A Decent Cup of Tea in Barcelona

The Torre de Collserola is inescapable...

... As is the nearby Tibidabo Amusement Park

I have always enjoyed being "abroad", but these days I have come to hate the business of actually getting there (or getting back home, come to that). How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways... Quite apart from the wilful absurdity of flying anywhere today on a burning planet, modern-day travel seems to consist of little more than various types of inconvenience, expense, and boredom glued end to end, broken only by episodes of mutual incomprehension and flashes of impotent rage. Travel may broaden the mind (I have always doubted this, myself) but tourism can certainly shorten your life. Grrr... But I've gone on about all this before (see The Trials of Travel) so won't unlock that overstuffed suitcase again.

I mention this because we were away for a week in August, staying in a pleasant hotel in a quiet part of Barcelona. Yes, such a facility in such a place at such a time does exist; it's not all young folk puttin' on the style (though there is quite a lot of that). And, yes, we did fly, with the admittedly feeble excuse that it has been four years since we last fought for luggage-space in the overhead lockers of a cut-price pressurised travel-tube. But I don't propose to bore you with my rather unexciting traveller's tourist's tales and holiday snaps.

But what's that you say? Well, OK then, since you ask, maybe just these few. I'll warm up the magic lantern. Can we dim the lights, please?

Slide 1:

Barcelona in August is by reputation always hot and humid, but was not as badly affected by the latest record-breaking heat-wave as parts further south, and thankfully not immediately under threat from wildfires. Something we hadn't anticipated, however, was that the city goes in for a Paris-style mass vacation during August, leading to streets lined with shuttered establishments of every kind, at least in the less touristy parts of town. It seemed that no sooner had we found an open restaurant that it would shut down the very next day for the rest of the month. No wonder the staff all seemed so cheerfully demob happy. Catalans are not French, of course, so service with a scowl is not de rigueur, but many waiters and bar staff seemed positively skittish, practically high; perhaps they were. That would certainly account for a couple of menu mix-ups, but my shaky Spanish was more likely to blame. At one meal, for example, I got manzana and manzanilla muddled up, receiving a cup of camomile tea instead of the apple tart I thought I had ordered. Being British, of course, I drank the tea uncomplainingly, and as a reward for my stoic / wimpish forbearance slept miraculously well that night. Camomile, eh? Noted. (I know, but I did warn you these adventures were rather unexciting).

Pork with padrón peppers, followed by apple tart

(I remembered the phrase book, this time)

Slide 2:

Talking of food, I happen to like nuts very much. I eat a lot of them under normal circumstances, but when travelling and the prospect of delays is inevitable, I usually put a large bag of mixed nuts and raisins in my bag, together with maybe an apple, which make a perfectly satisfactory substitute for a meal. In fact, I like nuts so much I quite look forward to that eventuality. So you can imagine my reaction when a steward announced on our outward flight that "today we have on board someone with a severe nut allergy, and so no food items containing nuts will be sold or should be consumed for the duration of the flight". Noooo!

It reminded me of how, when he was at day nursery, my son's lunchtime sandwich of choice was invariably peanut butter. Then a new child arrived with, yes, a nut allergy, and peanut butter was henceforth banned. Noooo! It was a first taste of what seemed like an emerging issue in the 1990s, where people could die – die! – from exposure to something as benign as a peanut. Which isn't even a real nut, dammit. I don't recall that ever being an issue when I was a kid, when we happily pelted each other at breaktime with various allergenic food items. Although perhaps children were regularly vanishing from our classes, unexplained, and we just didn't notice. Of course, after experiencing school dinners a lot of people have claimed to be "allergic" to semolina, say, or – argh – stewed plums and custard, but a lifelong repulsion is not really the same thing, is it? To say you would rather die than eat stewed prunes is rhetoric; actually to die as a result is not.

Rules, rules, rules, and petty restrictions everywhere...

What is the point of a museum, I ask you, if you can't even use a megaphone??

Slide 3:

Nearly there...

Talking of delays (yes we were), our two-hour flight to Barcelona from Bristol was extended into a three-hour-plus journey by the encounter with passport control. We arrived around lunchtime, simultaneously with several other flights, and joined an enormous queue of several hundred non-EU residents snaking around a tape-barrier maze that filled a swelteringly hot hall, shuffling forward painfully slowly to be inspected by just two customs officials, all the other four or so booths being closed. That aforementioned stoic British forbearance was being tested to its limit. I, for one, kept getting the urge to jump up onto something and demand, "So which of you complacent shits voted for Brexit?? Come on, show yourselves! Put up your hands! Show us your precious blue passports now!!"

However, it turned out that this was not spiteful euro-retribution for an ill-judged referendum. Because exactly the same thing happened on the return flight into Bristol airport. Our flight touched down at 23:30, as scheduled. As did several other flights. Because of the competition we had a tedious 20-minute wait on the tarmac for transfer buses to arrive, and then, yes, joined an enormous queue of several hundred UK residents snaking around a tape-barrier maze that filled a swelteringly hot hall, shuffling forward painfully slowly to be inspected this time by a row of automated booths, containing machines that failed to read the passports or biometric data of a fair number of us, me included, which meant I was directed to yet another queue which led, again, to the only two booths operated by human officials. We eventually arrived home at our Bristol flat at 1:30 in the morning. What was I saying about modern-day travel consisting of nothing more than various types of inconvenience, expense, and boredom glued end to end, broken only by episodes of mutual incomprehension and flashes of impotent rage?

Slide 4:

But enough of this moaning about "First World problems". Such mild inconveniences are nowhere near a fair price or adequate karmic offset for adding to the unwanted tourist burden of faraway places that were perfectly happy as they were before they became playgrounds for people who want to behave like entitled celebs for a couple of weeks, or experiment with their capacity for drink, drugs, and bad behaviour on someone else's doorstep. Not to mention raising property prices, destroying local communities, and accelerating climate catastrophe. We should all stay at home. Although we won't, will we?

Here's a fun thing, though. Like many well-meaning professional-class Brits, at home we favour brands whose green credentials are at least plausible. One of these is Clipper Teas, whose attractive packaging is very distinctive, and clearly designed to appeal to well-meaning professional-class types like us. Now, one of the fundamental problems of being a Brit abroad has always been getting hold of a decent cup of tea, instead of the anaemic infusions that are passed off as "tea" beyond our borders. So you can imagine the delight with which I fell upon an unmistakable box of Clipper "Organic English Breakfast Tea" teabags in a Barcelona store. It was only when looking closer that I noticed something odd.

At home ...

... Abroad

WTF? It seemed like the most blatant case of copycat brand-theft I'd ever seen, until I discovered that Clipper is marketed as "Cupper" in Europe, because another tea company had already registered the name "Clipper" in Germany (surely "Klipper" in German, though? And no doubt they peddle that instant-piss-in-a-bag stuff, not proper tea). You have to admit that "Cupper Tea" (geddit?) is a smart, economical, and creative typographical move, though, and a classic example of that eternal cliché, turning a problem into an opportunity.

Slide 5:

A final observation, and then I'll shut up. This magic lantern is starting to get a bit too hot, anyway.

