Tom Roper's Weblog

Accidents of birth

I celebrated my 55th birthday yesterday. The most compelling refutation of astrology for me is to look in the newspaper that day at the birthdays of the famous. In what sense could I be said to have anything in common with Paddy Ashdown, Ralph Nader, Julia Neuberger, Robert Scruton or Elizabeth Taylor?

It is more fun to look at the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) whose praises I have sung before. It is simplicity itself to construct a search for those in it who were born on 27 February, and amusing to imagine that I might share more than just a natal date with some of them.

And so I find myself sharing a birthday with Frances Cornford, the classicist, Henry Custance, the jockey, Lawrence Durrell, who is not read as much as he should be these days, John Fothergill, author of An Innkeeper's Diary, but who I did not know until today was one of Edward Perry Warren's circle of young men, the Lewes House Brotherhood, Richard Garnett, librarian and developer of the printed catalogue at the British Museum, described as being 'always been susceptible to intelligent young women', Kenneth Horne, of Round the Horne and Beyond our Ken, James Klugmann, historian of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Cyril Bertram Mills, the circus proprietor, Seán O'Faoláin, the writer and Ellen Terry the actress. These links all go to the ODNB entries, but you may need to go by way of your public library if you are not in an institution that has access. Most public libraries have subscribed.

There is another sense of accident about my birth but I will save that for a future post.

Kempton: Racing Post Chase day

I write this after the event, but I don't think I should shy away from recording the awful truth, with annotations. All at Kempton"

100: Punjabi (won, but I can't claim any special haruspical insight in tipping this beast)
200: Vino Griego (a local horse, trained with Gary Moore at Lower Beeding, so possibly a sentimental selection, was going well till the last fence, when he fell)
230: The Nightingale (won, impressively)
305: Nacarat (second, would have won if not for a mistake at the fifteenth fence)
340: Mille Chief (non-runner, if I'd known this when making the selection, I can't truthfully say I'd have picked Soldatino, the winner)

Ascot and Haydock

Things we thought to be eternal truths have been overthrown in the past week. Both Denman and Binocular lost races that most would have said were in the bag.

I approach today's challenge with diffidence.

Haydock 230: Lough Derg
Ascot 245: Tasheba
Ascot 315: Planet of Sound
Haydock 335: Dream Alliance

Castrating cats

I was intrigued by an item in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column. While not as funny as the error in a recipe for kale curry (700 litres of stock?) it reminded me of a debate in the veterinary profession when I used to work at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons

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The correction reads, 'A piece listed the neutering of male cats among procedures that qualified veterinary nurses can do. This was once an article of belief among some vets, but latterly it has been clarified among the practitioners involved that this is outside the nursing role'.

This was contentious back in the mid-nineties. My memory is that it all hinged on whether the cat's scrotum could be considered a body cavity or not, if the testes have descended. Only a veterinary surgeons can carry out an act of veterinary surgery, according to the legislation that governs the profession, and an act of veterinary surgery involves entry into a body cavity. I do not recall that it was ever resolved; it sounds as if it now has, though whether male cats will rejoice at the news is debatable.

The Persians: Kings College London Greek Play 2010

Νῦν ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀγών: now you fight for everything. These words, from the messenger's description of the battle of Salamis, spoken by the Greeks as their ships are about to engage the Persians are, according to Simon Goldhill's pre-play lecture at the KIngs College London Greek Play, the motive and reason for the Greek victory.

I attended the play, and the lectures beforehand by Professor Goldhill, who holds the chair in Greek Languages and Culture at Cambridge, and Dr Lindsay Allen, Lecturer in Greek and Near Eastern History at Kings College London. Professor Goldhill said the play was the foundation text of western attitudes to the east and discussed it from a Greek perspective, while Dr Allen took the Persian point of view, illustrating her talk with images of Persian antiquities, including Darius's tomb at Persepolis, not Susa where Aeschylus set the action of the Persians.

Not much happens on stage in the play: the Persians, represented by the Queen Mother Atossa and a chorus of regents, and referring to themselves as barbarians, learn of the catastrophic defeats of Xerxes' armies in Greece from a messenger. Atossa invokes the ghost of her dead husband and father of Xerxes, the dead king Darius who appears to bemoan the defeats and prophesy further ones. At the end, the ragged Xerxes himself returns, amid much crying of 'οἱοιοῖ’, woe. It was, as Professor Goldhill pointed out, brave of Aeschylus to show this, for it turns the audience's pride in a Greek triumph to ‘pity and fear’. For 1500 years, he said, the play was not shown. Yet in the past five years, there have been at least twenty productions, including that of Peter Sellars.

