and patient members of the species. As with all segments of modern capitalism, the free market education system needs a lesser version of humanity to thrive: a jostling crew of selves competitively defending their intellectual property. So if humanism were all it's cracked up to be, I felt, then it should be the antidote to this shrunken homunculusness, not another victim of it. But nothing around me told me so; it was all ill-fitting suits, publishers' stands, intellectual tussling, taut minds, contracted bodies.

Until, that is, our own Messiah came: in the guise of Tony Grafton. Feeling shrunken and guilty myself over taking a few days off 'urgent' work time, I very nearly missed this gem of a plenary address; the title piqued my interest, but no more than the usual vague titular titillation ('How Classical was the Classical Revival? Jews and Judaism in the Renaissance Vision of Antiquity'). The speaker was unfamiliar, and my excursions into the history of classical scholarship had never made it past the corner store. All signs were pointing to an escape to the library; but slowly I wrestled myself out of the desire with some familiar self-guilt-tripping: 'How often do you get a chance to learn from people rather than books in this game? When did reading that shitty article become more important than learning something new? Your failure to attend this lecture is an indirect capitulation to the iron grip of RELEVANCE. Sit your ass down home slice.' Bowing to the commands of my internal monologue was, in this case, one of the best decisions of my life.

The talk was, as (I think) the Germans say, balm for the soul. It featured wit and sparkle, but these can always be later additives; what was really unique was the combination of good humour with the solid research nugget you simply can't invent from nothing. Its humbly-put claim was really quite revolutionary (bear with me): that for at least two of the great renaissance classical scholars, Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger, the study of Hebrew and the traditions of Judaism was a fundamental comparative pivot for their more famous work on Latin and Greek. This may not sound like much to most; but for a young classicist trained in the idea of the renaissance as a reflowering of the Classical world, confined to the hermetic corpus of Greek and Roman, it was a beautiful moment of seeing history afresh. Avid, prolific readers both of them, the Greek manuscripts that passed through the hands of Casaubon and Scaliger are littered with comments in Hebrew; indeed, one of them (Casaubon?) spent so much time in autodidaxis that he could translate bits of complex Greek into Hebrew like it was going out of fashion (which it probably was). Bent double over a desk in the Bodleian, this scholar-figure made our own conception of classics, however broad, seem sickeningly narrow. The best talks, I find, make you want to learn everything merely by adumbrating the boundaries of your own knowledge and gesturing to a perimeter outside - and once the perimeter has moved once, there is no necessity that it remain in place there either. If Hebrew, why not Aramaic? Why not Akkadian? Why not classical Chinese? Classics became, in a rare moment, not an intimidating collection of German monographs on Juvenal's use of rhetoric, but an open field of ever-receding borders. Wonderful and humbling, yes; but the question was: humanising?

The talk answered this too. One of its other distinctive marks was the amusing snatch of biography surfacing from time to time; Casaubon and Scaliger were not just marginal comments on a manuscript, but letter-writers too, full participants in their unique historical moment. Grafton had mentioned, half-way through the talk, a young Jew in Oxford who sat with Casaubon and gave him one-on-one Hebrew lessons. This important character made another appearance in the final anecdote. The university had gotten wind of the man's linguistic expertise and wanted to appoint him a professor of Hebrew; but given the strict intertwining of institution and religion, that couldn't happen without the man's conversion to Christianity. Happily Jewish, the man had no interest in converting, and so, as the pressure mounted, he fled Oxford. The university authorities tracked him and hauled him back, imprisoning him as punishment for the affront, and assurance that it wouldn't happen again. Casaubon heard the news and intervened immediately, doing everything in his power to free his former tutor; eventually he went right to the top, writing the archbishop with a special plea for the man's freedom. It was granted, and our man walked: still himself, still Jewish.

The message fell short of rocket science and tumbled towards triteness, but was powerful for its clear intelligibility: in an atmosphere of normalised suspicion and hostility, where anti-semitism was the absolute default, the understanding gained from a deep relationship with another culture chiefly through text, was directly transmitted into appreciation, tolerance, friendship. One of the most basic operations of the humanities - our equivalent of addition or multiplication - is comparison. We compare things that seem different to show they are the same, at least as much as we compare things that seem the same to show they are different. The constant acts of connection and comparison performed daily by Casaubon settled in his mind until the commonalities between 'his' culture and another were habitual and obvious. This was the grand tradition of sympathetic humanism at its basic best: training by text to appreciate another human being, activating this training into a political intervention. As the story washed over me, I felt a lump in my throat.

The tears were already forming as the applause rolled on for many, many seconds; but it took Malcolm Schofield's dignified response for the real wells to start flowing. He took Grafton's words and put them side by side with the Norwegian killing spree, one final act of time-straddling comparison to close. But this comparison showed differences, opposites: on the one hand, a humanism that created a bond between two full-fledged humans; on the other, a narcissistic extremism that denied to others what it granted in full measure to the self. If we can claim anything as classicists, we can claim that our efforts to familiarise the past are parallel to, and fortify, our efforts to know our fellow humans; and our efforts to distance it can't do much else other than increase our enabling sense of relativism, make us aware that if humanity was different in the past, there is no reason that it can't be different (better) today, tomorrow. The practice of classics is just one (particularly good) way to dissolve stony extremism into harmless, silly-looking sherds. Anthropology will do it, philosophy will do it, literature will do it; the humanities will do it. If classics jumps in as an important player, it would do well to drop its rhetoric of 'foundational importance', as if it owned the humanities by spawning all of them. Rather - there being no I in team - it should take its place alongside every arbitrarily divided realm of human knowledge and stand or fall as all or nothing. Humanity doesn't depend on it; but a better humanity does.

Ain't No Lie: The Sport of Kings

Magisterial sleight of hand: this post, like the last, contains a king in the title, but this post, like the last, will have very little to do with King's or Cambridge. Nor will it have much of sport to recommend it. If you feel cheated, you may read all about the phenomenon here. Looks a worthwhile activity.