I've often remarked that parachuting into an unfamiliar location for a week or two is not a good way to get good photographs. It can work for an experienced photo-journalist, but for most of us it's a waste of time. Your eye is caught by trivialities and novelties, not to mention the touristic eye-candy that everyone wants to photograph (or, these days, photograph themselves standing in front of). So for this trip I decided to take my own advice for once, and restrict myself to the use of my phone, so as merely to document a holiday and nothing more ambitious.

I did in the end pack a small camera as well (Fuji X20) but barely used it: 14 exposures, versus 234 on the phone. I am never the most prolific picture-taker anyway – it's usually a case of one or two shots and I'm done – and most of those 234 phone shots were actually of objects inside various museums that I thought might come in handy for collage purposes. I did have a few regrets (I really wished I'd had a "proper" camera for the dry fountain shot below, for example) but in the main it made for a more relaxing time, just to be able to wander about, behaving and looking just like everybody else, and without the (self-imposed) pressure to find great photographs. Although that fountain is still pretty good, I think: a decent phone camera is a camera, after all. You just have to accept and work within its limitations.

Passeig de Jean Forestier

(most fountains have been switched off this summer)

As an illustration of both principles – that local knowledge beats everything else, and that any camera can be the right camera in the right hands – the best pictures I brought back of the city were probably some postcards made from polaroid photos by a local setup called 4photos, who have managed to hit a sweet spot between the documentation of their own city's highlights for touristic purposes whilst looking for a fresh angle on them. I liked them so much, in fact, that I ordered a whole load more from their website when I got home. Here are a few:

But, in the end, there is no escaping from the fact that for "serious" work – photographs, that is, which are intended to be printed, exhibited, and bought (yeah, right) – a phone is not yet a substitute for a camera with good optics and a large sensor. This will change, I'm sure, and in good light and used with care the results of phone photography are already impressive (after all, the photograph that I did print, exhibit, and sell at the recent RWA show was taken with my iPhone). But in low light, dim interiors particularly, noise becomes a problem that no amount of clever filtration can improve without smoothing away too much fine detail for my taste. Phone JPGs always look great on a screen, though, even if the sky was never really that blue, or the colours quite so intense, and are perfect for sharing or (cringe) memory-making (/cringe), and if you must record and share your restaurant experiences (a habit I have always ridiculed, but our kids demand it, honest...) what better, more discreet way could there be?

A good memory, worth recording...

Squid at El Trapío. Yum.

To Be In A State

C.R.W. Nevinson, Acetylene Welding, 1917

One of the first things English speakers grapple with when learning Spanish is the fact that, whereas we have only the one verb "to be" (I am, you are, we are crazy), Spanish has two: ser and estar. How this came to be the case is complicated but, although it can be highly nuanced in idiomatic language, the basic distinction is easy to grasp: ser is used for permanent, essential conditions, and estar is used for temporary states.

You can do something of the sort in English, of course. Language, like nature, always finds a way. For example: I am an idiot (permanent), but you are being idiotic (temporary, even if frequently the case). No problem. Other languages make similarly subtle distinctions by other means. For example, an early cause for despair among would-be learners of Russian is the discovery that nearly all verbs come in two distinct versions ("aspects"): one for when an action is ongoing or incomplete, and one for when it has been completed (something Putin must be juggling with at the moment). What, you thought learning a different alphabet would be the hard bit?

As an amateur language-watcher, I find it interesting that a new sort of permanent vs. temporary distinction has been emerging in English in recent times – American English, mainly – particularly when describing certain minorities. When we are urged to speak of "enslaved people" rather than "slaves", the point is clearly to emphasise an unchosen state, potentially if not actually temporary, rather than an essential condition. Nobody is a slave, even if born into slavery; they will have been enslaved by somebody else. Similarly, the homeless are now often referred to as "unhoused people", and the autistic as "neurodiverse", all from the same dignifying, humanising impulse: "see me as a whole person, not as a diminishing label".

It is easy to understand and appreciate the motivations behind these locutions, even if the resultant language can be awkward and has a certain finger-wagging pedantry about it. It reminds me of the two most important lessons that I learned at university from the brightest, most forward-thinking people I encountered (who, it has to be said, did not include the actual teaching faculty), which were these:

First, that one of the main enemies of progress is essentialism i.e. the insistence that a person has a "natural" set of attributes derived from their basic biological configuration – particularly gender, race, and sexual orientation (although as a short, left-handed person I always wanted to add height and handedness) – which wholly determine who they are and what they are capable of doing. You know the sort of thing: women are less intellectual than men, white Europeans are a superior race, etc., etc.; the usual litany of discrimination and privilege. Those of a conservative, reactionary cast of mind love essentialism in the same way they love social class because, especially when deployed in combination, they explain and justify the existing order of society, with the "natural" result that the right people (them) come out on top, for all the right "natural" reasons.

The second lesson was that many of these arrays of allegedly essential qualities are actually social constructs i.e. they have been invented by humans, by imposing rigid patterns of behaviour onto fluid, complex realities. These patterns get embedded into a society's way of doing things, but they are often merely "performative", in the jargon, and almost always give a significant power advantage to one constituency in its relations with the others. Language tends to disguise this constructedness, and to make these prescribed behaviours and power relationships seem, again, "natural" or, even better, invisible. But, being social constructs, they can be changed by society, given the will, sometimes by changing the language, but primarily by political and legal remedies aimed at redressing imbalances. Thus, just as trade unions give workers collective strength in negotiations with employers, so legislation can make discrimination on various grounds not just bad manners but illegal.

Thus far, no problem. These ideas, once novel, have gone on to become commonplaces. But lurking in them is an assumption that, I suspect, some younger people might find "problematic". That assumption is that a short person is and will always be short, a left-handed person is and will always be left-handed, and so on. [1] In other words, these are not, in the Spanish sense, temporary states of being. It is the prescription,  prejudice, and discrimination that are the problem, not the permanent attributes towards which they are turned. I am left-handed, in common with 10% of the population, and I am truly horrified when I consider the damage and distress that must have been done to those poor devils forced in the past to adopt right-handedness as the only permissible normal and natural state. It can still be very frustrating dealing with an overwhelmingly right-handed world, but it has never occurred to me that problems with handedness or height could be remedied by surgery or by behaving as if one were really right-handed or taller. You adapt, and accept that yours is a minority condition.

That relatively clear-cut picture has become blurred in recent times. It's as if the idea that "you can be whatever you want to be" has started to replace, or at least to rival the venerable idea that "you have to make the best of what you are", especially in the minds of the young. This is quite a profound change, with considerable consequences. At some point in the relatively recent past, for example, the words "sex" and "gender", formerly synonyms, went their separate ways, with "sex" denoting biology, and "gender" denoting behaviour and chosen identity.

Of course, there have always been those who took issue with the expectations and restrictions imposed on them by virtue of their biological sex ("Hey, I'm a neurotic poet, why should I be the one to dig and die in these trenches, when my sister is the sensible, sporty one?"), and some – who knows how many? – whose deepest, secret, but forlorn wish was to have been born into the opposite sex. These strike me as issues unrelated to same-sex desire, or indeed to sexuality at all. It seems to me that the current fraught "trans" debate (uh oh, here we go) is really a debate about social behaviour and identity, not about who one does or doesn't want to have sex with. And, at its most explosively controversial, comes down to: how legitimately can one claim a different "gender" whilst retaining one's original "sex"?

