Highly desirable

All graduates from this MPhil should emerge as highly desirable candidates for policy, corporate and academic careers.

This line comes from a poster currently advertising the MPhil course in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge.

All graduates should. I wonder if much thought was given to this wording. This is the kind of matter that philosophers and characters in Alexander McCall Smith books ponder for hours on end. Saying all of them should doesn’t guarantee that all of them will. It’s a neat get-out, but it’s still a get-out.

What would have been the most balanced, considered wording of this sentence?

Most candidates will? No. The problem here is that most denotes a specific, quantifiable number, i.e. the majority of the group, and that surely cannot be guaranteed.

Many candidates will? Well, that assumes that many candidates will do the course in the first place, you might argue. What does many mean anyway? And on the basis that many is a less emphatic word than most, it is to be avoided. Hints of the weasel word.

Some candidates will? You might as well write All candidates are capable of failing the MPhil. It’s a modal minefield.

I think, all things considered, I’d have gone for Some candidates won’t. Not only is it brutally honest, but if you go into the MPhil expecting the worst, everything’s a bonus. An approach that has worked for me all my life.

Who wants a policy, corporate or academic career anyway? I don’t know what two of them even are. Policy isn’t an adjective, and corporate sounds very woolly. The assurance that the completion of the MPhil might leave one unfit for a vague future career in the pen-pushing industry would doubtless increase its appeal. I’m tempted to draft an application.

Bygraves and Wesley

The recent death of Max Bygraves has given me pause for thought. I had no great affection for the man — growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, he was barely on my radar — but I do find myself invoking him at least a couple of times a week, without willing it.

The thing is, for my work I have to go into storerooms twice a week to take readings of the humidity (%) and temperature (°C), in order to make sure the books are in acceptable conditions. I take these readings from a little machine. A typical reading would be: 41.5, 17.5. And something about the gently bouncing rhythm, forty-one point five, seven-teen point five, triggers a sympathetic memory of this:

The situation has become Pavlovian: whenever it is time to take the environmental readings, I find myself singing this execrable, contemptibly catchy song in my head before I’ve even reached the room, including the middle eight (‘Every time I hear you whistle / It makes my nylon bristle’).

Just why I should whistle Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s Choral Song daily as I queue for lunch is less susceptible of rational interpretation, though I’m a lot less embarrassed about it.

Muguet

On this day twelve years ago, I was in the middle of two weeks in the South-West of France doing work experience at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bayonne. I think that although the librarians sensed I might be a useful guy to have around, they didn’t have a great deal of work for me to do. I certainly stamped some new acquisitions with the legend ‘Veuillez ne pas tenter de réparer les ouvrages vous-même’, wiped down returned children’s books with disinfectant, took part in (or at least was present at) a children’s story session, and went to a bookshop with my patronne Magali (still happily there, I see) to select new stock.

The record library upstairs was presided over by an effete dandy who looked like Ravel. Unless I misunderstood, I believe I was told that a system was in place whereby CDs were magnetised in such a way that the data stored on them would be wiped if they were taken past the sensors at the entrance without being borrowed. Can this have been true? I can at least state for a fact that it was in the music library that I discovered William Sheller, whose album Les Machines Absurdes I went out and bought directly from the department store Extrapole. There was music playing constantly upstairs, and one afternoon the staff kindly allowed me to select some of their CDs to put on. I remember choosing some Fats Waller (including this), which raised a few eyebrows. Maybe they were used to more sedate music. I don’t know if it affected business.

During the week I stayed with a charming (I am tempted to say perfect) and irritatingly photogenic family of six (three girls, one boy) in Anglet, the mother giving me a lift to and collecting me from work each day, and in the weekend in the middle I stayed with my exchange student Mathieu (who couldn’t accommodate me during the week, being a boarder at a Lycée de Chauffage Central or some such establishment) in Narrosse, just outside Dax.

At some point during the weekend, Mathieu’s mother presented me with a flower, explaining that it was the tradition in France to give each other muguet on 1st May. I struggle with names of flowers in English, let alone French, but I did happen to know that muguet was Lily of the Valley, I think because I had seen it written down on a bilingual bottle of liquid soap.

On checking my dictionary, I found the word had another definition, and Mathieu’s mother’s words took on a more sinister tone. I was grateful to get back to the library on Monday morning and start disinfecting.

Why not take a leaf out of the French’s book, and give muguet to someone you love today?

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Chain blog post

The Argumentative Old Git has very kindly nominated me to participate in a meme/chain letter-type thing. Well, I customarily pride myself on my adamantine resistance to chain letters, exhortations to ‘post this as ur facebook status for 1 hour’ and the like. But I can’t ignore a meme. Thank you kindly, Old Git.

It is now incumbent upon me to:

1) tell everyone something about myself that nobody else knows

2) link to a post that fits the following categories: most beautiful piece; most helpful piece; most popular piece; most underrated piece; most pride-worthy piece; most surprisingly successful piece; most controversial piece

and, finally,

3) nominate 7 other bloggers to participate

Let’s get going.

1) Hard, this. If you’ve read this blog before, you will know that writing about myself is probably my greatest preoccupation, and one from which the existence of a presumably infinite number of more fascinating subjects has seldom distracted me. But, having racked my brains, there is one thing I have not mentioned before. When I am watching television on my own and see someone being interviewed, I sometimes pause or mute the television and answer the question on their behalf. If it’s a sporting interview, I can usually be assured of providing a more interesting and/or erudite response than the interviewee. But the other week I was Sammy Davis, Jr. for a short period. A bit presumptuous for a middle-class white boy, but that’s the way I roll. My shameful secret no more. I suppose it arises from the lamentable fact that nobody is asking me questions on TV, in spite of my periodic desire for them to do so, even if it’s only about how City failed to find the net in the second half despite the two-man advantage.

2) A rather narcissistic exercise, but it will be over soon, and perhaps you would like to google some pornography afterwards to cleanse your soul.

Most beautiful piece: this is my most beautiful piece, and will remain so until such time as the YouTube video embedded in it is removed. It contains a lot of Brahms and not very much of me, and that is as it should be. Click on it and press play before continuing.

Most helpful piece: if this blog is ever helpful, it happens by accident. Certainly my intention is to misinform as much as possible. But it is nice when people come across it by chance because it provides something of particular interest to them. I think of welcome comments on my posts about the sculptor Georg Ehrlich and Eric Linklater’s novel The Wind on the Moon.

Most popular piece: 10 Beatles songs. I suspect this has been the most popular post in terms of hits because of referrals from Google Image Search. Still, some good stuff there.

Most underrated piece: a couple of pieces I am fond of, both of which refer tangentially to L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, have been spectacularly underperused. They are Memory triggers, in which I successfully predicted that Carlos Tévez would score away at Blackpool, and A fantasy, which at a measly 5 hits is my least loved blog post. Perhaps it’s just that Hartley isn’t cool.

Most pride-worthy piece: I suppose I’m happy when I write something that rises above the mundane. There are a couple of moderately successful poetic pastiches here and here.

Most surprisingly successful piece: there was quite a lot of traffic when I wrote about the final of BBC Young Musician of the Year 2010, perhaps because so few other people appeared to be doing the same. Until last month, the day on which I posted it was the blog’s busiest one.

Most controversial piece: oh, you’ve got the wrong blog. But I imagine this would ruffle a few feathers if it got into the wrong hands.

3) Forgive me for neglecting to nominate seven other bloggers to take part. It’s not that I don’t care. But if you would like to, please follow this example. It’s been fun looking over the past couple of years and finding things I’d quite forgotten I’d written. Shalom.