No, I would fain talk to you about the more specific counterculture of planking - or, as that hyperlink you've just followed would have it, the 'Lying Down Game' (henceforth LDG). Now, up to this point I've considered myself a relatively cosmopolitan citizen: broad traveller, crisscrossing from the richest to the poorest, and good hunks of residential time chewed at opposite ends of the earth, such that I can now verify through autopsy that Greenwich meantime is not a daily, temporary revival of childhood hostilities. But more and more I am finding that the greatest comic joys - those born from reality, no less - are being introduced to me via Skype conversations with my parents: particularly my dad, who has always been an avid follower of current affairs, but is only now really discovering how many current affairs there are in the world when he has infinite time to peruse them. Just envious dad, happy retirement. Anyway, as the parents filled in the details surrounding the current crisis in Australia, punctuating the story with mingled ridicule and condemnation, laughter slowly boiled over within me. Not that brief-remark-on-an-amusing-quirk laughter; that heavy, chest-heaving, open-mouthed, physiological hilarity. Yes, I have a short wire for the laughter bomb. But for some reason, this topical anecdote, that probably just made the cut in my dad's rigorous filtering process for what gets into our Skype conversations, really got under my skin.

There was an element of stubborn nostalgia at first, certainly, intensified by my present conditions of life: I'm in a country where the appetite for Australian stereotypes is bottomless. The way to every surly Englishman's heart is to tell him that you've met Harold from Neighbours in the most parodically Australian accent you can muster - admittedly easier if the parody is self-parody. Near three years in a land and the land must leave its mark on you, by now a bruised and unwashable suggestion of Britishness. And so I'm sure that an element of the laughter was the condescending spring of the colonist's brain: 'Haha! Only in the antipodes would they be daft enough to kill themselves by planking on a seventh-story balcony!' These myths are the grease and oil of empire, legitimating British exploitation of Australian resources such as sun: those convicts are so busy lying down in high places that they'll never notice how sunburnt we are. Just for the record, Brits - and now I speak as a native of the land downunder - we always plank with one eye open.

There are few feelings more pleasing than the identity safehouse that is the fulfillment of a stereotype - if the stereotype is positive, of course. I take it as a grand compliment when someone applies 'Australian' to me as a fully-fledged adjective over here; it is usually an economical code for 'you can talk to someone for ten minutes with only five awkward silences or less'. But there was more to my planking moment than an affection for my country's celebrated buffoonery, and a humming contentment with life taking on the square dimensions of art. There was something about LDG that transcended taxonomies - something universal. Having said that, I'm not confident that the female half (well, majority) of the human race would find it as funny. And there you go: of course a man would say it's universal when it's not. At least this paragraph proves that the pleasure of the stereotype extends to gender. QED. I'm a man, and thus a scientist.

I shall return to the masculine principle of straight narrative and get back on track. So, there was something about this phenomenon that instantly struck a chord in the (still substantial) juvenile part of my soul. It took me back to my early career in the prank (of which the plank must be a sub-genre): filling up a plastic bottle with water, dog-poo and flowers, putting it on a neighbour's doorstep, ringing the doorbell, yelling 'Patak's Express' and running for the hills. There has always been something inherently thrilling - and comic - about the awkward situation. The idea that someone, that unsuspecting butt, will be at the other end, desperately trying to make the situation fit the laws of social logic; and you, looking on from afar, in no better position beyond the fact that you know the situation can't be fitted to any logic, and the universe, for that one moment, is completely, wonderfully, side-splittingly, random. Hence, during the brief efflorescence of practical joke shows on television, the emphasis on the reactions of innocent bystanders walking past and puzzling over the spectacle. The beauty of the practical joke is that there is nothing to understand, nothing to be 'in on' - apart from the recognition that the thing in front of you is a joke. An illusion more potent than any form of art. But the plank is morally superior to this, for, in its noblest forms, it has no real targets. It is absolutely passive, absolutely inert: you lie down in the most ridiculous location you can think of, and that is that. People only laugh when they exhale with recognition: Ahh, planking I see before me, hehe, nice one. But happiest were those plankers in the early days of the game, before it was an international sensation, who hooked their audience for the briefest of moments before the audience got on with its day. The most lazy, barren, stationary form of street theatre possible: so funny precisely because there is nothing to see.

Apart from its charming subversion of the conventions of practical joking through its understated refusal to perform any action whatsoever, planking also brought back memories of how funny raw physical comedy - slapstick in the pejorative - can be. A (female, for the record) student of mine once suggested that men are funnier because they are freer and sillier with their bodies. While I snapped back that men weren't necessarily funnier, and if they were, that was because humour is deeply implicated with power, and men set the terms for what constitutes funny because they set the terms for the world, and jokes are written by the victor dontcha know - I had to admit to myself that men, in my own experience, do play with their bodies much more (publicly). As an alumnus of a boy's school, I can pick a flashback to any given day in uniform among those deodorised pubescent rats: it will inevitably involve visible arse-cheeks, someone (usually me) doing a smelly fart, and, if we're lucky, a scrotum in a mousetrap. The body was a prime site on which the eternal bid for laughs took place. There is still a (majority?) boyish segment of me that finds unsophisticated physical comedy some of the most distilled humour out there. Even Monty Python - that enigmatic, ever-so-British band of genii - deemed it fit to dip into the comedy of arms and legs from time to time: witness the famous Ministry of Silly Walks.

The Art of Planking plays into this purest of corporeal humour. And one of the other prominent theatres of male bodily awkwardness is, of course, the modern day dance-floor. As a white man, I gave up on aspirations to the merest semblance of rhythm a long time ago. But, as I launch my repetitive moves into infinity and struggle to squeeze any juice out of my stiff German hips, I can't help finding this space one of the most intriguing in western society (G-real, know you've written stuff on this, so jump in and wipe the floor with me if you like). The dance-floor is a realm in which most guys - usually so in control of the comedy of bodies - feel absolutely powerless. They are not sure what their limbs are supposed to be doing. I may be extrapolating unwisely here; but many men I lock eyes with in a club scream to me silently of a world in which people could listen to music without feeling the social compulsion to motorise their appendages. And so one night, nauseous with constant oppression at the hands of the agile, I decided to take a stand. By lying down. I was drunk, and decided that the best move I could pull off in the middle of a cleared circle was to lie down and pretend to be asleep. I had found my niche. But what I didn't realise was that my niche had, in a broad sense, already been found, and had found me. I was unknowingly participating in a venerable sport which had been around more than ten years. I was planking the dance-floor.

So I must admit that part of the plank's special appeal lies (yes) in my wistful longing to have invented it. So, perhaps, with all things piss funny on this earth. To stiffen a little further, on fifth thought the humour of the plank reminded me of Henri Bergson's work on the comic; I haven't had much to do with humour theory (despite my predisposition to the cack), but this French man seems to come up a lot in the little I have read. Far as I can make head or tail of the philosopher's jests (and could you ever write a theory of humour that didn't take the piss out of itself?), much laughter is induced by the recognition of human bodies acting like mechanical entities, taking on the appearance of automata. And what could be more robotic than the plank - than a body, customarily the seat of free movement, suddenly transformed into a thing that doesn't work, doesn't do anything? Complete stasis is the degree zero of repetition. The plank thus teaches us a useful lesson: death is the funniest thing that a human can do.