As I understand it (which is not very far), full transitioning is not about swapping from one fully-functioning sex to the other, which is not (yet?) medically possible, but about enabling the appearance and social performance of gender for those who wish to take on a different gender identity as fully as hormone supplements and surgery can make possible. As it happens, an old friend of ours has a fully trans son whom I have met several times in recent years, and you would be unlikely to guess that he had not always been male, although there is perhaps an uncanny sense that he had somehow never been a boy. Whatever your views on the matter, he seems far happier as a result, and you can only admire the courage and commitment that such a full transition requires.

A much simpler form of gender-swapping, obviously, is cross-dressing, which has a long tradition in Britain, from boy actors in Shakespeare's day and 18th century molly houses, to Christmas pantomime dames and principal "boys". It is also conveniently reversible, and it seems a stretch to regard this as equivalent to irreversible surgery, unless you think "trans" is just an abbreviation for "transvestite". Does Grayson Perry change from a straight man to a trans woman and back, depending on which getup he is wearing? I don't think so, but perhaps he does; after all, a core credo of the vociferous trans lobby is that "a trans woman is a woman". Cross-dressing is nonetheless fraught with contradiction: I surely cannot be alone in finding drag queens, for example, actually rather misogynistic in their parodic stereotyping of what it means to be female, with every trivial signifier of a cartoonish "femininity" vamped up to the max? It all seems rather hostile, and at its worst surely bears comparison with "blackface". But OTOH there are doubtless permanently and soberly cross-dressed men and women going about their daily business who do not seek to draw attention to themselves and whom nobody notices (unless, presumably, they have occasion to remove their clothes).

But, whatever one's views, no-one should ever insist that there's no place on the decorative fringes of the human tapestry for the camp, the gaudy, or even the downright strange. Which is not even so "fringe", these days: it seems that the desire and pursuit of a certain outlaw status (or at least the performative, outward appearance thereof) is now a major life-goal for many. And why not? The widespread fashions for tattoos, piercings, and hints at BDSM sexuality are not to my taste, but I'm not going to campaign against them, and there is no reason at all why my tastes or inability to "relate" to anything should bother anyone who feels differently. I'm sure they would have things to say about my own conventionally drab clothing, too, which is rather more M&S than S&M. "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven"... Live and let live, eh? 

But this cuts both ways. For the first time, the 2021 Census of England & Wales asked a voluntary question: "Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?" According to the Office for National Statistics, a surprising 94% of the population aged over 16 answered the question, and 0.5% (262K people) answered "no". By contrast, there were 30,420,202 respondents who identified unambiguously as female: 51% of the population. Now, for reasons that I do not pretend to understand, advocacy of the interests of that 0.5% has become a passionate cause for the intelligent young. Which would be fine, except that when old-school feminists question whether a self-identified trans woman who remains biologically male should really be entitled to access women-only spaces and facilities, or to exert influence over women-only issues [2], they are subjected to organised campaigns of protest, persecution, and "cancellation" – leading in some cases to actual loss of employment – as if they were the moral equivalent of white supremacists, or predatory paedophiles.

The militant trans-activists' war-cry seems to be that those women they label as TERFs ("trans-exclusionary radical feminists") but who self-identify as "gender-critical feminists" are seeking to deny the very right of trans people to exist. Not just the right of some of them to occupy women-only spaces, but to exist. Really? Such over-heated rhetoric helps no-one, and spills over too easily into intolerance and even violence. Indeed, my own partner has disturbing stories to tell about the bullying of female colleagues (death threats pinned to office doors, for example), and has herself had to negotiate packs of aggressive demonstrators, often masked and male, seeking to disrupt the meetings of feminist academics. The irony that feminism is all about challenging the injustices constructed on the biology of 51% of the population seems to be lost on those agitating on behalf of that 0.5% burdened with the "wrong" biology. Strange, isn't it, how it always seems to be women (and in particular women defending the rights of women) who end up getting the rough end of the stick? [3]

I suppose you could see parallels with the equally passionate and uncompromising advocacy of revolutionary politics by the intelligent young in the 1970s. Those bookish, university-educated, would-be Lenins and Trotskys who sought to position themselves as the "vanguard" of an imminent but entirely imaginary working-class uprising, and who denigrated existing working-class institutions such as trade unions (too "workerist"), the Communist Party (too "Stalinist"), or even the Labour Party ("you're joking, right?") are, in retrospect, quixotic figures; naive, presumptuous, and misguided, to put it kindly. It does no harm to remember, either, that "women's issues" and gay rights were always dismissed by those same self-styled revolutionaries as a distraction from the real job at hand, i.e. the pursuit of that fantasy of an imminent proletarian revolution, which would turn out to be the one-size-fits-all solution to, y'know, everything, so just shut up about it for now, yeah?

However, those people were and in some cases still are my friends. At the time, I was happy to play the role of a spear-carrier in their disruptive and sometimes violent student-revolutionary plots and war-games; it was the sort of dangerous fun that the young seek out, and I really gave very little thought to the motivations behind or consequences of the actions I was being asked to take. Although if, as a result, I had been expelled from university or ended up with a criminal record – either of which could very easily have happened – or if I had directly or indirectly caused real harm to somebody – yes, even someone branded as a "fascist" – I doubt I would be looking back so indulgently now. So I have to wonder whether those young activists trying to bully older women with uncongenial views out of a job will one day look back with regret at their actions, too. I certainly hope so.

In the end, I suppose the young are always a solution in search of a problem, and what counts as a suitably soluble problem to the young will probably always be baffling to older generations. As the young Bob Dylan sang in 1965, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?" Well, you're absolutely right there, Bob, I have very little idea, although in this case it's not so much "what" as "why". To be young is, of course, a clear case of a temporary state, Spanish-style, and not a permanent, essential condition, despite what a slightly older and wiser Dylan wished for us in 1974, and the inescapable and sad fact is that, when it comes to human life, ultimately no condition is permanent. The radical postures of one's youth have a way of losing their glamour as the years pass, as our sympathies broaden and our certainties soften, until the inevitable question arises: what on earth were we thinking? So repeat after me: I was, you were, we were crazy... 

1. I concede that "short" is a relative term, as I once discovered in a bar in the Spanish Basque Country, where to my surprise I was the tallest man in the room. Not having acquired a "tall man" mentality, however, it didn't occur to me to push my way to the front...

2. To return to language, there are for example those who would insist that references to "pregnant women" should be changed to "pregnant people", on the grounds it is discriminatory against self-declared trans men (48K in 2021, 0.1% of the population) or non-binaries (30K, 0.06%) who might find themselves pregnant because of the sex-specific internal organs they have retained.

3. Particularly from "people with penises". OTOH there seems to be relatively little fuss about trans men. Although whether trans men who remain biologically female are demanding access to men-only spaces and facilities is an interesting question. TBH I'd be surprised if they were, and definitely wouldn't encourage it.

[NOTE: I will be out of blogging mode for most of August, so any comments and/or death threats won't be seen, moderated, or posted / passed to the relevant authorities until I return later in the month, or perhaps even in early September if I'm having a particularly enjoyable and relaxing time away from my computer. See you later, alligator / Hasta luego, caimán / Fins després, caiman!]