The theatre was full, and not only with sixth-formers studying the play for A level. The production leaned towards the traditional but was effective and we applauded the cast generously at the end. Darius in particular, had considerable stage presence and, if I read the biographies in the programme, not all the cast are reading Greek itself, so their sensitive and accurate recitation of the lines was a considerable achievement. The Greenwood Theatre is not the most well-appointed in London, but I found a seat next to a broken one, which gave me plenty of leg room.

Χορός

ἰὼ ἰώ, Περσὶς αἶα δύσβατος.

Ξέρξης

ἰὴ ἰὴ τρισκάλμοισιν,

ἰὴ ἰή, βάρισιν ὀλόμενοι.

Χορός

πέμψω τοί σε δυσθρόοις γόοις.

Newbury: Aon Chase

Denman runs at Newbury today, and cannot be opposed. The 3.05 Totesport Trophy Hurdle is a more complex affair, and I have chose Tony McCoy's mount. For my last selection, I oppose Master Minded, since Paul Nicholls is saying he is 80% fit, and I think Fix the Rib has a good chance.

2.30: Denman
3.05: Get Me Out Of Here
3.40: Fix the Rib

Post scriptum 4 pm: how wrong is it possible to be? Denman unseated Tony McCoy, handing the Aon Chase to Ruby Walsh on Tricky Trickster, and Master Minded won, in spite of walking through the last fence.

Shane Godbolt on international development

Picture: Shane Godbolt, Director (l), and Emma Stanley, Senior Programmes Officer of PHI

The latest, and not, I hope, the last of CILIP in London's monthly meetings in the Sekforde Arms in Clerkenwell heard Shane Godbolt discuss what CILIP members could do to support international development.

After a genial welcome from the chair who had, he confessed, looked long upon the grape at a travel industry event earlier that day, a warning that there might not be a March meeting—check the website for details — and some publicity for an event at City of London libraries on 24 February at 11 am, where they will show off their back-room activities, he introduced Shane.

She became interested in international issues early in her career, when working at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School Library. Influenced by Lesley Morton and Fiona Mackay Picken, she was sent by the British Council to India. She was struck both by the level of deprivation in the country, but also by how much she had in common with Indian librarians. Through David Matthews, then at Aberystwyth, she made contacts in Sierra Leone, and began visiting Africa. She found both library and medical education lacking. She was involved in bringing African librarians to Britain through the Association of Commonwealth Universities fellowships.

In 1992 Michael Carmel founded Satelife, later to become PHI, Partnerships in Health Information, and Shane became Director in 2006. Though international development was low on government agendas, she felt that movements like Make Poverty History and events such as Nelson Mandela's release and the overthrow of apartheid had pushed politicians into action, such as formulating the millennium development goals. Increasingly, they had come to realise that reliable information was the basis of good health, which in turn was the key to the eradication of poverty. Controversially, if the incredulous noises around me in the audience were anything to go by, Shane suggested that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been helpful. The Crisp report, by the former NHS Chief Executive, was the result of a request from government for an analysis of what needed to be done.

She described partnership-based initiatives such as WHO's HINARI. She and Alison Weightman at Cardiff began to be asked to train African librarians in HINARI. Neither of them had the skills to do so, so they turned to contacts in the US and Africa, and so were able to send a lead trainer to Freetown. Shane was able to see at first hand the transforming effect of HINARI. Before, medical students had been trying to write dissertations without any access to the literature.

IFLA's Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) programme became involved, through a chance contact with Paul Sturges, to produce sound authoritative information librarians could use on AIDS. Shane also mentioned INASP, and their capacity-building work with libraries, and the Tropical Health Education Trust's information programme, based on institutional partnerships. Librarians should be involved, she said.

Health Care Information for All 2015 is another project PHI is heavily involved in, and they also work closely with CILIP, especially the International Library and Information Group and the Career Development Group.

Shane mentioned the shattering effect of the civil war in Sierra Leone on library services.

A typical day in her life might consist of emails form Kenya, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia, two meetings at THET and a Skype conversation with the AHILA President, calling from Nigeria

She urged us to get involved, and suggested some of us might want to attend the next AHILA conference.

In questions and answers, I asked if they were working with non-English speaking countries in Africa. The answer was no, though AHILA organises the whole continent. Someone else asked about method of communication; Shane replied that one to one e-mail works, though services such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail tend to work better than institutional accounts; Skype and texting are also useful.