After swearing solemnly to myself and my parents that I would never plank, I got drunk and I tried. I now have a small wound on my forehead. And though, after that disaster, I will never let the animal out of the cage again, I can't bring myself to join the chorus of moral hysteria. A good physical joke is an irresistible force of joy, and an injury inflicted in jest from the other side of the world is, if nothing else, the sign of a good physical joke. The joke is on me: on my neanderthal forehead that has evolved, or refused to evolve, specifically for a good planking.

We Three Kings

Being a classicist has its advantages. You are equipped with the raw knowledge to answer that obligatory ancient world question in pub-quizzes, subsequently no longer useful, and so at liberty to buy the next round of drinks; for both of which contributions your teammates are mildly grateful. You can etymologise your way out of, or into, any argument: 'Umm, I think you'll find that's from the Latin meaning 'your opinion is flawed because you don't know Latin very well''. And, at Cambridge, you can wince money out of the faculty for travel to any land that the Greeks or Romans touched in their, erm, fairly tactile imperial encounters. I think I speak on behalf of all professions and disciplines when I say, in all earnestness, that you would be mad not to be a classicist.

Fortunately, no one takes my career advice on board; and an equally fortunate corollary is that there remains a pot of cash in my faculty for travel to 'classical lands'. This time last year I dipped into the account for an excursion to Crete with good friend Volker. By law of there never being too much of a good thing, we decided to repeat the spring-travel pattern this year, keeping the company but riffing the destination. After characteristically small deliberation, we set on Israel as the target: close by plane, distant by culture, richly embroidered with some urgent world politics, and, above all, acceptably classical.

To lay my traveller's cheques square on the table, I have a history of arbitrary tourism syndrome. In 2006 - bored by the prospect of an honours year in my beloved discipline - a crew of the curious span the globe blindfolded and lighted a digit on...West Africa. And so it was, an extempore adventure through the legacy of French colonialism. But this time, my interest in the destination had deeper roots than those that grew from the small arbitree. Israel had been firmly lodged in my imagination ever since Rabbi Blackman (?) bribed dialectic out of our teenage minds with a smorgasbord of fresh bagels. Since that day - not the last time I, an unapologetic member of the Goy family, crossed that sacred threshold of lunchtime discussion - I've built long-lasting relationships with many Jews, and much Jewish culture. With the help of incidental snippets of conversation, text and site over the years, I felt I had pieced together at least the bare bones of the diasporic people of the Sabbath. My mental efforts paled in comparison to the real life reconstruction that is the state of Israel.

For a guy who struggles with opinions, more adept at scorning the misplaced conviction of others than forming his own, Israel is a hell of a place. This hotly contested patch of barren land is about as far from my (equally barren) Australia as you can get: the middle class suburbs of Sydney, famed for their generous apathy, are sites wherein the residents scarcely hold their eyes open enough to see themselves from day to day, let alone the rest of the world. No one looks at us; and we have trouble returning a favour that isn't given in the first place. If some Euro type is ever riling you with his/her swaggering cosmopolitanism and railing at the American parochial mentality over a perfectly rolled cigarette, just ask them whether they have an opinion on Sydney's proposed second airport. Guaranteed they'll pause for a puff and swiftly steer the conversation back to Israel. For everyone, everyone is looking at Israel. It is the capital of the cosmopolitan gaze, the naval of world politics. It is saturated with the cumulative opinions of the human race. A space (discursive and geographical) where it is impossible not to put your foot in it, because it is impossible to keep both feet out of it.

I suspected that I would have to run the 'prospect of a second airport' diversionary tactic many times over in the holy land, averse as I am to heated conversation even in this cold country. But on arrival, I had trouble finding the belligerent opinions I was steeling myself to avoid. Mostly, sadly, people (and by people I mean the small subset of relatively liberal, younger generation Israelis we had access to) spoke with a weary resignation: rockets from Gaza creeping ever closer to Tel Aviv, IDF airstrikes, terrorist bombings, full-scale war brewing on the horizon. People talked of these matters with a kind of fashionable nonchalance. Our cabbie to Ben Gurion airport spoke for the whole (insofar as this country could ever be uniformly 'represented') when he slotted the insouciant comment 'There will be a war in the summer....Nobody likes the mud.' Violence in Israel belongs to the realm of the banal, its relapse about as surprising as (and intimately linked to) the passing of the seasons. People would gossip about the escalating tension as if it were tangible as the thick air before a storm; they could 'feel it coming'. I found this meteorology of war as staggering as the casual melodrama with which it was processed.

The intensity varies from place to place; but certainly Jerusalem was a focal point within a focal point. My imagination fell short before such a city: every stone loaded with religious significance, an unfair burden when each piece struggles to maintain structural integrity at the same time. And for every stone, at least a hundred fans and fanatics. It was another eye-opener for this secular soul whose religious education amounted to committing the first five books of the old testament to memory. Only four remain. Anyway, in a relaxed overlap, the third holiest site of Islam forms a metallic mesh with the centre of the Jewish universe, fortuitously married to the home of Christianity. Happy family, happy family. But all the while a cowboy wearing a kippah, holding a cross and reading from the Koran whispers in the corner: 'There ain't enough room in this one-mule town for the earth's three Abrahamic religions.' Everywhere a sensation of hostile jostling grips you. In the narrow, crowded passages of the old city, a pimply young Hassid weaves an ungainly route through hordes of aging German protestants in his hurry to school - almost tripping over a young Muslim shop runner who is carting a load of empty gas canisters in a diagonal direction. Competing identities make grabs for space at a wider topographic level too: the old city is divided into distinct quarters (Armenian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish). The new city has its own abrasions, ironically magnified where there are no holy sites to fight over: ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim, a village of black-clad sidelocked men and invisible women, shares a main-road border with predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem. How about 'intra-religion' unity? Well, venture into the motley church of the Holy Sepulchre and feel the finely chopped love: every denomination has its own corner to whisper in (complete with whispering cowboy), and the Greeks intercepted any harmony of vista by putting up huge walls in the very centre of the place, walls that prevent border crossing through the most basic visual effort, being here and seeing there. From every vantage point, Jerusalem is a city of fractured views.