A Barge Made of Ice

 

My Erotic Double, by John Ashbery

He says he doesn’t feel like working today.
It’s just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,   
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
                                             The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are   
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
You always find to say are charming, and rescue me   
Before the night does. We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight   
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.   
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.   
Thank you. You are too.

From As We Know (Viking Press, 1979)

I'm not a big John Ashbery fan – I could never get past that fundamental optical error in "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (assuming it is an error, and not a false trail laid to entrap and infuriate us lefties – if so, it works) – but I came across this one quoted on an agreeably bonkers blog that I visit most weeks (BLCKDGRD – now he is a massive Ashbery fan) and it echoed the most recent revision of one of my digital collages so closely that I couldn't resist.

I had given the picture the title "Summer Night", but I might reconsider now, and call it "A Barge Made of Ice". It never hurts to make some highfalutin' literary reference, does it?

Out of Order

My desk, March 2010

During my span of working life I participated in pretty much the full four-decade story of library computerisation (no, please, don't stop reading yet...). From a standing start in the mid 1970s (i.e. none at all) it all began with the introduction of a few green-screen "dumb" terminals linked to an in-house mainframe computer, dedicated pretty much to the automated reproduction of what had gone on before: the purchase, cataloguing, issue and return of stock. After the arrival of the first stand-alone personal computers and a period of experimentation and innovation we stabilised for quite a few years with a succession of systems made up of dedicated, locally-networked PCs – the "online public-access catalogue" (OPAC) was our Big Thing [1] – until finally (in the last chapter of my story, at least) we were broadcasting everything and anything we had to pocket-sized sci-fi wonders which most people no longer even thought of as computers at all, and had become just one competing component in an entire universe of freely-available information, misinformation, and amusing cat videos. Arthur C. Clarke's declaration that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" had never seemed more prescient.

Looking back, you begin to realise you have been living through an extraordinary period in human history. Well, sure, OK, who hasn't? But, just as my generation's grandparents were born into a world without aircraft and ended up having bombs dropped on them from a great height, so those of us who were not "born digital" are entitled, I think, to feel things may be getting out of hand. Slow down! Can't we just think about all this a bit more?

Along the way I learned to work with a number of now-obsolete operating systems: DOS, of course, but does anyone else remember Pick, for example? (and can there really ever have been a time when the name of its developer, Dick Pick, wasn't hilarious?). I also taught myself to program in several languages, but my main task was to learn how to wrangle the complex blend of technologies employed in a university library, and to "manage" the people using them, who were often resentful, unwilling, or just plain unsuited to the task. Sigh... (There's a famous Norwegian TV sketch about the introduction of the new "book" technology into a monastery that always makes me laugh). Above all, however, what I learned was to dread "upgrades" and – ultimate horror of horrors – the implementation of an entirely new system, especially one using yet another underlying operating system. Which, until Unix had become something of a standard, was every time. Every bloody time, every five years or so. What a nightmare that was. Every time.

Most of us who found ourselves moved sideways (rarely promoted) into a systems management role in the 1970s and 80s ("Congratulations! You're about to become the most unpopular person in the building!") had no training or computer-science background whatsoever. It was very much a "sink or swim" experience, and in the beginning learning to swim was surprisingly enjoyable. There was a pioneering, exciting period – let's say, from about the late 1970s to the early years of this century – when an enthusiastic "systems librarian" (and I imagine the same went for most other office-based industries) could learn how to get under the bonnet of their computerised setup and tinker with it, in the same way it used to be possible to tinker with cars. You figured out a bit of programming, read your way through the manuals, established a relationship with your supplier, and then got "hands on" whenever necessary. It was fun, most of the time; communities and friendships formed around user-group meetings, and many of us discovered latent technical talents; quite a few were recruited into the industry side as developers and go-betweens, able to speak the language of both supplier and customer without too much eye-rolling or sarcasm.

By the time I retired, I was spending much of my time doing what most proper, professional programmers would love to be doing, but can't: just tinkering around, finding problems to fix, and writing Perl scripts to fill gaps in the functionality of our latest, Linux-based library system. My proudest moment was writing an entire suite of CGI programs that managed the transfer of 50,000 books from one library to another, in the process automatically reclassifying each item's Dewey Decimal shelfmark into its Library of Congress classification equivalent, printing a new spine label, and carrying out various other tweaks (changes of loan period, deduplication of stock, etc.). It reduced a massive and daunting task to a simple matter of scanning in the barcodes of a trolley-load of books at one end of town, hauling them across to the other end in a van, scanning the barcodes again, printing and attaching the new labels, and getting them swiftly up to the shelves, ready for use. Repeat until complete. Hey presto!

Sadly, such acts of labour-saving creativity – and there were many – did not earn me the rewards you might expect. Why not? Over the years I had been transformed from a typical humanities airhead, attracted to intangibles and mumbo-jumbo, into a notoriously intransigent, hard-headed number-cruncher. Universities, surprisingly, are full of people who think that believing something is possible is enough to make it so. Few ever bother to quantify a task – the time it takes, how often it must be done to achieve a certain target, how many people it would take to do that, how much those people will have to paid, and so on – before deciding it will be done, and what's more finished by, oh, shall we say Christmas? Those few that do make those essential calculations and are brave enough to deliver the bad news are, inevitably, never popular with senior management, and attract a reputation for "negativity": which is promotion poison, even – especially! – when your efforts have saved various incorrigible Pollyannas from serial self-inflicted humiliation. I learned never to expect gratitude from any ambitious high-flyer.

In the last years of my professional life, however, exactly as has happened with cars, ever more sophisticated products began to arrive on the scene that used the automation equivalent of tinker-proof sealed units, and these were usually a mystery even to their developers and suppliers. Who, but an ultra-specialised techno-geek, knew exactly how a network functioned, or WiFi, or even a smartphone "app", and could therefore fix them when they stopped working? Worse, who would dare admit that they didn't know? Besides, most serious programming had long ago come to depend on libraries of pre-written components – I doubt anyone has bothered to write anything as basic as a sort routine in decades – and these would be assembled together like Lego along with other proprietary stuff bought under license, all in the expectation that the resulting package (actually a Heath Robinson-ish monster beneath its glossy surface) would work under all circumstances, and – crucially – continue to work when one element in the chain of dependencies developed a fault or, argh, was "upgraded". What could possibly go wrong? Everything and anything at any time, that's what.

I retired a decade ago, and things have clearly continued to get even more mysteriously opaque and giddily interdependent, and as a consequence more precarious. Lately it has seemed that, wherever you turn, you encounter yet another automated system that is unreliable, poorly configured, or out of order. More often than not this turns out simply to be because a new system has been introduced, and no-one yet knows how (or whether) it really works. Obviously, a key driver behind automation has always been the saving of money, and there are few activities where the biggest cost by far is not staff wages. To employ technical staff of the proper calibre at the going rate is regarded by most non-technical enterprises as an unnecessary luxury (an impossibility, actually, in public-service contexts where salary scales are inflexibly tied to job descriptions and grades). So, in effect, once installed, a new or upgraded system is placed into the hands of its end users – usually poorly-paid clerical staff [2] – to "debug" in live use. "Hey, look, when I do this, the whole thing freezes!" "Really? We had no idea you would ever do that. This could be a problem... Could you try not doing that?" "But that's my whole job!"

