Hugh Bowden 2010

These are not happy times to be an academic in Britain, or anywhere else come to that. My job, like that of my colleagues in Arts & Humanities is, technically, at risk of redundancy. At least I have no teaching on Thursdays, so once I had dealt with all the administration that had been piling up in my e-mail inbox and elsewhere I had time to get out of the office and do a brief bit of 4quating. The following exchange seemed to resonate with my mood:

‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.
‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

- from Pilgermann

I printed it out on yellow A4 paper, added today’s date and the sa4qe.blogspot.com address, and took them off to the college library. It was inevitable that I would leave them in the history section: one on a desk, next to War, a book edited by Sir Lawrence Freedman, who is currently part of the Chilcot enquiry, and the other next to a book called Truth is the First Casualty, on events in the Vietnam War.

Plenty of students there suffering from attacks of history. And the rest of us.

But some can wear 85 years of history lightly: Happy Birthday to one of them.

An Hugh Bis
Dr Hugh Bowden
Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, Department of Classics, King's College London

Join the Facebook group campaigning against the redundancy threats
Further information and petition: http://stopclassicsfacultycuts.webs.com/

Hugh's brand new book Mystery Cults in the Ancient World (in which Hoban fans will be pleased to hear Orpheus plays an important role) is available from Amazon