Not that walls in a church constitute the country's biggest mural problem. We took a day out from Jerusalem to venture across the hefty concrete slab dividing Israel from the West Bank (in recent years the quieter of the two Palestinian territories). Again, I carried my 'second airport' conversation in an emergency glass container. But all we found in Ramallah was construction, good cheer, and what appeared to be a whole lot of wealth: posh cars threaded through infrastructure that was brand spanking new, or will be in a year's time. The city seemed to be receiving a very direct, very conspicuous facelift when we were there; one of the central pedestrian roads was being torn up guts and all, in order to lay the foundations of what will be, fingers crossed, a new Palestinian nation. Seeing such a functional and - if a day tripper is licensed to say - prospering city was a much-needed complement to the images of abject refugee camps dominating western media. We were detained by the owner of a sandwich shop for a few minutes and listened eagerly to a spirited argument for sovereignty - all delivered (sandwich included) in a genial, non-aggressive manner. From our limited experience, this seemed to be an approach quickly snowballing into a zeitgeist: mainstream Palestine is committed to displaying an 'acceptable' face to the world, letting people (i.e. the west) into its primarily 'normal' everyday life. Mahmoud is just like you and me, Jimmy. While such a strategy might tend to occlude blemishes in favour of slapdash capitalist cosmetics, a change of image is not to be underestimated. Start building, acting, looking like an official state, and eventually you'll be treated like an official state, and eventually you'll be an official state. It worked for Dio Chrysostom, who became a philosopher by dressing up as one, until people started talking to him as one. And then he started talking like one. And then he was one. By no means the end of a complicated peace process; but it plays a role in this world of images.

As always in Israel and the territories, things change in the blink of an eye. The relatively rosy trip from Jerusalem to Ramallah was not the same thing in reverse: entering Israel is like entering a maximum security prison facility where the guards are convinced you're trying to kill them. All Palestinian residents had to leave the bus while their documentation was checked, and in the meantime, two IDF soldiers scoured the vehicle for bombs. Some poor sod had left a bag of snow-peas (or similar greens) under the seat. You could feel the tension surge as the soldiers reluctantly prodded it before picking it up and verifying its vegetable constituents. Then they ran off with our suspiciously unstamped passports. Guns a-swinging the whole time. I've had some distressing border crossings in my life. Senegal into Mali, for example: we gave it a fifty percent chance the bus would drive off without us as we waited on an interminable passport check. Even though I never worried about passport return this time, the crossing took the prize for sheer unpleasantness: looking out the window and seeing Palestinians herded through a wire gate while we surrendered our passports to some aggressive ambassadors already primed into a bad mood through suspicion of snow-peas, stuffed innocently into a guilty-looking opaque bag. The old Heathrow glare and robotic 'What do you study?' was looking like an immigration Club Med.

And all this rigmarole at the end of a period of relative quiet, when checkpoints were supposedly at their mildest and mobility for the Palestinians at a modest high. As soon as tensions re-flare, travel times will explode; what should, by the assumptions and calculations of modern transport, take half an hour to cover, will inevitably balloon to hours. Being a Palestinian in this world must feel a lot like physical disability, or incarceration, or any and every metaphor of impediment: doing time, not on your own time, but on someone else's, the one who decides how long it will take you to cover the same distance you covered yesterday and will cover tomorrow, but who decides differently on all of these days. Hemmed in by a wall of force separating you from your people on the other side (East Jerusalem), and on the other other side of another gigantic territorial wall (Gaza). Contrast our trip to Haifa later that day: straight on a bus and at the opposite end of the country in a few measly hours. Uneven travel times are by no means the worst inequalities in this bumpy region; but they are a quotidian index of frustration in a world that, increasingly, is rightly giving the finger to the tyranny of distance (this Australian joins the chorus). It is no coincidence that some of the most famous scenes of apartheid are played out on buses: places of transition that should highlight community, but often advert to segregation. I leave the image as sketch and not fully-figured parallel; but I know my foot is already deep in it, deep in the picture.

I left this place more confused than I entered it, muddled in the mess of culture, religion, ethnicity; even geography posed problems as I reviewed the 'neutral' flat map. What would a Palestinian nation look like? An Israeli one next to it? I couldn't even complete this simple task of two-dimensional rearrangement and rezoning of space in my own mind. It made we want to erase every line drawn on the landscape in the history of human civilisation and start again, from principles that would give up on an equation between politics and geometry. How about on the moon? No: an astronaut cowboy will still confront me, gesturing towards the national flags that continue to jostle even as they sag: surviving without the life support of all the rhetorical wind and hot air that are some of the unfortunate side-effects of an atmosphere.

The Hegemony of the Interesting

Let my interests be made visible from the beginning: I don't consider myself very interesting. Whenever I read that famous Socratic dictum 'the unexamined life is not worth living', my heart leaps like a puppy that hears the the shake of the chain and falsely infers the promise of a walk - when the owner was just gearing up for some s and m all along. 'Know thyself'. Timeless classical wisdom! Introspection IS the mother of virtue! I swallow these nuggets to the letter, on the assumption - which really should have done itself a favour and self-erased by now - that something 'interesting' will emerge. But when I turn inward, all I see is a young boy on a comfortable couch, playstation controller in hand, thanking his mother for the orange juice, locking his eyes on mine, and robotically addressing me: 'C'mon Tom. You know me. Move along. There's nothing to see here.'

Once upon a time I fantasised about the possibilities of total renunciation, total reclusion. I thought the protagonist of Into the Wild embodied a pin-up myth of generation and demographic: absolute self-sufficiency. Imagine: giving it all up to be at one with nature, in the company of a beaver, the odd salmon, and a full circus of thoughts. Phwoah, the thoughts I'd have! I'd spend half the day deciding whether or not to eat that ambiguously coloured berry, half the day rethinking the institutions of literary criticism. No distractions. No interference. Just me and my world-altering movements of mind.

Since then - whenever then was - I've substantially revised my model of the solipsistic utopia. First of all, given the current frequency and frequent currency of the thought 'Hmm, think I'll have some cheese on toast again', if withdrawn to remotest Alaska, I would most certainly be thinking about the berry much more than the institutions of literary criticism. How about if I raised the bar a little and dwelled in a cottage with unlimited heat, food, other necessities? With the basics guaranteed, would I not be free to think on matters of far greater consequence? Wittgenstein solved philosophy (debatable, but let's run with it for now) on the fringes of Europe, holed up on a Fjord, with little more than pen and paper at his disposal. My mathematician friend daily violates the law of conservation of energy and produces something out of nothing. Given such paradigms, why doubt that solitude reigns as the solid precondition for creativity?

