Personal Blogs

The atmosphere is tense at the AA100 end of term party, where the music will be provided by The Who and the Beach Boys, whose rival fans have already started eying each other suspiciously.   It is striking how the seating arrangements in the bar seem to reflect the popularity of the guests.  The table with the most celebrity is the one occupied by Cleopatra, Madonna, Maria Callas and – somewhat incongruously – the Dalai Lama.  At the opposite end of the room are Stalin, Shostakovich, Cézanne, and Michael Faraday.  After a disagreement about formalism in music, Stalin and Shostakovich are not speaking to each other.  Faraday is looking with some concern at the rapid accumulation of empty vodka glasses.   He would probably be better employed in studying the pickups on Pete Townsend’s electric guitar, the principle of which he discovered.   The literary table seems the most animated.  Paul Muldoon, W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney and Alan Sillitoe are having a lively but, as yet, only slightly inebriated debate about What Shakespeare’s Work Really Means, upon which Christopher Marlowe is attempting to adjudicate on the grounds that he is the only person present who ever met him.   Plato and Aristotle are complaining that the piped music is too loud, and the weather is too cold for comfortable philosophising alfresco.  Pugin is wandering around on his own, and lamenting the fact that the building seems to bear no ornamentation other than a large number of decorative plaques cast in brass (the ownership of which seems to be contested, judging by the argument going on next to them).  John Locke, with apparent indifference to his position as the founder of modern liberalism, is appalled by the immodesty of what some people are wearing.  Epicurus says it doesn’t matter as long as they know how to derive pleasure from simple things.  Paul Lafargue has given up trying to organise a strike among the roadies, and is remarking that he might get a kebab on the way home…and a curry…and a pizza…and some chips.