Some examples.

We could start at the top, with the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, the scandalous prosecution of nearly 1000 sub-postmasters for theft, false accounting and fraud, all because of a software system, Horizon, that didn't work properly, and reported non-existent accounting shortfalls. But that's a book-length story, and still ongoing. Suffice it to say that a number of perfectly innocent sub-postmasters were jailed and had their lives trashed entirely on the evidence of a faulty system that Fujitsu, the supplier, and the Post Office, the implementer, insisted until quite recently was not faulty. The idea that quite so many operators of village Post Offices were lying, thieving cheats seems not to have troubled anyone at senior level in the Post Office; quite the reverse, in fact.

Closer to home and with rather less consequence, it recently took me an entire month to make a simple change to a National Trust gift membership I had given to my son. I made multiple phone calls, but no-one ever answered the phone, despite the cosy northern-accented voice that interrupted the muzak every couple of minutes to reassure me that they knew I was there, my call was important, in a queue of unspecified length, and that someone was "on their way to me" (as if there might be a knock on the door at any minute). As so often, this lack of response was blamed on an "unusually high level of customer calls"(in other words, "Look, we're just too busy / understaffed / idle to answer the phone, so why not just go away?"). So I also sent emails, which also got no response. Then, after a week or so I finally did start getting through on the phone, and there were three attempts to make the same simple change by three different "agents", each of whom failed to negotiate their way to a satisfactory conclusion. It was frustrating. Then, replies started to arrive belatedly in response to my earlier emails which both contradicted each other and the "help" given by the people on the phone. Aaaargh! In the end, a customer services person had to admit, ruefully, that it was all really due to the introduction of a new call-handling and membership system which was having "teething problems"... Well, of course! Why didn't you say so? Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner... At least it is around here; you have my deepest sympathy. Let's hope you don't all end up in jail.

Then there was the medical appointment I had to make at a local hospital. I tried using the online booking system, but it claimed that there was just one appointment available during the coming months, at 8:30 a.m. one day the following week. This seemed highly improbable, so I made the customary odyssey through various switchboards to arrive at the relevant phone on the relevant desk, and – yes, you've guessed! – it seemed they were having problems with a new booking system. I was told that if, by some miraculous stroke of good fortune, I was able to see any appointment at all, then to grab it, and maybe ring next week to see if things had got properly sorted out in the meantime. They hadn't.

So then a short while ago I made my first return visit post-COVID to my old place of employment, the library of the University of Southampton. My "retired staff" identity card failed to open the turnstile. Huh? It seemed "iSolutions" (the university's utterly unironic name for its computing services and support operation) had mistakenly deleted me from the database at the same time as they shut down my old email account. No worries: my details were noted and would be passed through to be restored ASAP. Meanwhile, an old colleague (there aren't many of them left) had spotted me and we chatted: yes, there was a new library system now; no, it didn't really work; no, there was no longer any senior technical person who could sort things out in-house; so, yes, I was missed (hah, finally!). So when I returned a fortnight later, could I get through the turnstile? No, of course I couldn't.

Well, there are no surprises in any of those examples: that is exactly the sort of thing we have come to expect, isn't it? We anticipate incompetence, incomprehension, delays, and frustration, as the world is constantly reshaped to no great purpose by disruptive corporate swashbucklers, who always promise much but leave instead a trail of impractical, half-finished schemes in their wake as they sail on to more senior positions somewhere else. But listen, guys: if you must "fix" or "disrupt" things (because how else would we notice you had ever been in charge?) then at least let the people who are going to use, say, some shiny new automated system have a thorough look at it first, just to make sure it does actually work in every important respect before you sign the cheque and add that new line to your CV. The same goes for your addiction to organisational shakeups, such as centralising / decentralising / outsourcing / insourcing all clerical assistance (essentially reversing whatever situation you found when you arrived on the scene), or forking over thousands of pounds to consultants simply to change the name, font, and logo on all the official stationery, websites, and corporate clothing. Sure, you want to make your mark, but couldn't we just add your name in nice gold lettering to a list on a board somewhere when you go? Wouldn't that do?

But, heads up, people, here comes so-called AI (artificial, yes; intelligent, no), which promises to combine the breathtaking arrogance and heedless ignorance of both worlds, managerial and technical, at their very worst. Really, trust me, this is going to be bad. Not because humanity will be exterminated by killer robots, but because careless implementations of AI will fuck up so many things that were already working perfectly well. [3] 

"Hey, there, you techie guys: how can we save even more money and maximise profits?"

"Well, Mr. Manager, here's a thought: why not sack everybody? Bold, I know! But we've bought in a little package here that can do anything all those expensive, troublesome, lazy, disease-prone people can do, but faster, better, and 24/7! Most of it is incomprehensible to us, admittedly, but we've tested it pretty thoroughly in various scenarios and it seems to get most things right most of the time... Besides, as always, we can iron out any little problems as we go along. So, sign here, please. Plus this liability disclaimer, if you don't mind; just a formality, obviously. After all, what can possibly go wrong?"

Royal South Hants Hospital, June 2023

1. Impossible, now, to recapture the excitement of being able to search for stuff online by keywords. Once, back in the early pioneering days, I wanted to show off to a visiting class of 12-year-old schoolchildren how our new library system could find any book, just by entering the first four letters of both the title and the author's name, separated by a comma. I have no idea what made me choose to search for Hard Times by Charles Dickens on the spur of the moment. There is clearly some internal, malevolent imp that lives, like a comedian of genius, one beat ahead of the action in my head. I hadn't even read the damned book; still haven't. But I carefully entered "DICK,HARD" on the terminal keyboard. Hey, kids, what's going on? What? What's so funny?? Oops! Let me just quickly change that...

2. Although not always. I recently watched a consultant surgeon become completely baffled by a new login procedure, in a priceless real-life recreation of that Norwegian "book" sketch. He had to summon a nurse to bail him out. Mind you, I should probably have warned that nurse what this act of mercy would do to his promotion prospects...

3. Here's an interesting article about the future of books, AI, and reading. Spoiler: books are great just as they are!

Previously on Idiotic Hat...

The current Hollywood screenwriters and actors strike reminded me of a post I wrote a couple of years ago which seems to have become more relevant than ever. It may be that ARGH's moment has finally arrived. What do we want? Better scripts with more realistic and equitable treatment of minor characters! When do we want it? Now! Read on...  

A New Union (2021) 

In a post in 2020 (Mysteries) I wrote in passing:

It's curious how much current popular entertainment seems to be aimed at affirming and enlarging the mystery constituency: magic, superpowers, and alien life-forms are more or less standard issue on Netflix, along with deep-reaching conspiracies and textbook narrative arcs, all set in a glamorous world free of tedious workaday concerns like washing up, or even facing trial for a series of murderous assaults on life's extras: negligible, nameless folk like guards and henchmen.