But a doubter I am. And partly because a Wittgenstein, I am not. I prefer to think of my brain in its present state as a Mac (or to be honest, a clunky underperforming PC) with an infinitesimally small hard drive. I divide the labour with my technological partner (a real Mac) according to what we do best. The real Mac acts as the external hard drive to my mind: I connect them and the data is accessible, as long as the cord remains. Every time I need to write something, I read over the notes made on and belonging to the Mac, and I sink beneath the dependency of memory. Very little is stored up here any more; and what is stored is compressed into a kind of zip file which requires a supplementary engine to be read. I no longer recall from scratch; I recognise from prompt. Same goes for what should be the 'objects' of my study, the texts I should know back to front. But until I have something in front of me, until I see the words on the page and the memories sharpen up a crisper universe, nothing happens. No matter how many times I've read the text, without the text's presence: nothing happens.

Self-sufficiency thus always strikes me as a howling oxymoron, whether at work or at play. When there's a whole world of other things and other selves out there, I can't help being struck by how gallingly insufficient the self is. Not just insufficient, but deeply, simply, boring. The opposite of interesting.

You won't be interested to know that I've been thinking (with the aid of my Mac) about the dominance of the 'interesting', particularly in academia, but also everywhere else. How long has this term been floating about as the ultimate goal? Everyone around me strives to produce interesting opinions, have interesting conversations, absorb interesting information; work out five year plans of cultural capital investment which will yield a more interesting person, plus interest. I read a book once (which, needless to say, interested me greatly) called Interpretation and Overinterpretation, and a polemic essay by a leader of the pragmatists ran something like: we shouldn't worry about what we can and can't say in criticism, enough of laws and limits. We can say whatever we like - as long as it's interesting. Other contributors in the book took issue with the ill-defined concept of 'interesting'; but it struck me as an extreme, and extremely accurate, transcription of the thick air of interest around us. 'Interestingness' rests smugly on the analyst's couch, yawning out loud, a pina colada in hand. We sit upright in the analyst's chair, our skin tensed and pencil at the ready. We know we have to listen to interestingness, because it's bound to say something interesting. Interestingness and interestingness alone is the thing that will pique our interest, the only worthy criterion for investigation.

To whose interests are we pandering when we try to be interesting? In the cutthroat world of academia, patterns of interest make or break careers. Interest someone whose interests are similar to yours, and you might just have a job. Fail to interest and the jig is up. Even if we try to go out on a limb and pursue what is interesting to us, and us alone, we play with other players, because our interests have always been set by the agendas of other people's interests. It takes a real visionary to buck the trends and define new areas of interest. And when this happens - Jesus Almighty, it's interesting!

As you can see, I don't have anything particularly interesting to say on the topic of interestingness apart from the fact that I deem it worth thinking about. Yes, interesting. But I'm also going to conclude by making the profoundly uninteresting move that I make in near every post, and contradict myself. As I become increasingly exhausted by the quest for novelty involved in leading an interesting life among interesting people, I become increasingly attracted to the boring. Boredom: that precious, ever shrinking resource in an overstimulated and overinterested life. That's why the puppy heart is going to keep jumping every time I recall - no, recognise - 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. I'll keep turning inwards, surveying the cacti and tumbleweeds, logging off, shutting down, never getting anywhere. And if I shake the shackles of the interesting, even for a few seconds: that's gonna be exciting.

Cut/back

It's one of the finest words in the English language: form and sound shearing it of fat and smoothing it down to hard bone. Cut. Cut cut. Synonyms, in this case, just don't cut it.

I've spent a good cut-out of life in a relationship of deep ambivalence to cuts and cutting. A precise incision was responsible for liberating/flinging me from me mum's belly; a Caesarian section (Latin caedere, to cut) followed by a scissoring of the umbilical cord gave me my first breath as an exiled, discrete human being. The terror of that primal cut travelled through my infant brain and grew into comical ineptitude when it came to the blunt scissors of childhood. I couldn't cut straight to save my life. My first school report expressed major concerns as to my scissor prowess. The greater freedom of high school allowed me to expand into the scalpel genre; would the less bumpy action of a sharp knife improve my technique? No. I lacked the patience to follow the lines, and the decisiveness to cut straight first time without subsequent revisionary motions - motions that targeted tidiness but ultimately yielded more mess. My cuts bore the rugged extemporaneousness of rips. Every incision in the paper was a commemoration of that first traumatic surgery. I wanted to get it over and done with as soon as possible, but botched and repeated the job over and over in my haste. I cut myself from the class - legitimately, I'd never cut class - and hung up the blades that continue to slash at me to this day. The first cut...

While scissor cuts have been substantially removed from my everyday life, I still have to drive the metaphorical knife deep into the text I produce quite regularly. Needless to say, the same hesitation spills over into this cutting process too. Better the writer, better the cutter: a good representative of both, for example, would have cut that paragraph above and deleted a generous portion of this whole blog, slicing sentence after sentence with ruthlessly sharp movements between mouse and delete key. Not I though, shameless believer in quantity. Luckily I haven't had to polish much (any) work this year, but the cuts of yesteryear are still fresh in my mind: sweatily palming through the comments on my first undergraduate essay to find the reason for the bad mark, only to find that it was because I chopped a fundamental section to bring it down to size; painfully parting with chunks of my undergraduate thesis, chunks which were never quite chunky enough to sink it under the word limit; sacrificing that fond pun in my Masters thesis because the remnant would carry the message in one word, not three. With the same uncertain hand that could never quite cut deep enough into the lino block until each repeated shallow cut formed a disastrous over-cut, I worked away laboriously. Every little snick of the razor hurt like hell, and the finished product always looked ugly.

When it comes to text reduction in theory, I now have to tow the party line: I urge students to greater conciseness, economy, to give me more with less, and think of less as more. But what I'm thinking - and what my paradoxically uneconomical comments on their essays bear out in practice - is really: why not use as many words as possible? Why can't multiple forms of expression enhance and clarify the thought? Why shouldn't you experiment with luxuriant rhetoric? Why shouldn't you contest the dominant model of brevity and simplicity, the capitalist logic of most 'material' for least 'expenditure' as applied to language?

In other words, the other words are the point; verbosity has value.