She also mentioned a new report from the ACU on issues for African universities by Jonathan Harle.

There were also questions about the HINARI training, and CDS/ISIS, developed by Alan Hopkinson at Middlesex University some are now using open source products like Evergreen

Further reading

Crisp, Nigel
Global Health Partnerships: The UK contribution to health in developing countries

Harle, Jonathan
Digital resources for research: a review of access and use in African universities
ACU, 2009

Can we achieve health information for all by 2015?
Godlee F, Pakenham-Walsh N, Ncayiyana D, Cohen B, Packer A.
Lancet. 2004 Jul 17-23;364(9430):295-300.

Interest declared: I worked for Shane, long ago, as Senior Internet Project Officer in the NHS's North Thames Regional Library Development Unit. That was when the Internet was a project.

Shane described this part of London as Dickensian. So it is, for when she and I worked together we were a little way away, in Millman Street at the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, a stone's throw from Dickens House in Doughty Street. I loved the atmosphere of this part of London, the just[position of the professions of medicine, law and journalism. In Shane's experience many of her projects have been built on chance encounters, and on personal contacts. That's how I remember the Unit offices. Barely a week went by without an international visitor from somewhere, in a bewildering whirl of projects and partnerships, all held together and made sense of by Shane's PA, the splendid Susan Fairlamb. That brief period was one of the most interesting periods of my career.

Desk diaries

I have become involved in a collaborative blog, Desk Diaries, the brain-child of the multi-talented Alexandra Loske, who may also be found discussing colour theory at The Morning after the Deluge.

The idea is that each participant posts pictures of their desk, as frequently or infrequently as they wish. We believe that the desk is the window to the soul.

Deep-girdl'd dames

'The Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom...The existence of the amateur was recognised by the publication of this Library, and to a great extent made respectable...The difficulty of Greek is not sufficiently dwelt upon, chiefly perhaps because the sirens who lure us to these perilous waters are generally scholars [who] have forgotten...what those difficulties are. But for the ordinary amateur they are very real and very great; and we shall do well to recognise the fact and to make up our minds that we shall never be independent of our Loeb.”

Virginia Woolf in the Times Literary Supplement, quoted on the Loeb Library home page, though without a precise citation, which I shall look up tomorrow, when I have access to the TLS Archive.

I feel less guilty, now I have Woolfian authority, about reading the Loeb translation of Aeschylus' The Persians, by Herbert Weir Smyth, to support my faltering Greek in preparation for next week’s visit to the Kings College London Greek play. Annoyingly, I learnt that in Cambridge, at the end of the month, Emmanuel are staging an abbreviated production of Oedipus at Colonus in the original, with a discussion. If I were free, and still had a house in Cambridge, I’d be up there like a shot. The dates of this autumn's Cambridge Greek play still aren’t announced: I scoured the Arts Theatre website.

In using the Loeb, I find myself wondering at some of the archaisms Smyth use. Some examples:

'Trusty of the Trusties', 'venerable partner of my bed', 'nay, methinks thou shalt learn anon the whole account in very truth'.

Why should Smyth use this language,which must have sounded old-fashioned in the extreme in 1928 when he prepared this translation?

I quickly rejected one theory, that he might choose antiquated vocabulary to fit the metre, for the translation is rarely in verse, expect for some of the choruses.  Neither could it be that the choice of words is made to make a suitable translation for dramatic performance. These translations are designed to help the reader, not for performance on the stage, and in some cases, even to the ears of an audience eighty years ago, the translation would have been near-unintelligible. Is it that he wanted the translation to mirror the Greek word order? This would be helpful to readers like me, yet it is clearly not always the way Smyth translated. Sometimes the archaisms do preserve some of the effects in the Greek, such as assonance and alliteration, but not all the time.

I fall back on the theory that he felt that, as this is one of the oldest plays we have, it should be made to sound old. Unfortunately, even to my ear, and as my family often complain, I am not free from guilt of deliberate archaism and circumlocution, they grate.

Doncaster and Sandown: Scilly Isles Chase day

With the exception of the first race in which I make a selection, the Scilly Isles Novices' Chase, which is nailed on for Punchestowns in my and many other punters' opinions, there's some very open races today.

Sandown 235: Punchestowns
Doncaster 255: Give It Time
Sandown 310: Erzen
Doncaster 325: Free World
Sandown 340: Gone To Lunch