The glamour of the academic life

Recently, on Twitter, there was a very entertaining account of a nightmare experience of giving a paper by Duncan Wilson, a historian at the University of Manchester.

Just remembering the time I gave a talk in a uk university, 3 people turned up and 1 fell asleep after 10 min. They then told me there was no money for a hotel and I had to sleep on a camp bed in someone’s house. Mid way through the night their dog bit me.

As other contributors to the still-growing Twitter thread noted, this is not an isolated incident in UK academia. The stories go beyond the UK, although I think it’s fair to say that ‘our’ stories are particularly grim. It’s not as if we ask for a lot, especially when doing something without pay, for the good of the subject, and to contribute to another department’s research environment as a hotbed of lively talks and discussion. Like Duncan, I’ve had that experience of only three people turning up. I know, there’s a lot to do, and department seminars aren’t always the most appealing use of time, but still… At least none of them fell asleep. And I was able to travel back to my own home.

That, however, isn’t always possible. I’ve also been taken to the station to catch the last train, on one occasion to find that there were buses and taxis replacing the train on a freezing cold night. Well, not actually replacing. At one point there was nothing laid on and the passengers had to locate a taxi themselves. It would be good if one’s hosts checked for this sort of thing. Even worse was the occasion when I was driven to the station by someone who ran out of petrol on the way, parked in one lane of a busy road, went round to the boot of the car and brought out a watering-can full of petrol, from which he filled up the tank. I’m not sure what was worse – being parked in an unsafe place, worrying that if I missed the train I could be stuck at this man’s house for the night, or realising this was someone who thought a watering-can of petrol was a good thing to have in the back of the car.

On to something I mentioned in the Twitter thread. I was asked to be the external examiner for an Oxbridge PhD. It was very much my sort of subject, so I agreed, and was told a room had been booked for me in the college of the internal examiner. I arrived and was led to my room. On the way, the porter explained that it was the college’s ‘closed period’ so there were no functioning bathrooms in the building in which my room was located, and he helpfully pointed to the building where one could take a bath or shower. My heart sank: I’d expected ensuite and wasn’t travelling with a dressing gown or anything like that. He left me outside my door. I opened it, went in, and was met by an unmade bed and discarded pizza boxes (and some pizza). Let’s just leave that there. All you need to know is: no, I didn’t spend the night there; and yes, the university eventually reimbursed me for the cost of the hotel.

Then there was the external examining experience in which the various examiners were wined, dined, and sent back to the various halls of residence in which we’d been placed. Two of us were driven by a colleague from the university. On the short drive, the other external – who was clearly drunk – proceeded to fall asleep on my shoulder. It was, simply, gross. When we arrived, the colleague went to help him out of the car, and the external fell over in the gutter. The colleague and I walked him into the college, where the colleague proceeded to search the examiner’s pockets for a room key, as he wasn’t in a fit state to know where he was going. At this point, I left the colleague to it. Putting someone to bed isn’t in any of our job descriptions. I went back to my room, took a deep breath, and started an allergic reaction to the cleaning fluid – it was very smelly. After a night of severe hay fever-type symptoms, I took a shower (ensuite! yes!) and went down to breakfast, to find the other external eating for England and showing no ill effects whatsoever. Life isn’t fair. OK, so at least external examining is paid (not much, though), but there’s quite enough pressure without dealing with near-comatose people.

There are also those times when you agree to give a talk to a school, or an interest group such as a branch of the Classical Association or the Historical Association. It’s for the good of the subject, and these are people with even less funding for such talks than a university would have. So you expect to be put up in someone’s spare room for the night. This can feel very uncomfortable if it becomes clear that the host is … odd. One insisted on every door in the flat being closed as soon as one went through it. The rooms were small – I’m not usually claustrophobic but this made me feel ill at ease. He went to make tea, but closed the door on me in the sitting room while he did that. I’ve seen enough cop shows to know that this is what the killer does, so he can get his murder weapons and burst back into the room with them.

On these ‘one of the committee will put you up in their home’ gigs, there is always a tricky period when you arrive at the flat or house and are offered a drink – tricky because you never know whether they want you to say yes, and then stay up for a chat, or no, in which case everyone can make it to bed at a decent hour. On one such evening, I eventually made it upstairs to my very small room with its very small bed and no ensuite. As regular readers know, I’m fairly obsessed with toilets, although not as obsessed as some staff at my most recent university. In those days, I could probably make it through the night with only one loo trip. But I’ve never felt entirely at ease being in a house with one loo and several people. In this case, though, the problem was clearly going to be the cat. It thought of the spare room as its domain and was pushing at the door as soon as I closed it. At the start of the inevitable loo trip, the damn cat rushed in as soon as I gingerly opened the bedroom door. What to do? Evict it at once, or go to the loo and then wrestle with it? I went for the immediate eviction option. Of course, that made a certain amount of noise, so I was worried that someone else would wake and head for the loo. Fortunately, not. I managed the eviction without being scratched, and then had to slither through a barely-open bedroom door when I came back from the loo, to drift off to sleep to the sound of the cat scratching at the door… Which is better than the occasion when a host explained to me that their cat had peed on the spare bed earlier that day, but they thought it was all clean now.

I was not so lucky on an unexpected academic overnighter. On this occasion, I had been out with my department and there was heavy snow during the evening. We checked and found the trains had stopped. A senior member of my department kindly offered to put me up. This meant a camp bed in the living room. It wasn’t comfortable, but I was poor and it was a bed so I was very grateful. Plus, no cats. During the night, I woke up for a loo trip. I had no idea where I was. Once it came back to me, I realised I didn’t know where the lounge door was. I shuffled slowly and carefully over to where I thought it should be. It wasn’t. With an increasing sense of urgency, I started walking along each wall, hands patting the wall in search of a door. I realised there was one light source – the red stand-by light on the TV. But I’d never seen this room until I went to bed in it, so that didn’t help. I continued to pat the walls until at last I found a door handle. This process was not a quiet one; there was a certain amount of tripping over furniture involved. Which meant that, when I finally got out of the room, someone else had been disturbed by the noise – and was already in the loo.

If you want a glamorous life, don’t even think of academia.