Culture is as culture does.

I'm very happy to be writing from Bristol tonight after a long weekend in Liverpool for the annual Classical Association conference. The conference itself was pretty good, and it was a fun weekend, don't get me wrong; the fun just came from different places than we students had imagined. Expectations were high because Liverpool has recently been crowned European Capital of Culture for 2008, and we were looking forward to spending our free time touring the docks and browsing through galleries and museums. Through no fault of Liverpool's, the weather pretty much put the kibosh on those plans. Apart from brilliant sunshine as we arrived and left the city, the weekend was solid rain, varying from annoying sprinkles to a full-on downpour complemented by high winds that washed out our free afternoon yesterday. So, if you want an assessment of Liverpool as a cultural Mecca, I can only say that if by culture, you mean vast quantities of mediocre coffee and cheap wine, then Liverpool has a lot to offer.

The weekend did feature one genuinely impressive cultural experience. The conference dinner on Friday night was held at Liverpool Cathedral (Anglicans apparently don't mind allowing crowds of indeterminate religious persuasions to chow down in their sanctuary, apparently, if they can cough up the appropriate fee). The Cathedral is absolutely massive and looks ancient (that is, less than a millennium later than anything classicists study) although it's actually a Gothic revival, finished in the 1970s. Everyone came all fancied up for an opening wine reception, after Robert Harris (author of Pompeii, Imperium, and other historical novels) gave a very good presidential lecture, in the very back of the Cathedral. Afterwards, we proceeded to our tables in the sanctuary proper for a three course dinner with a more bizarre program of entertainment. After the main course, a hush fell over the crowd as a man and a woman in dressed in gold-and-silver ornamented robes came striding slowly and deliberately down the aisles, addressing to the audience in measured and mellifluous tones what was, by general consensus of the diners, absolute crazy talk -- distinctly creepy pronouncements about love, marriage, sex, childbearing, etc. We soon took note of little notecards on our tables that clued us in to the explanation that these were a husband-and-wife team giving a realistic performance of ancient Sumerian proverbs, shortly to be followed by a performance on the Golden Lyre of Ur. Somehow this did nothing to mitigate the creepiness of the situation which only intensified during the lyre playing and a monologue in which the woman acted out participation in a mass suicide. The conference organizer was heard to be apologizing profusely to as many tables as he could when dessert was finally, mercifully served. A fantastic demonstration of the Cathedral's organ after dessert went a long way towards taking our minds off the earlier entertainment, and we all left in good spirits. (For those of you keeping track at home, I would put the evening's programme somewhere in the top 10 on the list of Things That Would Only Happen in a Catholic Church Over the Pope's Dead Body).

In any case, the Cathedral was a pretty impressive backdrop for the conference dinner, such as it was. The weekend went downhill in the culture department from there. We students (there were four of us total, and we had a great time together) bravely ventured out into the downpour yesterday afternoon to go get a look at the Albert Dock area, but by the time we made it to the city centre, we were soaked head to toe despite umbrellas and ducked into a huge shopping mall to wait out the rain. After some dry-sock shopping and a greasy cup of coffee, we did finally make it to the waterfront and walked through the Tate Modern, but weren't overly impressed with the whole area. Luckily, though, by the time we left the museum, it was a respectable hour of day to commence what one must always turn to when weather and culture fail: eating and drinking as a form of entertainment. We knew just where to turn: a friend and I had had a delicious meal at a cute French bistro on our first night in town, so we hiked back up the hill and had a long, warm, dry, relaxing, fun meal, then continued the festivities at a pub in town with another friend. We ended the evening with spontaneous stops at a kebab shop and (enticed by free drink coupons) a dingy club populated by freshers from Liverpool University. It may not have been classy, but it was our best night in the city.

So, grateful for my first-conference experience and a taste of the Capital of Culture, I am even more thrilled to be relaxing in my own room tonight in lovely, lovely Bristol. I'm glad to be done with traveling for a while, but I have enjoyed noticing that every time I return home that I've become even more attached to the city. What's more, I'm absolutely stoked (and I am not kidding) to be able to throw myself into a straight month of uninterrupted work starting tomorrow morning after all the stressful distractions of the past six months. I've almost forgotten what it's like to work with a clear head.

Entertaining pics of Liverpool later. But now, I'm going to bed.

I'll have the fish I can't pronounce, si vous plait.

Glow-paint party!

Even though I've already told some of you about it, I want to write about an event from last weekend that I still can't quite wrap my mind around.