Having watched more such streamed stuff over the last two years than is probably healthy or wise, I have become quite concerned about the casual and often lethal violence meted out to those nameless guards and henchmen. It seems that whenever some vengeful protagonist breaks into or breaks out of some villain's lair – be it an office block, a medical lab, a repurposed stately home, or some underground labyrinth – the inevitable exchanges of gunfire will result in a bloody massacre of inept "guards", usually dressed in sub-standard protective gear that clearly offers no protection whatsoever, and equipped with faulty assault rifles that could not hit a moving row of ducks at a fairground, never mind the sort of person who can outrun and dodge multiple sprays of automatic gunfire, clad in nothing but pyjamas.

Now, villains, criminal masterminds, and outright psychopaths deserve whatever comeuppance they get, which is usually some ironically symbolic obliteration involving a self-constructed petard-cum-MacGuffin. In films, that is; in real life, they get legal representation and a fair trial. Which brings me to my original point in the quoted passage. Yes, you, our hero ruthless protagonist: you have saved the world, solved the mystery, reaped vengeance, got your life back, whatever it was that drove you on so single-mindedly; but along the way you have killed and maimed dozens of mere employees. We saw you do it! But, look, these were actual people, who hoped to pay their bills and raise their families by patrolling the grounds and manning the CCTV monitors of some organisation that, as far as they knew, did something sorta high-tech and secretive but which was all so far above their minimum-wage pay-grade as to be invisible. It's boring work, and the hours are inconvenient, but like security staff everywhere, you do at least get to dress up and play at being police or soldiers without any proper qualifications, training, or exposure to real danger.

That is, until you turned up.

Of course, real police get mashed, too. That car chase, for example? The one when you drove way too recklessly, totalling the vehicles of several innocent civilians, not to mention the market stalls and fast-food stands you demolished on the roadside, before taking a short-cut through a plate-glass shop window? You remember? And then, FFS, when you careened at high speed the wrong way down a dual carriageway into heavy oncoming traffic... Well, all that resulted in multiple cop cars crashing, overturning, flying off flyovers, and bursting spectacularly into flames. Again, let me emphasise, driven by real people with families to support. And all because you knew you were right, and therefore had to evade police detention in order to pursue some idiotic self-imposed mission. But the thing is, tragic as their loss is, those guys at least have pension benefits to pass on, widow's insurance, and a union to press their case for compensation against their employer. Guards and henchmen? They've got nothing.

So, what I'm proposing here is proper trade union representation. Let's call it the Amalgamated Representatives of Guards and Henchfolk, or ARGH.

For a start, the union will demand proper protective clothing in the workplace, up to full military standards – and maybe not head-to-toe in baddie black? – as well as firearms that can do more damage than just knocking chips off concrete pillars and brickwork. Members will be required to undergo proper vocational training, so that they can detain a suspected invader or escapee without the situation escalating into a bloody one-sided massacre, or at the very least so that they can shoot straight. There will be full compensation for injury or death in the line of work, with benefits for bereaved fictional family members. The union will insist that those responsible for such injury or death be brought to justice, and face trial for their reckless actions: the ends do not justify the means, and any sinister cover-up of the serial assault and murder of union members will not be tolerated (unless this is the seed of a new multi-part thriller on Amazon Prime, securing further employment). Clearly, there is also a need for better pay, shorter hours, and proper breaks: there's a reason security staff keep losing concentration on the CCTV monitors at crucial moments, don't spot suspicious movement at the other end of the corridor, or fail to find the lethal dessert spoon tucked in a detainee's sock in a routine body-search.

Most of all, members will have a right to be fully informed about what the hell is really going on in that "secret" laboratory on Level 6, or in those maximum-security cells in the basement. They may work for monsters, but that doesn't make them monsters: they were only obeying orders! [Hi, ARGH Legal Dept. here: please don't ever use that argument in court; it really doesn't play well]. 

So watch out, Jason Bourne, John Wick, and all you other trigger-happy vigilantes and vengeance junkies. ARGH is coming for you. The movies are about to get a lot safer for everybody! And next, we'll be turning our attention to the organisation of the villain's lair cleaning staff: what an awful, messy job that can be...

Florence 2016

Boxes of Rain

Around this time of year my thoughts often drift back to an occasion in summer 2010, the memorial of an old friend who died far too young. John always comes to mind, even now, whenever a person is described as a "larger than life" character: it's hard to believe that someone so supercharged is no longer with us. Although, a decade-point-three on, it's an idea that no longer seems quite so unreasonable as it did back then, and I sense a rising nervousness among my contemporaries: who's next?

One of the permanent memories of that afternoon is, surprisingly, the Grateful Dead song "A Box of Rain", which was played at the end of the proceedings. Now, I am definitively not a "deadhead" – in the past, I was known to protest vociferously whenever a Dead album found its way onto a turntable – but hearing that particular track under those circumstances was an unexpectedly overwhelming experience. Thank goodness I need never listen to it ever again...

Anyway, the idea of "a box of rain" stuck with me, and eventually came to seem a natural fit with the half-abandoned "deconstructed packaging" idea. I liked the idea of a cube, inside which rain of various intensities was falling, a sort of temperate-climate relative of the "snow globe". So here are four variations on the theme.

As printed, these are A3 sheets. Assuming you can't read them reproduced at this size, the two texts are:

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. (Ecclesiastes 1:7)

Vapour brought to us by such a wind must have been generated in countries lying to the South and East of our island. It is therefore probably in the extensive vallies watered by the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine, if not from the more distant Elbe, with the Oder and Weser that the water rises, in the midst of sunshine, which is soon afterwards to form our clouds, and pour down in our Thunder-showers. And this island, in all probability,  does the same office for Ireland: nay, the Eastern for the Western counties of South Britain.  (Luke Howard, The Climate of London, 1818-20)

Plus, of course, there are the essential assembly instructions:

1. Cut out the box template

2. Score along the [colour] lines

3. Fold along the scored lines

4. Apply glue to the tabs

5. Assemble into a cubical box

6. Or, why not just leave it as it is?

You'll be completely familiar with Ecclesiastes, of course, but Luke Howard's three tomes of meteorological data and observations may be less well-known. They are available online, however, and well worth a browse if you're a fan of observational, anecdotal science in the mode of Gilbert White. Here's something that caught my eye, for example, if only because in 1800 my maternal ancestors were living in Ampthill, Beds.:

Remarkable Hail Storm in Bedfordshire, 19th of Eighth mo. 1800

The following particulars of a destructive hail storm in Bedfordshire were communicated to me by my friend and relation, Richard Howe, of Aspley, who showed me the scars then remaining in the stems of fir trees in his plantation, from wounds inflicted by this hail several years before.

    There had been thunder showers early in the morning, after which the air cleared up and became very warm. About 7 p.m. after a very heavy clap of thunder and vivid lightning, the hail began, and fell for about ten minutes only; it consisted of balls of ice, of from six to eight or nine inches in circumference. A small one weighed above two ounces; the form was an oblate spheroid, the nucleus the more transparent part. The cloud had an uncommon, fiery appearance, and there was lightning all the evening after. The next evening, also, much thunder, with heavy continued rain. On the third day, the air much clearer and fine; afterwards showery.

    The storm appeared to originate about Fenny Stratford, and passed in a westerly [1] direction over Hogstye-End, Aspley, Crawley, (missing Woburn,) to Ridgemount, Ampthill, and Clophill, where it ceased, having gone fourteen or fifteen miles, with a breadth of, at most, a mile and a half.

