All in a Don's Day Read Free Page A

with Jim, and he does give up – or finishes but doesn’t pass. My colleagues try to find out what went wrong and summon up all the reports. There’s not a single one which predicts the disaster that came. The disaster was completely unpredictable, they conclude.
    No it wasn’t, I think. This isn’t transparency, it’s opacity in a new guise. Can’t we accept that a bit of secrecy might be a price worth paying for honesty?
Comments
    Yeah, Jim’s a worry … but what is the actual difficulty here? Wasn’t it better he should give up, which Mary put all that effort into coaxing him not to do?
    PAUL
    Wouldn’t it be possible to try and be frank with this fictional Jim well before it comes to potential disaster? If he doesn’t think you’ve noticed and you continue giving him positive feedback, he won’t ask for help he knows he needs or for the push he knows he should get (let’s face it, sometimes you know you need a good solid push from your supervisor).
    ZAREEN

The laughter lover
    15 March 2009
    I should have known that giving a big lecture about the late Roman joke book (called the
The Laughter Lover
or, in Greek,
Philogelos
) in Comic Relief week would attract more interest in this particular byway of the Classics than usual. But when – months ago – I fixed the date to go to Newcastle for the gig, I hadn’t realised that it
was
Comic Relief.
    In fact, I didn’t actually realise the coincidence till someone pointed it out just before the lecture started. ‘Funny you’re lecturing on Roman jokes when it’s Red Nose Day tomorrow,’ they said.
    Anyway, thanks to the efficient press release put out by Newcastle University, there had already been a number of media inquiries to my mobile phone before I reached the banks of the Tyne. In this case, they were quite hard to deal with. The problem was that most of the journalists had got the impression that I had actually discovered – or dug up, perhaps – a new and entirely unknown book of Roman jokes.
    The
Daily Mail
asked if they could have a picture of it and didn’t seem quite to think that a picture of Roger Dawe’s published edition in the Teubner text series (which is all I could offer) was actually what they were looking for.
    It was hard to get the point across that the text had been known for centuries (Dr Johnson had been keen on it, and Jim Bowen had recently performed parts of it), but that I was looking at it harder than anyone had done for ages and ina new way. That’s what being ‘new’ is, for the most part, in Classics.
    Still, I soon found that having a little repertoire of ancient jokes that I could quote, tailored to the paper or show in question, did the trick. I even found some that pleased the man from
The Sun
    I think the biggest hit with
The Sun
was this one.
    â€˜A man says to his sex-crazed wife, ‘What shall we do tonight – have dinner or have sex?’ ‘Whichever you like,’ she replied, ‘but there’s no bread.’
    Oddly the interest didn’t fade once Red Nose Day had passed. The
Today
programme wanted a joke or two for the programme on Saturday morning. This was a bit of a problem, as I was due at my Speed Awareness Training in Milton Keynes by 9.30 (and the husband had rightly said that I was to be out of the house by 7.30). In the end, I told the gags over the phone at 7.25, before zooming (no, not zooming) off in the car.
    But not before the World Service had rung to ask for an interview for
Newshour
. The only time for this was in the car park at the Safety Training Centre,
if
I got there in good time.
    I did, and spent the last few minutes before 9.30 prerecording an interview via my mobile, to be used later in the day. Plaudits where they are due. The World Service outstripped even the
Today
programme in intelligence. There was no need to explain the nature of the ‘discovery’, and