Thursday, December 11, 2008
London

The last meeting of my class on Anglo-India took place today as I gave my final exam. My students have clearly reached the end of their tether and despite the fact that they have enjoyed London, they are now ready to board that flight homeward. They could not wait to get out of class and start to celebrate the end of the semester.

I had little time to waste. Right after the exam, I had made plans to meet Paul Collins, a scholar on the Middle East who works at the British Museum. I had been given his number by my friend and fellow docent Elizabeth Kaplan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. “Call Paul”. she had said, “and he will give you an Insider’s Tour of the Ancient Near Eastern galleries”.

Paul was very obliging indeed and at noon, we met at the Main Information Desk. Paul explained that the Ancient Near Eastern and Islamic Galleries in the British Museum were recently combined to form the Middle Eastern Department which is where he is now based. In his company, I made my way first to the Karyatid from the Erechtheion, one of the buildings on the Acropolis. During my travels in Northern Ireland, I had been reading The Parthenon by Mary Beard, a paperback lent to me by my colleague Karen who recommended it warmly as a very good read. I had enjoyed it immensely and was keen to see the Karyatid, one of the sculptures of the graceful women that adorn the building that stands next to the Parthenon. It turns out that it is hidden far from view behind a temple of the Nereid’s in the Parthenon Section of the Museum. And how beautiful she is! How graceful! How delighted I was to be able to set eyes on her. I had been on a quest to find her from the time Llew and I left Athens and here she was!

Then, Paul took me into the Ancient Near Eastern section where the treasures from the palace at Nimrud in modern-day Iraq have been mounted on the walls. These exquisite bas reliefs show detailed life in the days of ancient Iraq when religion was polytheistic and the king was feted by the gods. Other panels presented life in the time of ancient Assyria. Here were scenes of bloody warfare and of startling brutality as the king went lion hunting with a variety of weapons and was always victorious over the beasts. Paul pointed out to me specific panels in which the features of the king and queen were deliberately defaced by successive victors who usurped the throne and wished to obliterate any vestiges of the presence of the king. It reminded me, and I pointed this out to Paul, of the American soldiers who toppled the statue of Sadam Hussein when they arrived as invaders and took over Baghdad. It seems that some aspects of history do not change, no matter how many centuries might elapse from one regime to the next. Paul also took me to the basement where he commented on panels that are now closed to the public as access is not so easy to large crowds.

The best part of the tour was the visit to the Study Room where Paul spends a great deal of his day. In this room which was once a stack in the British Library (which moved in 1998 to new premises at King’s Cross), thousands of slabs of cuneiform script have been preserved–and I mean thousands–for they number more than 34,000. These detailed ‘forms’ or ‘documents’ if you like, give scholars all manner of information about life in those days for the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians were compulsive record keepers and reams of text accompany the sculpture and visuals they created. I saw several scholars bent over these tiny bits of stone that are covered with text and Paul fascinated me by actually reading some of them. It was quite amazing indeed!

Then, after I ate my quiche and yogurt at the cafe, I took a bus to the Tesco at Covent Garden in order to buy paper products for the party I am throwing in the evening for the students in my Anglo-Indian course. I needed plates, glasses, napkins and cutlery and with those items purchased, I made my way on the bus back home. I had plenty of time to set up for the party as well as to clean and tidy my flat before the first guests arrived on the dot of five bringing an appetiser or a dessert each.

As I welcomed them in, I gave each one a Christmas cracker–another British tradition of which they were unaware. So many of them said, “Oh, I’ve been seeing these in the stores and wondering what they were!” I told them that they had to wear the hats that they found in the cracker throughout the party–these were colorful crepe paper crowns–one of which particularly suited a student named Arthur whom I then promptly christened King Arthur! We took a load of pictures and reminisced about London and the past semester. Many of them felt regretful about returning to the States as they have not completed all the travel they had intended to accomplish. (“I didn’t manage to get to Paris”, said one of them; “I just have to go to Windsor tomorrow”, said another).

I had provided Buck’s Fizz, a mocktail made with orange juice and sparkling wine and a fruit cake as they had never eaten one before. It happened to be the 20th birthday of my student, Tara Dougherty, so we asked her to cut the cake and as we sang for her, the fruit cake did the rounds. There were dips and chips, cheese and crackers, a variety of Indian snacks that I provided (samosas, onion bhajis and potato tikkis), and all sorts of nibbles. Most of the students brought a bottle of wine each. Others brought desserts–lava cakes, chocolate pudding, chocolate truffles. It was an eclectic spread and one we all enjoyed. A few of the late comers came in bearing a large platter of fried rice, home cooked and very delicious. As the champagne made the rounds, we drank to the end of another semester, a great stay in London and a safe return home.
I spent an hour after the last guest left at 8. 30pm cleaning and tidying my flat and washing up and putting away a load of leftover food that I have frozen. None of the students wanted to take any food away with them as they are all leaving tomorrow to return to the States. It had been a lovely evening and I am sorry to see them go as they were a memorable class and one to which I had grown close.

But, I guess, all good things must come to an end and as I grade the last batch of examination booklets, I am thinking of returning home to the States myself, quite unable to believe that one semester has already flown and that I have only one more to go here in London!