    The repairs of glass, &c. in this space amounted to several thousand pounds. The corn in shocks, as well as that standing, was in many fields quite thrashed out of the straw.

Curiously, a family legend was that my mother, who had been an ATS sergeant in an ack-ack battery during the war and thus well acquainted with loud bangs, was nonetheless unreasonably afraid of thunder, as was my grandmother. Might some ancestral flinch have been passed down through the generations as a result of that notably destructive and prolonged storm? Probably not – it's no more likely than that my descendants several generations from now will have inherited a reflex distaste for flaccid West Coast guitar noodling – even though I believe Lamarckian evolution has regained some respectability as a theory. But it's nice to come across something that your long-dead, unknowable, direct forebears must have experienced as a remarkable event. It was bound to have been the talk of the village for years ("Hail, boy? That ent hail... Lemme tell you abewt that ol' storm we hed in 1800...").

1. Interesting use of "westerly" there, as all of these places lie further to the east, not west of Fenny Stratford. It seems in the early 1800s "westerly" meant "coming from the west", as still applied to a westerly wind, as well as "heading west". Confusing... It is a curious fact, though, and one often unremarked, that the arrow on a weathercock points to where the wind is blowing from, not in the direction in which it is blowing. Obvious really, but similarly confusing.

Professing Poetry

You are almost certainly unaware of (or at least unexcited by) the recent election of the next Oxford Professor of Poetry. It's a five-year post, appointed by a poll of those Oxford graduates who can be bothered to register to vote (a body termed, Oxford-style, "Convocation"). Last time round, I agitated on behalf of Alice Oswald (well, OK, I wrote a blog post and sent a few emails), who went on to win. You're welcome, Alice. There was no question in my mind that Oswald is a major contemporary poet with interesting things to say about poetry; there was also no doubting that most of those I knew who were qualified to vote in the contest would never have heard of her, or even given much thought to poetry in general. A little encouragement never hurts.

This time, I threw my utterly inconsequential weight behind candidate Don Paterson, although it's true that I forgot to post about it or send out emails, so it was just a case of my single vote: sorry about that, Don. Paterson, too, is a major contemporary poet with interesting things to say about poetry – I find his irreverent, working-poet's commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets indispensible – but I don't suppose many of my Oxford contemporaries will have heard of him, either. As I have said before, I fell among politicos and policy wonks, for whom poetry is not a priority.

TBH, it seemed a foregone conclusion to me; of the other candidates, only A.E. Stallings had much of a profile, and despite her reputation I couldn't really see her as a suitable candidate. Why not? I'd bought a copy of her recent selected poems, This Afterlife, and it seemed to me she is a one-note poet, playing up the resonances of the classics with the modern-day domestic scene, in a formally-patterned, ironic mode that links the broken washing machine to Homer, but that only rarely seem to achieve escape velocity from "light verse". Anne Carson, for example, does that gig a lot better IMHO, but she wasn't the candidate.

In the end, A.E. Stallings won. Which was (to me) an interesting surprise. Certainly, looking around the Web, there was a lot of campaigning for Stallings votes and very little going on for Paterson (who is, besides, male, Scottish, a jazz guitarist, and not an Oxford graduate – he left school at 16 – none of which will have helped his cause), and it's quite possible that a majority of poetry-reading Oxford graduates are precisely the constituency for one-note verse that plays up the resonances of the classics with the modern-day domestic scene. I prefer Paterson, but then I'm in the constituency for late-night brooding on the dark and dangerous questions, and have no problems with Scottishness or jazz. So it's possible a certain element of gender may have been in play here.

Anyway, for your enjoyment and edification, here's a good Stallings poem that I bookmarked: "After a Greek Proverb". The Greek proverb concerned is given as an epigraph to her poem, and transliterates as "Oudén monimóteron tou prosorinoú" which (according to Google translate) means something like "nothing is more permanent than the temporary". As a villanelle, the poem is inevitably reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop (in particular her "One Art"), but I do know exactly what she's talking about: "there are always boxes that you never do unpack"... Oh, yes. But, does it do more than flesh out the proverb, though?

And here's one from Don Paterson's extraordinary collection 40 Sonnets: "Francesca Woodman". Francesca Woodman should be well-known to photography enthusiasts, not least because of the recent publication of her "artist's books" by Mack, but if not you can read about her tragically short life here; in a way, she is the enigmatic Nick Drake of photography. For me, Paterson's "sonnet" really captures the haunted mood of those strange, posed photographs made in dusty, derelict rooms. Does it do more than your typical "ekphrastic" poem, though?

Answers in fewer than 500 words. You have two hours. Your time starts now.

Dig It

It has been difficult for the last few weeks to concentrate during the day, as Southern Water (our local purveyor of leaky pipes and sewage dumps), has uncharacteristically decided to replace the entire water main running down our street, which has involved much digging, drilling, scraping, shouting, and general mechanised mayhem. The most impressive bit of machinery has been the "suction excavator", an incredible roaring behemoth the size of a dustbin lorry that literally sucks the earth and rubble out of the holes and trenches dug into the road and pavement. It's a beast, and as you can imagine, it is orders of magnitude louder (and doubtless a lot cheaper) than any team of men with spades, especially when operating just outside your front door.

I might have more to say about this when the dust has literally settled (including the exciting two-part quest for our elusive water meter) but for now I thought I'd just post these two recent revisions of items from a couple of project ideas I had a few years ago, the "poster bar book" and the "DIY cut out booklet". I think they're fun, and quite decorative, and I keep meaning to enter some for various open exhibitions (I've made quite a few since first coming up with the idea) but then I always lose my nerve, not least because they're too big to print on my own A3+ printer: the one at the top is ideally 50cm x 40cm; the one at the bottom 60cm square. Doubtless, as with the ill-fated "deconstructed packaging" idea, someone else has already done something similar, although I'd be surprised if they'd done it better. We'll see; maybe next time...

Scouting for Gentlemen

Staircase 10

On another blog out there on the Web the word "scout" recently came up for discussion. The (American) writer of that blog had not come across it before in its very particular usage at Oxford University, where it has traditionally been applied to a "college servant", although it emerged that "scout" has also been used in the past in the same way at Yale and Harvard.

The very idea of a college "servant" is highly anachronistic today, of course, but at the older universities, established in earlier centuries to cater for the educational and pastoral needs of the young, male members of privileged families well-used to the benefit of servants both at home and at their private boarding schools, it would have been seen as an obvious necessity. The young gentlemen would not have been expected to make their own beds, clean up their own mess, or fetch and carry water, light fires, and so on. A certain degree of discreet moral surveillance would have gone along with the job, too.

Improbable as it seems, even to myself in retrospect, I was once a student at one of the very oldest and most prominent Oxford colleges, way back in the 1970s. In those days, all but five of the forty-plus colleges were still exclusively for "men" (a charitable euphemism for late-adolescent boys), so scouts in the all-male colleges were generally (always?) male, too. The 1970s were very much a transitional period at Oxford, with the more traditional colleges still locking up their gates for the night and banning overnight "guests" in student rooms, while others had already relaxed such outdated customs and were finally even ready to contemplate the existence of women, both as "guests" and, within a few years, as prospective undergraduates. Apparently my own college, which despite its age and eminence was probably the most liberal of the lot, was known to envious students at the stuffier colleges as "Hotel Balliol".

