Thursday 21 June 2012

Ang San Who She?


 
I’m delighted to see that Aung San Suu Kyi has found time to spend with her family in Oxford this week and that, now she is being rehabilitated, the trade in arms to Burma can, presumably, be resumed to the benefit of all our pension pots.

There is something about the corners of her eyes, the glossy dark hair, the carefully pursed lips and even the careful choice of earrings that made a strange connection in my mind this morning. I was visited by the odd thought that the Burmese Nobel Prize winner might have used her long incarceration to have minor surgery to make her look to improve her acceptability to the Western Establishment and had chosen, from a sample book of possible alternatives, to be modelled on Dame Mary Archer.
One can imagine her asking of an aide

“Which of these women has my single mindedness of purpose, my self-restraint in personal relationships, my will-power and purity of thought and yet, has good connections with people who know how to run an effective coup d’etat?”

And the aide would ponder this for a moment and reply

“Your highness, no-one can compare with you on those scores - not even Lady Thatcher. The nearest the British Ambassador could come to a match for your unique qualities is this lady here. She conforms to your requirements in all aspects but one”

With a brisk nod to her surgeon she would have replied

“Very well then – make me like her but with better eyebrows.”

News of the past


So there we are, I have finally opened, perused, binned, sorted, stacked and understood the great volume of correspondence that has built up since my enforced departure. I am now ready and willing to communicate with the outside world once again.

Clearly all of the greatest events in Cambridge in the last year have taken place between the Middle Bronze Age and about 700AD. I refer of course, to the astounding discoveries of the archaeologists who have been digging up Clay Farm and Trumpington Meadows. All else, from the elevation of Dame Mary Archer, whose odour of sanctity wafts disconcertingly through my open window as I write, to the opening of the Guided Bus system, must pale into insignificance compared with the discovery of the Trumpington Cross, the unearthing of a skull and crossbones cult behind the Green Man and the astounding revelation that a first century Roman memorial garden will underly, forever, the soggy foundations of  what we must now call (if only we knew how to pronounce it) Great Kneighton.

Much of this may be discovered in the breathless video of the endearing
 Richard Mortimer of Oxford Archaeology East which may be found here

“What?” I hear you ask “Have we no Cantabs available that we need to import such folk from the Thames Valley?” To which I can only reply that Mr Mortimer has more enthusiasm for the past beneath his dirt-encrusted fingernails than most of our fellow citizens do in their abstracted minds.

Clearly the young lady who owned the cross must have been closely related to King Seighbert, the original founder of the University of Cambridge as John Caius noted in his excellent and accurate history of that institution, since the workmanship is identical to that of the other items from his family collection, including the Allington Hill medallion buried with him when he fell at the Battle of Fleam Dyke.


Tuesday 27 March 2012

Return to Rats' Bottom


Just like General MacArthur, I have returned!

On this beautiful spring morning I have decided to re-open my blog with a photograph of this charming building, which used to occupy the exact spot where Rats' Bottom now stands. Where civil servants from the Department of Agriculture once toiled to keep our country self-sufficient in food after the last war, I now sit and wait for Ocado to deliver my Kenyan beans to my high-tech kitchen.

It's good to be back, though slightly odd. I believe my mind may have been altered by the "therapy" I received in that awful place in Norwich and I no longer feel quite so disagreeable. I look at the government (which appears to be a different one to the one I remember) and I think what nice young men they all seem. Misguided, certainly, especially in their choice of dining and riding companions, but one feels that they mean well.

I have lost touch with you, dear Reader and cast this crumb onto the brook of life to see if you are still there. I'm putting on the kettle now and shall expect you for coffee shortly.