That lengthy pre-amble hopefully bore out the programme obviously enough (and bored you in the meantime, double-whammy). What put me onto the theme in the first place was the more sinister, more penetrating cuts floating around the universities of Britain at the moment: the cuts to higher education planned by the coalition of the no-frilling in government here. Like most acts of violence, in some sick way the cut is sexy; David Cameron and Nick Clegg have shown how lean a machine they can be by slicing through a host of government funded services, and higher education, it seems, is set to cop one of the biggest chops. Students Britain-wide, not to mention many other higher education faithfuls, have taken up the gauntlet in vocal style; nor is it, I'm proud to say, all quiet on the Cambridge front.

As evident from previous posts, I'm about as guilty a practitioner of self-satisfied middle class irony as they come. Traditionally, the cynical sense of humour and the classicist in me have hooked up to form a philosophy of inaction, quite smug and snug, thanks very much: the only way out is to have a laugh (cynical humour). Forget about forming an opinion: a final judgment can never be made because knowledge is always selectively used and occluded, there's always more to know and all I really know is that I don't know nothing (classicist). For these reasons I've always been a little reticent in the realm of the protest: while guts and broad sympathies are aligned with the cause more often than not, I find it difficult to shake the feeling that I'm not quite informed enough to 'demonstrate' a view, and merely adopting one pre-digested by others. A protest, for me, was always bound up with a sense of shame at my over-caution, my inability to ever muster a full-bodied commitment...to anything. I aped the chants at sub-audible volume, afraid to trumpet the lack of conviction in my voice in case it should infect all (sometimes more, sometimes less) devout humans around me. The sensation casts its shadow back to my pathetic incursions into the Sydney punk community as angsty teen: the fear of exposed fraudulence haunted me then, and haunts me now.

But for the first time since I was cut from me mum, I ain't so haunted. The value of higher education is something etched in the genes and the childhood mind: both my parents were beneficiaries of the wave of social mobility that hit Australia in the late 60s and 70s, and a basic part of their forward march was their pioneering venture into higher education. Both took their studies way beyond the narrow horizon of expectation envisioned by their parents for themselves, and the parents of those parents. But their achievements weren't just a triumph over the adversity of cultural, generational habit (though they were indeed that): they were also only enabled by accessible and healthy institutions, schools and universities that offered them subjects they loved without demanding wealth to study them. You'll be spared further sentimental biography, but needless to say: I heart higher education for all.

So, in the wake of announced cuts and fee-increases (a kind of cut, as the cut is a kind of fee), I've been joining the protests, and, well, digging them for real. I'm still a part-time activist (or as one friend pointed out, a full-time passivist), dipping in and out when I don't have to teach. I can't claim full commitment even now. But when I'm there, I'm there. Perhaps it's a mere sign of reduced reservations about the cause, but I'm nervously poised on the edge of admitting that maybe just maybe there could be such a thing as collective spirit. As I squatted on the lawns in front of the university senate house and watched my friend speak clearly through the megaphone, I felt some big, hitherto flaccid words begin to fill up. I still hesitate to say it, I still hesitate, but: it felt as if the smallest strand of that cut cord had been restored, and me and my beings were connected again.

Idling On the Path

July 4th was when this blog last received any attention. Three and a half months ago. In terms of cyber-time, this equates to about five thousand years. A billion transnational kisses on facebook, a billion email handshakes. Online communities, whole civilisations, have risen and fallen several times over. The forces of entropy have turned my neat little scribble pad into a nightmare of neglect: dishes everywhere, toilet blocked, backyard overgrown, outdoor furniture incognito, all items wholly repossessed by the high grass. Time for some overdue autumnal maintenance.

After a much better summer than last year's no frills slumfest, I'm hitting the pitch black: exactly halfway through Cambridge. Light at neither end of the tunnel; just pure unadulterated tunnel. The received wisdom of PhD students everywhere prescribes one of two courses for the following year: deep 2nd year blues, or comfortable hitting of stride. Or strands of both. Speaking from one PhD year down, though, these possibilities feel like nothing new. The sense of narrative form you gain from conversations with peers and immediate elders has an air of futile clutching at normative shadows: a kind of attempt to introduce a comforting undergraduate progression of 1st to 2nd to 3rd year, pass, into what is really a frighteningly amorphous lump. One day I'm reading Derrida on Heidegger on animals; another I'm trying to make insightful comments in the margins of a student's essay on a text I read badly back in 1905. Does that go in the first year report? Where am I at? Where is that in relation to other wheres I could be? Where will I be? Where can I invent as a destination? Where is the dvd remote so I can forget about all this and watch the wire?

Perhaps it's just the way we all do things nowadays, but in some (slightly self-centralising) sense, the (humanities...ok, classics...ok, classical literature...ok, my own) PhD seems to be an exercise for the age. It's isolating, competitive, and most of all, scatter-brained. Not only do long tracts of time at an internet-ready computer encourage flitting coquettishly between worlds of stimulus, but the non-procrastinatory aspect is also unstable. One of the most common questions I'm asked is: classics? how do you ever say anything new? I stifle the answer I secretly harbour in my heart of hearts ('indeed, I suspect we don't say much at all, new or otherwise'), and usually dribble out some lame schtick about 'Classics and Theory' vel sim. But the answer I probably should give is something like 'interdisciplinarity'. Because I like to keep two steps ahead of the OED, which obviously isn't quite interdisciplinary enough to believe in the noun; but also because it's closer to the mark. Being a classicist involves - and whether this is unique to the discipline I'm not disciplined enough to say - a deep belief in the connectedness of all disciplines. You want to read that bit of poetry? Well, you damn well better get a handle on the historical context. You want to get a handle on historical context through a frame other than literature? Well, you damn well better get some skills in deciphering inscriptions, reading architecture, thumbing coins. Learn something about philosophy while you're at it - all your favourites were schooled in the basics. And of course you won't be able to get your head around the otherness without doing some religion. Hop to it young squire. Don't come back until you've mastered everything.

The ever ramifying trees of knowledge you feel you need to climb as a classicist are daunting, unclimbably so. But there is something enabling about an undisciplined discipline, an area of study that has little respect for its own boundaries. The zeitgeist is not, of course, unique to classics; I could pick a PhD student, any student, and I'm sure they could tell me they work at 'the intersection of x and y'. Through the marriage of seeming incompatibles a new idea baby is born (more often than not aborted, more often than that hideously deformed). Fine. But I still feel as if there is something wonderfully, maniacally cross-fertilising about the subject. Not that it happens much, but I feel the potential that I could read a line of Goethe and shed some mind-light on that fragment of Furius Bibaculus. I could read some philosophy of time on top of Ausonius and see what came out. I could read some quantum physics, not understand any, and invite a slap from the stern fat mother in my head: 'What do you think you're doing? Get back in your corner, boy!' You get the idea.

