Heeeeeeeeeeeeere's Voley!

Back in the office where I belong, faced with a massive pile of marking.

Yesterday's meeting in Cardiff was to inspect their halls of residence ready for the School Games. The journey down was beautiful. Deer, rabbits, buzzards and other fauna played in the spring sunshine, and the rolling hills of Gloucestershire and South Wales blazed with blackthorn blossom and wild flowers. Disembarking at Cardiff Central, the Welsh language fell on me like the softest of spring rain.

It was amazing to see their student body. Clearly more middle-class (did you know that Wolves has the most working-class intake of any UK university) and almost all white. They were all working hard - Cardiff seems to run more exams than us. The main university buildings are stunning: massive, gleaming white Edwardian architecture from the days when the cheapest bid didn't always win the tender.

If you haven't been, the city is well worth visiting. On the way back from the visit, I took the circular bus round the city. It went through Splott and all the dock areas, grey houses hunched against the environment. I saw Ninian Park (now abandoned for a new stadium across the road), and suddenly glimpsed the Welsh Assembly Building down at the front. It really is astonishing, a brown and grey hulk of bronze, stone and slate which both fits in and looks like a spaceship from that great Welsh TV show, Dr Who. Then of course there's the castle (I didn't get a chance to go in), Spillers Records - the oldest in Britain, and some bookshops.

On that subject, thanks very much to Anita. In recommending The Plan café, she neglected to mention that it's right next door to Capital Bookshop. I went in for a minute, looked through just one case, and came out with £50-worth of Welsh books. Most won't excite you much: a bibliography of Anglo-Welsh literature published between 1900-1965, a first English-language edition of Kate Roberts's A Summer Day in hardback with its dustjacket, an early edition of Alun Lewis's Raider's Dawn and Other Poems, biographies of Katherine Philips (Orinda) and Emyr Humphreys, a collection of conversations and essays by Humphreys, and Glyn Jones's wonderful The Island of Apples, a classic mid-century Welsh Bildungsroman.

I marked essays on the train. It appears that some of my students believe McDonaldization is a good thing because it means more leisure time for students, and lower staff numbers. As you can guess, that gave me a nice warm glow. Thanks to one of my commenters for linking to this, which sets out McDonald's' plan to offer academic qualifications. So while we're being McDonaldized, they're being Universitized. Or something. Shamefully, one of my American cousins 'teaches' at Hamburger University.

Blah blah blah

Not much to post today. Between swimming this morning, marking fora this afternoon and going over to Shrewsbury for fencing this evening, I haven't time to find things on the web to rant about (and that's what blogging is for, isn't it?). 

I did finally get through the Anne of Green Gables marathon (the main eight novels, not the side-projects). I thought they'd be a quick canter but one can only take so much sentiment at a time. Some patches were spectacularly good, others were spectacularly bad. The tendency to introduce Poochie-style new characters when the old ones got dull or their lives became too adult to entertain the target audience was a little wearing. Children may be adorable, but not so many of them. 

The last volume, Rilla of Ingleside, though it had touching moments, was by far the worst. It's a female Bildungsroman set against the backdrop of World War One, but rapidly degenerates into propaganda with very little room for nuance: dying brothers, declarations that the Kaiser needs a spanking, authorially-approved violence towards pacifist deacons. Worst of all, everybody agrees that Canada's bright future can only come about by a blood sacrifice in advance - remind anybody of a certain other nation and political movement?