Living in England, I don't have many moments of profound culture shock. There are the general differences in landscape, accent, culinary tastes, etc., that I still take some notice of, but for the most part I spend my time around students and average joes, and students and average joes tend to be more or less the same all over.

But when I have, a couple of times, been thrown into the heady stratosphere of upper class British intellectual culture, I realize pretty quickly that I am out of my element, and not just because I'm American. Case in point: the occasion of the Friends of Herculaneum Society meeting in Bristol last Saturday. An email went around to the classics postgrads saying that the dean of the school, the president of the society, had invited any of us who were interested to attend as his personal guests (i.e., free). I jumped at that opportunity, enticed by a lecture on Roman public libraries and a showing of clips from a new documentary on the excavation of Herculaneum. So I showed up on Saturday, and in between the lectures, I helped two of my friends serve tea, biscuits and wine to the old rich folks in attendance. As a sort of payment for our services, the dean invited us to come out to dinner with him, the presenters, and a couple of the other members whom we vaguely understood to be Big Deals.

We went to a French restaurant (the name of which I still can't pronounce) up Whiteladies Road that I hadn't noticed before, probably because my food-and-beverage radar tends not to pick up places that far out of my price range. I was the last to hand my coat to the waitress at the door, and I watched in slow motion as everyone else seated themselves, leaving one open place exactly in the middle of the table surrounded by the dean, the presenters, and two other men who looked intimidatingly familiar with this sort of dining establishment. I gave the old social skills a quick pep talk and went into the fray.

There come certain moments in life when it is best to accept the fact that it is flatly impossible to impress one's dining companions as much more than a caveperson who drinks 2.99 wine selected by Sainsbury's and cannot read French to save her derriere. At such moments, one must suppress her suddenly overwhelming appetite for a chicken fried steak and a PBR and embrace her own boorishness. She must forge ahead in any way she can, and hope that the multiple vintages of fine wine on the table will aid her neighbors in soothing the sensibilities that she will no doubt violently offend.

So I sat down and put my napkin in my lap. I introduced myself to the silver-haired man on my left, who turned out to be a recently retired Oxford professor of archaeology who still manages the Lincoln College faculty wine cellar of 13,000 bottles and whose wife, also a connoisseur, has written dozens of entries for the Oxford Companion to Wine. He very capably advised the dean as to which wines were the most likely to be pleasing to our whole table. Red and white both, of course (a given when you begin with the fish bisque and then "go on" to the filet). Across from me was the Roman libraries lecturer, who had the best-cared-for fingernails I have ever seen on a human being. I mean smooth, rounded, with perfect cuticles merging into painstakingly moisturized skin. It was hard not to stare. He looked quite awkward, left out of conversations on either side, and I figured that then was a good a time as any to reveal my breathtaking ignorance and ask a question about his presentation. We ended up having a nice chat about Roman reading audiences and books we'd read lately, and I learned he went to the same (posh) secondary school that features in Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club, which I'm currently working on. On my right, I met an Oxford papyrologist with an American accent, with whom the indispensable line, "I must confess I know nothing about (x)..." once again came in extremely handy. We ended up having more in common than I thought, though: his first two degrees were from the University of Nebraska, one of which was in English, so I had a little something to go on.

I am proud to say that I conducted parts of these conversations while digging mussels out of their shells with a fork (it looked less feasible yet more appropriate to use the spoon provided, but the papyrologist was going at them with a fork, so I took that as permission) and intermittently washing fish juice off my hands in my own little finger bowl of tepid water. And then, when the time came, I "went on" to ox cheeks (a bargain at 18 pounds). I thought better of inquiring as to which set of cheeks I had the pleasure of sampling, but they were tasty, and the Roman librarian thought they stood up quite well to the boar's cheeks he'd eaten in South Africa recently!

I have to say that I completely enjoyed the evening, start to finish, and that everyone there was extremely nice. Still, I couldn't take a bit of it seriously, my predominant thought being, "is this really my life?" It was equally inconceivable that I had somehow landed in that situation and that everyone around me seemed to find nothing extraordinary about it. I found myself memorizing every detail so I could tell a good story in an email to Dee and on the blog. The whole experience went in the "remember-for-future-novel" file rather than the "remember-in-order-to-look-posh-at-future-dinners file." And of that, I'm not ashamed. If you ever catch me eating ox cheeks (either set) with a straight face, I would appreciate it if you could remind me to lighten up. If you're going to spend (or have someone spend on you) 40 pounds for dinner, you should at least savor the full entertainment value.