So classics, my classics, is a subject of hyperlinks; you wouldn't think it, no, but a subject with the illimitable sideshadows of an internet cast across its wriggling Promethean form. Perhaps whenever I say classics now, I have to mean '1st year PhD classics' - for I've had what the euphemists might call an 'exploratory reading year'. I haven't kept off the academic grass. I've enjoyed the transgressions immensely. But in the last few weeks, I've tried to reimpose some kind of order - and it hasn't been pretty. I thought that wide reading would pump up my sickly horizons, give me a thousand new methodologies to work with, revolutionise the reading of poetry. But the coup never came. My mind is still my mind, still doing those things it does, silly interpretative pivots, overinterpretation of puny puns, jimmying loose intratextual connections out into the open. Marching around the hermeneutic circle, the only thing changed being my hung-headed embarassment that I'm still marching it. Trying to dip myself into the text and see patterns in the splotches that survive. Playing the game I ultimately like to play: writing about words I don't quite understand.

The interdisciplinary engine stalls under the stress of production. I convinced myself I could go anywhere. But, stripped back to true colours, facing the monumental task of sorting and synthesis, I betray myself: I was a classicist all along. Off the grass and back onto the path: plodding, idling towards that unimportant box marked 'PhDs here'. One box among many others like it. Interchangeability, a comfort like no other.

The Ballad of Hijacked Fun

At approximately 18:15 on the 10th of June, I overheard the following conversation between two microscopic pests. They were sitting by the fourth hairpin bend in my small intestines, historically a lucrative spot for roadside begging:

Max: Alright Rob? How's life in the fast lane?
Rob: (chuckles, resulting in a rumble) Pretty slow at the moment. Haven't seen much action since the bellum intestinum of Africa 2006/7. Made great inroads there. But it was a short-lived victory - bloody homeostatic forces came back and slaughtered the lot of us. Never trust the armies of an embattled body. I only survived by putting on a yellowy white dress and posing as a Yakult bacterium. That got me a bit of work actually - everyone loves Yakult. But however hard you try, you can never get rid of the stigma of foreignness. Nothing much changes in this part of the world. You get trodden on just for being different. But you're young. You need to work all this out for yourself.
Max: C'mon Rob, it's not all that bad. We get a sniff of an upset from time to time. And Johnno was just saying that Cliff told him that there are some big winnings just around the corner. Lots of parties coming up, immune system low, you know. And the machine's getting older. We'll get something soon. I can feel it.
Rob: I'll believe it when I see it.

Two weeks later, lying in bed between my half-hourly trips to the toilet, I felt Rob give Max a big hug. The optimism of youth had trumped father Jaded in a touching success for the little guy, an unlikely win for the underdog over the imperial power of normative bodily functions. It was a beautiful moment, and I had diarrhoea.

It was by no means a unique capitulation. Several of my friends here, keyed into the same Cambridge rhythms that prescribe periods of sickness and health, were attacked simultaneously by flus, colds, infections. Where did our wellbeing go? The south of France? See you in October?

The answer lies in the Cambridge anomaly I briefly sketched out at this time last year: May Week. My cursory remarks were to be found right at the bottom of that post, so many of you wouldn't have made it (I barely make it, and I write the thing). In which case, let's refresh or insert the memory. May Week is the semi-confusingly titled (it is a week, it's not in May) period of concentrated licence at the end of every academic year. After the Undergrads work their hinds off for two months in preparation for the final exams, which in turn follow a good six months of working far harder than any self-respecting undergraduate at most other self-respecting universities, they are rewarded with an expensive and intensive one week course in fun studies. No classes and marks here though: it's pass-fail, the only strict criterion being one non-examinable regurgitation. The relative social quietude of Cambridge in the months leading up to exams really makes this one of the best week-long raves in the world. I can't be a card-carrying misanthrope just yet, for the spectacle of two young lovers passed out on the grass after a sunrise dip in the river, bowties skewed and dress straps akimbo, near-empty bottles of champagne in one hand, each other in the other, still brings an indy tear to my eye. Smart people rarely permit themselves human overindulgence; when they do, what to do but warmly indulge them?

The end of June last year saw the first fruits of a shrivelled income: I simply couldn't afford to buy into May Week in any substantial way, so I did what I always do, made a virtue of necessity, and wrote sulkily 'I didn't want to participate anyway.' I claimed that the King's Affair, one of the cheaper events of the week, was inherently superior. 'Don't bother with Trinity or John's balls' I said, 'they're overpriced wankfests tailor-made for black-tied champagne-swilling Tories. King's, on the other hand, provides left-wing booze at the radical price of sixty pounds. I know which one I'm going for.'

This year I bought a dinner suit and promptly attended both Trinity and St John's may balls on consecutive nights. My party ideologies are easily neutralised with a bit of spare cash. Unfortunately, I didn't start the week in the right zone to play the long game and survive: Monday's Trinity ball chased right at the heels of a bicycle jaunt to Brittany which featured various forces for fatigue, such as long-distance cycling, drinking, lack of sleep, and a nine hour drive on the return. As I sat in the euro chunnel covered in baguette debris, performing my hungover ritual of reading the most difficult unintelligible book conceivable (Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition', which I like to re-title (but not) 'Repetition and Difference', because I didn't understand a word, and so the only satisfying thing I can do with it is make jokes about the title), I trembled at the monstrous levels of fun to be had in the week ahead. I feared I would not make it. And ten pages of Deleuze did not offer anything, not even a footnote, on the dread of excessive bourgeois recreation.