Nonetheless, I think my experience was still typical. That is, a scout would be assigned to look after the rooms on a particular staircase, college buildings generally being arranged around open quadrangles with numbered staircases leading off, sometimes with the names of the current occupants painted onto a board next to each entrance. A scout would clean and tidy up, make and change the beds, and generally keep an eye on things. Unless you put out a "Do Not Disturb" notice, he would also knock on the door in the morning to give you a wake-up call (the days of bringing in a morning cup of tea had already passed), and would have other duties around the college during the day, such as working in the refectory to serve food. The job was never well paid, but I suppose offered a degree of security and a sense of being part of the permanent team of an elite establishment through which tides of lively young people constantly washed in and out, many destined for prominence in public and academic life. It seemed to suit a certain personality type. I mean, can you imagine the warm glow of having had a young Boris Johnson or David Cameron on "your" staircase? No, of course you can't.

Inevitably, this could be a difficult relationship for anyone who, unlike Johnson and his ilk, had been state-educated and had spent his first eighteen years at home with working parents who expected their teenage son to – gasp! – make his own bed and tidy his own room, rather than having been incarcerated from a shockingly early age in a series of private educational hothouses (know confusingly in Britain as "public schools"). In fact, and contrary to mythology, a larger percentage of post-war Oxbridge students were state-educated than was the case in many other universities: the state grammar-school system had its problems, but did ensure a steady supply of the brightest kids on full grants to the top universities. For many of us, to deal with the servile snobberies of the pre-war "Brideshead" mentality was an unwelcome novelty, and usually problematic.

As it happened, I was lucky in my first year. The scout on my staircase, Ray, was a genial Geordie, who quickly understood that I did not need babysitting and also valued a certain routine level of privacy; not least because as often as possible I would remain in bed until midday, quite often even later, slowly coming round from the adventures of the night before. To be honest, I regarded the achievement of getting the grades to become the first person in my family to go to university (never mind getting a place at Oxford) as having entitled me to a rather generous helping of fun. This was possibly a mistake, in retrospect, as we had significant exams at the end of that first year [1], but then what would I have done differently in my life burdened with a double first, anyway? Ray was relaxed about all this, and had an appropriate sense of humour: when one night an artificial joke-shop turd got left out on my desk (don't ask, I have no idea), Ray countered the following day by ostentatiously leaving a roll of toilet paper next to it.

The next year on a new staircase was very different. Scout Laurie and I did not get on. He was very proprietorial about his rooms and the "young gentlemen" that occupied them. He was elderly, and I think his worldview had been thrown into confusion by having to "serve" a new generation of students from families whose social status was not so different from his own, and who did not understand or respect the established conventions of the student-scout relationship; it made for friction. Besides, the second year at Oxford is exam-free, and therefore a time (for those so inclined) to ramp up the fun factor. My room became an established venue for those who wanted to sit up into the small hours, drinking, smoking, talking nonsense, and listening to music. [2] The "Do Not Disturb" notice was more or less permanently deployed on my door; quite often, there would be several comatose "guests" littering my floor in the morning. Laurie was not impressed; he would regularly inform me that "only the gentlemen who get up in the morning on my staircase get firsts in finals" (although I did come very close to proving him wrong; but then, I'm not really a gentleman...).

I'm not sure what those college rooms are like now, but in the 1970s they were still fairly primitive, even in the more wealthy colleges [3]. At prestigious but relatively poor Balliol the original coal fireplaces had been replaced with underpowered electric bar-heaters (often modified with twists of wire to facilitate toasting of bread), but the ceilings were high and the ancient sash windows were ill-fitting and single-glazed, so they were very cold indeed in the winter. There was usually only one bathroom with a toilet on each staircase, situated either on another floor or somewhere down a long, dark, cold corridor, and most rooms lacked running water and a sink. My second-year room did have a sink, installed inside what must once have been a cupboard, which was why I had chosen it. On a cold night, I'm afraid to say, it would save you from a trip down the freezing corridor for a pee. I only mention this because the true measure of scout Laurie's abject devotion to the college was (as he confided to one of my neighbours, anticipating admiration) that if he ever had the money he would have sinks installed in all of "his" gentlemen's rooms at his own expense. Good grief...

Obviously, things will not have remained the same over the intervening five decades. I'd be amazed if that proprietorial attitude among the scouts has survived, for a start: it seems unlikely that anybody today would remain long enough in such a poorly-paid and thankless job to develop positive feelings towards an institution in which they had no personal investment (I notice for example, that scouts are not even listed on the Balliol webpages as members of staff). Certainly, the presence of young female undergraduates will have changed things radically, and I doubt anyone now needs to listen politely to the effusions of some elderly man with strong views on cause and correlation when it comes to exam success. And I bet all the rooms are warm and equipped with free wi-fi, never mind basic plumbing...

But the word "scout" survives in the peculiar idiom of Oxford, along with other oddities like "battels" (a student's college account for food and accommodation), "handshaking" (a verbal end of term report on a student's progress), "bulldogs" (the university police), and all the rest of it. Although it does seem that the name "Hebdomadal Council" (an important governing body which was, sadly, nowhere near as arcanely Harry Potter-ish as it sounds) has finally gone. Some people celebrate and thrive in an institution whose traditions and vocabulary have stiffened into sclerosis; most just try to get used to it, or, if they have the patience, attempt to change it. [4]

But at least these days new students (sorry, freshers, a pretty universal bit of uni-speak) get handed some basic instructional literature to help them navigate a parallel universe where perfectly ordinary things are given perfectly silly names, unlike the sink-or-swim attitude I encountered half a century ago. Which, I suppose, had in its turn changed somewhat from the experience on offer a half-century before that, the aristocratic milieu of Evelyn Waugh and the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. Change may never come as quickly as one might like, but it will eventually come as the decades pass, even in a place as complacent and self-regarding as Oxford University. I should probably go back some day, knock on the door of that room at the top of Staircase Ten – assuming there is no "Do Not Disturb" note tacked to the door – and ask if I can have a look around. Although I promise I won't ask if I can use the sink for old time's sake, no matter how much I might need to.

Guests, ca. 1974...

1.  One of my best friends that year, with a room on the same staircase, was journalist David Aaronovitch. Dave's political activities meant that he spent even less time studying than me, and as a result he failed those exams ("Honours Moderations" or "Mods") and was, in the jargon, "sent down" i.e. booted out.

2. Apparently that room at the top of Staircase 10 had previously been occupied in the 1960s by Howard Marks, which set a high bar, so to speak.

3. Although I was amazed the first time I encountered a so-called "set" (in Christ Church, I think), i.e. two linked rooms accommodating just one student. These had a double door at the entrance, like an airlock: if the outer one was closed (known as "sporting the oak") it meant "do not disturb", although I'm not sure whether this served to exclude your scout in the morning. Overnight "guests" were very strictly policed at such colleges...

4. I was one of the founding members of a seminar group convened by Terry Eagleton that later became Oxford English Limited, set up to agitate for change in the very sclerotic English Language & Literature curriculum. TBH, I really only got involved to impress a prospective girlfriend, my future Civil Partner. Unromantically, she can't now remember a thing about it.