dom.blog

One of life’s oddities: this evening, I got to interview Ken Livingstone.

OK, backtrack. So there I was a couple of weeks ago in Special Subject class when the girl opposite me (hey, Emma!) leaned forward over the table and asked if I’d volunteered on Ken’s last election campaign. Which came rather out of the blue for me, but of course Emma had chatted a while ago to my former DoS, who’d gossiped what she knew about the other people in the class. And of course, my former DoS knew I’d volunteered on Ken’s campaign because I, too, like to chat. And Emma’s an editor of the student newspaper Varsity, and was wondering if I’d fancy doing a quick interview with Ken when he came to speak to the Union Society…?

Well, naturally I would, thank you! And it’s all the easier because my contact at the Union turns out to be a guy (hey, James!) who sat next to me at the Peterhouse Politics Society dinner last year. (We chatted about Ken.) And oh, now Ken’s here and I’m able to give him a copy of the interview from the last time I did this – a decade ago. (Don’t we all look younger in the photo!) I was ten, and yet here I am now asking him basically the exact same question about running for the mayoralty with or without the Labour party.

The moral: life is strange, fun and ever so slightly cyclical. And you make it better by idle chatter

Anyway – since it is Varsity‘s interview, I shall refrain from blogging the content until I can link to the online version. (Don’t expect great revelations, obviously. He’s an old pro at this. But hopefully it should still be a good read…)

I know, I know, I’ve been really lax in blogging, and have clearly been overtaken in both quantity and quality of output by Tasha’s sterling efforts on this front. In my defence, I have – always – got an awful lot of reading to do. It’s funny, because there’s a real trade-off with doing political thought papers: on the one hand, when it comes to actually planning and writing my weekly essay it’s a lot easier, as you don’t have to roam so widely, but at the same time I do an awful lot more reading and note-taking than I usually manage over the week. Still, this isn’t a complaint – I do love it really

Had a really lovely T&S evening last weekend, in which we were all surprised (and much impressed) by Andrew’s new-found cocktail making abilities. (They were, and I tell no lie, delicious.) What was odd, and frankly what I didn’t deserve, was to wake up in the middle of the night afterwards with eighteenth century discourse trapped in my drunken brain. Seriously. Rather than saying “hmm, go get some water” to myself, I ended up musing internally in elaborate prose about whether quenching my thirst was an ‘ultimate end’ in itself or not, which now seems like the wrong side of mental. Still, worth it for the cocktails. Tonight Sophie and I went for a relaxed marital* pub-confab, which is another thing which forms a very worthy companion to working all day, and is much appreciated, partly because Sophie has an uncanny ability to memorise all of my London-based friends and keep track of their news as well as Cambridge gossip, so it’s almost like mentally popping back home. (Hmm – there’s that ‘mental’ word again. Worrying, worrying.)

(*You remember we’re college husband and wife, right? This isn’t needlessly confusing? Great!)

And now for the big end of blog diversion which you don’t have to read:

Socrates. You’ve heard of him, surely. A Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th century BCE. He taught Plato, who went on to teach Aristotle. A bunch of writing from these last two DWEMs survives to the present day.

But is it too harsh to wish that it hadn’t? Because the fact is: there were others. Leucippus. Democritus. Epicurus. We don’t have much of their stuff, but we do know that they all advocated a materalist atomism which was way ahead of their times. Can you imagine how the course of history could have been different if they had ended up representing classical thought, rather than the intellectual sophists and dead-ends which we did get? You might say that it wouldn’t have mattered much in comparison to armies, conquests and empires. But I like to think we could have at least done it all better

Ladies and gentlemen, from a chilly Cambridge attic bedroom, I wish you a good evening. My plan is to blog, quickly and quietly, before retiring to a still-considerably-cold bed. Tomorrow morning brings a mock exam for HAP – ‘Historical Argument and Practice’ – which is the seemingly obligatory part of any course where everything goes tediously meta, and questions run the gambit from “But, really, why?” to “So what?” and “Oh, right. Discuss.”. But never mind. If I really can’t think of anything to write, and bear in mind we have three hours to come up with a single answer, I might just resort to composing limericks or something. It’s a mock.

Much much much more fun is my actual paper this term, which is a continuation of the history of political thought from last year. This week is Hume, who is awesome, although I am slightly concerned that the rest of the term is going to be a downward spiral from this initial height. (It’s hard to improve on ‘no metaphysics’, since just writing it again but in a bigger, jazzier font is bound to be subject to diminishing returns. Maybe in <marquee>…*) Anyway! All this has lead to a grand moment of self-discovery tonight, wherein I realised that my answer of “I don’t know, I don’t have any plans…” to questions about the future is basically a lie. I do have plans – lots of plans! – only they’re based around reading rather than careering. So, here is my commitment: when I leave uni, I am going to make time to read (a) even more philosophy, (b) Very Short Introductions to sciencey things and (c) great fiction. Inbetween, if I have time, I might get a job. How’s that?

(If only I could read on trains, my life would be pretty much complete!)

*Note to self: It’s probably best not to write jokes which combine both philosophy and HTML, since the potential target audience reading this blog is basically Alex Trafford. And maybe Bill Thompson.