There was nothing to be done but slip into some evening wear and think of mum. Despite my longer term anxieties, Trinity, the first bender, was confidently set in motion. Much as it pains me to hand it to them, it does merit a bit of a purple patch. Luckily I was ticketed on the back of a musician playing at the ball, which meant jumping the lengthy queue and heading in the side entrance. Yep, ordinarily you have to brave an hour long queue for an event that costs 140 pounds. Welcome to the good life. Anyway, I circumvented it with some agile ducking and weaving under the wing of my musical partner. I got in not long after the official start, dived straight in for a G+T, then let my more seasoned colleague drive me straight to the oysters. Apparently these guys - though they arrive in tons - go very quickly. I suggested that this was because people like him eat thirty in quick succession, buckling under paranoid greed. He didn't hear me though; he was too busy breaking his consumption record. I captured the feat on memory card and sucked a few down myself. In the frantic initial rush to eat and drink, slamming Pimms and pigging out on Hog burgers, it took me a while to absorb the surroundings, which were, cynicism aside, beyond special. The usual manicured and empty grounds of Trinity were transformed into something that could be described as a third way between Glastonbury and Outdoor Cocktail Party. Er, much further toward the latter of course. But what struck me as bizarre was the unique mix of sweaty makeshift and haute couture: portable toilets and food tents, fairy floss stands and dodgem cars, doughnuts and strength-testers formed the backdrop to thousands of youths immaculate in their formal dress. Of course there were higher class entertainments on offer as well: string-group dancing in hall that would have seemed equally delightful a hundred years ago, sophisticated toffy comedians, and in the realm of ingestibles, premium quality champagne and a dedicated port and cheese room all night long. But I found the unconvincing veneer of 'classiness' the most charming part of the evening: the space was symbolically arranged so that as you moved from the old buildings to the open air on the other side of the river, the old-fashioned elegance of the entertainment declined: from formal dancing and Moet, past the cheese, over to the jazz tent, past the chocolate fountain and electronica tent, through to the unashamedly carnival world of rides and ice creams. I ended my own night in this region, as I think did most people; it was a lovely, progressive stripping away of affectation as people boozed further and further into animalistic oblivion. It was a synchronised kebab trip after a stuffy dinner of lobster mornay with your posh in-laws. Eventually the common denominator of youth glared garishly through: drinking and driving (small electric cars) in a controlled environment.

The next night was more legitimately punk, but only if the night before it was disavowed. I'm happy with the contradiction if you are. Every year the anti-ball crew flexes their collective middle fingers and decides not to endorse these events by paying for them, but rather to play the latter day Robin Hood and break in for free. The security is tight, particularly at the biguns like John's; at the same time, the 'security' is always a crack team of intimidating Cambridge students. This means that you're likely to know someone, anyone, on the inside. And if you know them well, it doesn't even smell like the stench of corruption - merely the collaboration of prisoner and guard against the man. John's ball this year happened to be saturated with King's men and women working security, so my friend and I thought we'd have a go. The only barrier was the castle-like fortification: we still had to get over the piranha-infested moat and scale the guarded walls before having a remote chance of even whispering to our insiders. But the crash stars were smiling. After some interviews with experienced crashers, we ascertained that the best way to breach was via disguise rather than flashy action-man techniques: posing as garbage collectors was the tested method. So we threw on some understated black, picked up some black bags from the dumpster, and walked straight in the back entrance while the guard had his hands tied with someone else. Unintentionally, the timing was perfect: we made the breach during the fireworks, when all eyes temporarily left their duties to gawk at vast amounts of money exploding into pretty, perishable colours. I realised that this was the chief reason, too, for the superabundance of love on NYE: everyone is staring at the sky and not at each other.

So we made it past the first hurdle; but a crash is a series of them. As soon as we reached the light of the back court, we began to pick up rubbish - not so zealously as to be conspicuous, but trying to keep up a pace comparable to the other cleaners around us. Half an hour in and we were running out of ideas/bin space; the approach had to be modified. Move or die. The problem was that we weren't dressed in evening wear, so couldn't just blend into the crowd of legitimate guests. The smart road would have been to put our suits in the bin bags and change immediately upon entrance; but our success had taken us by surprise, and we hadn't planned this far ahead. Now was the time to call in backup. A King's friend (bless her) came to the rescue, convincing us to dump our bags and follow her - of course, in the presence of another worker, we just looked like run-of-the-mill workers ourselves, having our two hourly break and a much-needed chat. The final major snag was movement between courts: each passageway had several wristband checkers stationed to catch out any undesirables. My friend created a distraction, we fudged our way through, and we were properly into a world of unlimited free booze. Unfortunately we were jammed in the court which specialised in alco-pops. Fortunately the same court specialised in drum and bass. A loss, a win, but we were still up in the lifetime accounts.

At this point, the story becomes a guaranteed favourite of ancient authors who love a bit of vicissitude with their breakfast cereal. Beware good fortune: it will inevitably turn bad. Giddy with success and premixed vodka concoctions, we became a little cocky. We felt the niggling urge to explore the next main court, so we scoped the passageway situation, observed that it was temporarily unguarded - and went for it. We made it through. Anti-climax? No, just a prelude to the real thing. We sipped a few cocktails. I even saw another Kingsperson working at the bar, she knew the situation, she asked me in front of the others how long I had been on my break for, we were building the charade, we were meshing, we were riffing, it all felt so good. And then we decided to return to the godforsaken vodka womb whence we came. Largely - and my friend admits this - the calamity to come was his fault: he spied some cleaners whom he suspected were also involved in the crashing game, and with liquored impetuosity thought it a good idea to confront them and pretend we were security. He leapt up and bounded towards the passageway before I could reason with him. The wristband-checker asked him where his wristband was. 'I lost it', he replied dishonestly, but not quite dishonestly enough. I was trailing behind him, so I had a split second to think. Shit. Shit. What to say? The checker turned to me and asked 'do you have a wristband?' Shit.

'Um, yeah I do.'

My Australian friends will be pleased to know I still merit the nickname 'Toady'. And a moment of stunning betrayal it was. For some reason, the checker believed me without checking. But my friend, he was escorted to the back entrance to prove he was a cleaner, and if not...flick. Yep, he was flicked. My conscience pounced, I tried every security staff member I knew; but no one could help. I mourned for my friend and my own understanding of the concept of friendship. But, as after all funerals, I had a drink. And then another. And then, slowly, predictably, the guilt passed through the bladder. I plundered the security friend's wrist and hung a tattered band precariously under my sleeve. She managed with her security ID alone. The rest, as they say, was history without memory. The proof is in the survivor's photo (in which the naked guy, unfortunately, is not me).

The remainder of May week dribbled away in various lobotomising pursuits; never have I been so tired of fun. I ended the days with a trip to Oxford for an exchange formal with our sister college. After falling asleep on the couch in their graduate common room, still dressed to impress, I woke up at 6am to a friend covering me with my dinner jacket. I had been shivering, but not with cold; my body was anticipating the immensely painful withdrawal from fun. Did I deserve this fun? No, not in the way an undergraduate deserves their fun. Graduate existence feels like this a lot of the time: no medicated courses of work and play, no alignment of cycles with peers, no banked up tension and prepaid release. The intense good times must be parasitic. The fun must be hijacked.

Resignedly, I faced the firing squat. It was worth it.