All in a Don's Day Read Online Free
Author: Mary Beard
mercy. âOK,â says Trimalchio, âgut it now.â And out come all those sausages ⦠and everyone applauds.
Heston had rather more trouble with this one.
He ended up having to push the pig in on a great trolley and arrange it rather awkwardly to have its belly slit. The sausages had been very carefully positioned inside, using a medical endoscope to get them in just the right place (not a facility available in the Roman kitchen). Even so, when the knife went in, nothing exactly tumbled out very impressively ⦠even though the celebs made suitable âooh aahâ noises, and he eventually managed to present them with a trayful of what you might easily have mistaken for innards.
He had better luck with Petroniusâ ejaculating cake, which was the centrepiece of his Roman pudding.
So how did Heston score for authenticity? Could have been worse, I thought. True, it was the same old stuff about the Romans being the worldâs first bulimics, and I kept having a nasty feeling that we were going to be told that old myth about them vomiting between courses (though we never actually were). And there wasnât even a gesture to the fact that, even if the rich really did eat this sort of stuff (which they probably didnât â the
Satyricon
is a fantasy novel, for heavenâs sake), the poor were on a much more subdued diet of cheese, fruit and cabbage.
All the same, Iâm pleased to report that he passed what I once called the âdormouse testâ. (âThe longer you have to wait for a dormouse to appear in a recreated Roman banquet, the more accurate the reconstruction is likely to be.â) We learned about the Romans eating flamingos and sowsâ udders, and there was a lurid sequence in which Heston whipped up a calfâs brain custard. But there was not a dormouse in sight.
Comments
I too was wondering when we going to get to the dormouse. I suspect that the procedure used for fattening the poor creatures didnâ²t make it past the welfare people â though to judge by Hestonâ²s demeanour in the slaughterhouse, or when cheerfully disembowelling live fish, he wouldnâ²t have minded.
The last dish, the â²ejaculating cakeâ², seemed to have been made largely of chocolate. Not too many points for authenticity there, methinks.
NELSON JONES
Should schools teach Twittering?
3 April 2009
There was much hand-wringing a few days ago about the idea that primary schools should give up teaching kids about the nineteenth century and should teach them about blogs, Twittering and Wiki instead.
The thing that bothered me most about this was not the elevation of Twittering skills above (say) poetry, but the idea that central government would be requiring Twittering (or whatever) of all schools in England. More imposition of a one-size-fits-all model on to long-suffering, and very diverse, teachers and pupils.
I canât see anything wrong, in itself, in teaching kids about all kinds of different uses of languages and styles and genres. In fact, I vividly remember when I was about twelve, being required to practise writing telegrams in an English lesson at school. (And telegrams were almost the 1960sâ equivalent of Twitter, werenât they?)
The task set, I still recall, was to write a telegram to someone who had won a scholarship to Cambridge and ask them to confirm that they would be taking it up (an exercise that was also presumably one of the drip, drip ways in which our academic aspirations were raised.) My own effort (of which Iâm even now quite proud) was: âWON SCHOLARSHIP CAMBRIDGE WIRE IF ACCEPTINGâ. (I thought it was clear enough without âSTOPâ between âCAMBRIDGEâ and âWIREâ.)
Not a bad exercise in concision. And nor would Twittering be, I suspect.
As it happens, you will be pleased, surprised or utterly horrified to learn that âA Donâs Lifeâ itself has already featured in one area
Heston had rather more trouble with this one.
He ended up having to push the pig in on a great trolley and arrange it rather awkwardly to have its belly slit. The sausages had been very carefully positioned inside, using a medical endoscope to get them in just the right place (not a facility available in the Roman kitchen). Even so, when the knife went in, nothing exactly tumbled out very impressively ⦠even though the celebs made suitable âooh aahâ noises, and he eventually managed to present them with a trayful of what you might easily have mistaken for innards.
He had better luck with Petroniusâ ejaculating cake, which was the centrepiece of his Roman pudding.
So how did Heston score for authenticity? Could have been worse, I thought. True, it was the same old stuff about the Romans being the worldâs first bulimics, and I kept having a nasty feeling that we were going to be told that old myth about them vomiting between courses (though we never actually were). And there wasnât even a gesture to the fact that, even if the rich really did eat this sort of stuff (which they probably didnât â the
Satyricon
is a fantasy novel, for heavenâs sake), the poor were on a much more subdued diet of cheese, fruit and cabbage.
All the same, Iâm pleased to report that he passed what I once called the âdormouse testâ. (âThe longer you have to wait for a dormouse to appear in a recreated Roman banquet, the more accurate the reconstruction is likely to be.â) We learned about the Romans eating flamingos and sowsâ udders, and there was a lurid sequence in which Heston whipped up a calfâs brain custard. But there was not a dormouse in sight.
Comments
I too was wondering when we going to get to the dormouse. I suspect that the procedure used for fattening the poor creatures didnâ²t make it past the welfare people â though to judge by Hestonâ²s demeanour in the slaughterhouse, or when cheerfully disembowelling live fish, he wouldnâ²t have minded.
The last dish, the â²ejaculating cakeâ², seemed to have been made largely of chocolate. Not too many points for authenticity there, methinks.
NELSON JONES
Should schools teach Twittering?
3 April 2009
There was much hand-wringing a few days ago about the idea that primary schools should give up teaching kids about the nineteenth century and should teach them about blogs, Twittering and Wiki instead.
The thing that bothered me most about this was not the elevation of Twittering skills above (say) poetry, but the idea that central government would be requiring Twittering (or whatever) of all schools in England. More imposition of a one-size-fits-all model on to long-suffering, and very diverse, teachers and pupils.
I canât see anything wrong, in itself, in teaching kids about all kinds of different uses of languages and styles and genres. In fact, I vividly remember when I was about twelve, being required to practise writing telegrams in an English lesson at school. (And telegrams were almost the 1960sâ equivalent of Twitter, werenât they?)
The task set, I still recall, was to write a telegram to someone who had won a scholarship to Cambridge and ask them to confirm that they would be taking it up (an exercise that was also presumably one of the drip, drip ways in which our academic aspirations were raised.) My own effort (of which Iâm even now quite proud) was: âWON SCHOLARSHIP CAMBRIDGE WIRE IF ACCEPTINGâ. (I thought it was clear enough without âSTOPâ between âCAMBRIDGEâ and âWIREâ.)
Not a bad exercise in concision. And nor would Twittering be, I suspect.
As it happens, you will be pleased, surprised or utterly horrified to learn that âA Donâs Lifeâ itself has already featured in one area
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