Manically busy

Jennifer’s Diary: wild flows the Don. Who says we’re a lazy bunch of sinecure-holders? Much of this first week of a new term at Cambridge has been spent checking titles and abstracts for students’ dissertations (deadline Friday). As everyone knows, 100 words are harder to get right than 1,000, and the trenchant-yet-appropriate title harder still. The incredulity of the young faces as one slashes their woolliness, changes it’s to its and vice versa, and ties it all up in a convincing knot, continues to be of deep concern. When it ceases to be, it’ll be time to retire.

And in retirement hope to continue to be as manically busy as Prof. Patrick Boyde, resting from the chair of Italian only to involve himself in other literatures — Rilke, Racine and Corneille and, the latest, archaic Greek. His curiosity about various theories of pronunciation and declamation in Homer surfaced over the week’s first half in a quasi-dramatisation of the episode in the Odyssey where the hero, after ten days’ shipwreck, is washed up, naked, filthy, exhausted, on the shores of an unknown island, to find the King’s daughter Nausikaa playing ball with her maidens.