Staff must not abuse the tuck shop

Is the university concerned with our three years of real-terms salary cuts? Bigger class sizes? A lack of rooms? 


Not judging by this important missive about us 'abusing' the £3.00 lunch voucher we get while we work on Open Days (I'm doing four this year, all on Saturdays): apparently eating while we volunteer is a 'good will gesture' - well so is all the extra effort we make without appreciation, so there's something we could withdraw if we continue to be treated like naughty children. 

Please note there will be a change to the lunch voucher system at this Open Day due to reports of a few staff inappropriately using the lunch vouchers at the last Open Day. These vouchers are a good will gesture to staff that have given up their Saturday to work the Open Day and are intended to pay for lunch, however at the last Open Day a few staff had collected a number of vouchers and were buying pounds worth of confectionary. This is not acceptable and catering staff have been advised to not accept lunch vouchers for this purpose – they can be used to purchase a main meal and drink or sandwich, snack and drink only. There should be just one voucher per person and there will not be any additional vouchers available on the day so please make sure you provide your staff names and numbers accurately. It would be a shame if the actions of a few spoil this for the majority but if there are any more reports of abuse of this system I will be forced to remove the lunch vouchers from Open Days.

Oh no! The Chocolate Cops are on to us! I'm just in a meeting with the new Vice-Chancellor, so maybe I'll raise it with him. 


Update: I didn't. I asked him instead whether having a tax-evading expenses cheat suspended from the House of Lords was bad for our reputation. He rather wittily avoided the question. 


What he did very effectively do was explain the huge range of challenges facing the university with the government's ridiculous plan to privatise and rig the education sector. What a shame then that some sections of the institution are more concerned with whether staff buy chocolate or chips when they work weekends…


Further update: my colleague has reassured us:

The new VC has acted swiftly to deal with the embarrassment caused by `Chocolategate’. The Committee for the Reduction of Unnecessary and Needless Chocolate Hiatuses Involving Employees (CRUNCHIE) has been established and it is hoped that CRUNCHIE will produce robust guidelines re cocoa-based infractions shortly.

How sweet…

It's all flowers and chocolates in my office today. Not because grateful graduates are showering me with gifts (damn their eyes) though.

A belated birthday gift from Christine consists of two astonishingly tasty chocolate bars:

Yes, that's Cheese, Walnuts and Grapes in one, and pork scratchings with hazelnut and cinnamon in the other. And they genuinely are delicious.

The flowers are in the Kate Greenaway-illustrated The Language of Flowers. It looks a bit twee, even fey, but there's a serious purpose. Up to the end of the Victorian period, flowers had meanings. We still use roses to mean love, lilies are linked to the 1916 Rising in Ireland, and various blooms are associated with death, but we've basically moved past flower symbolism. But if you're reading literature from the period, you need to know what's being quietly communicated when the heroine arranges a vase of fig marigold on her husband's desk (idleness), or our hero presents his beloved with Flower-of-an-hour (delicate beauty: i.e. she's going to expire of consumption by chapter 4, so let's get down to business).

Here's poor Ophelia in Hamlet, using the native tradition:

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray,love, remember: and there is pansies. That's for thoughts. 

There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue for you; and here's some for me: we may call itherb-grace o' Sundays: O you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died: they say he made a good end,--

Fennel - praiseworthiness or strength; Columbine - depending on the colour, folly, resolution or anxiety; Rue - disdain; daisy - shared sentiments, innocence or thought; Violets mean faithfulness, watchfulness, modesty or rural happiness, depending on the colour.

The tradition derived in part from Turkish seduction techniques (acquired via the Grand Tour?), and from the Roman, then Northern European tradition of still-life paintings, in which the virtues, mortality and similar concepts were conveyed through flowers and other objects.
There's also another tradition which I'm not sure Greenaway's book will cover. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, according to Tillyard's excellent biography - had a formal garden which to the initiated, indicated his radical, republican sympathies: to the ignorant, it was just a collection of flowers. Political gardening was clearly an interesting activity. Anyone recommend a good book on it?

I hereby declare Laurestina to be the Official Plant of the Blogosphere. Why? Because in Victorian times, it meant 'I die if neglected'!

I also received Brooke Gladstone's comic-book radical history of the media, The Influencing Machine, which looks interesting at the very least. Here's a short animated section.

Recipe time

Neal and I wondered about cheese and chocolate last week. So we tried it. We put really dark, chilli chocolate with Welsh cheddar flavoured with ginger. It's delicious. It also reminded me of an occasional treat from my student days in the mid-90s. Boil up some well-salted spaghetti. Then put a bar of Dairy Milk on top, and microwave it. I like to think that it inspired Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls.

Feel free to suggest your own recipes.