Carnivorous Cow

Carnivorous Cow turned to Gramsci as they dodged the taxi without headlights in the wrong lane. "I wonder," she mused, "beyond the Mancunian who supports the wrong soccer team, are there any archaeologists left doing archaeology?"

Gramsci managed to come up with one or two names, but many more who'd moved to other things, from bean counting to directing the bean counting director. And, of course, transmogrifying technophobes into innovative teachers. Which was where the whole question had arisen.

Having been bull-ied into ordering the Angry Beef, Carnivorous Cow was engaged in an interesting discussion with some of the people whose labours have led to your being able to read these words on this blog... when the confession came. "I'm an archaeologist..."

It was a bit like an AA moment, the Cow thought. Luckily no one else stood up and followed suit, despite similar disciplinary brandings, releasing the Cow from any pressure either to confess ("I'm Carnivorous Cow and I'm a disciplinary vagrant...") or to confess ("I'm Carnivorous Cow and I was... <ulp!> married... to - no, sorry this is too hard [cue tears, shaking, hoarse voice] I was [whisper] married... to.. an archaeologist....") . She grabbed her glass and gulped a large mouthful of Tiger gratefully.

Though she did rather wonder what they put in the departmental entry in the prospectus. "Career options for archaeologists are many and varied. You could become a research administration director, a fundraising director, a dean, a finance manager, an educational technologist, a botanist, or a deputy vice-chancellor, among many other options. Oh, and if you're really lacking in imagination, you could even become an archaeologist..."

Gramsci has always held that email is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and so was interested to come across this debate on the Guardian education blog about whether email was responsible for ushering in the end of the Age of Deference in universities. Had students lost respect for their Elders and Betters (lecturers) because these were now accessible via email, where they could be greeted by first name, signed off by "cheers, mate" and informed that the reason for non-attendance at lectures was due to overconsumption of alcohol?

Carnivorous Cow was less convinced. Her experience of students' excuses for missing class - admittedly very little, as student culture militated against any excuse being offered at all, in the main - was usually along the lines of "the dog ate it" rather than anything skirting the bounds of plausibility. And where students did bother to mail, the tone would either be overly deferential - verging on grovelling - or angry and defiant, rather than the familiarity "cheers, mate" would imply. She wasn't sure what she would prefer. "A visit, in person?" suggested Gramsci.

The Cow snorted. "Someone who is too hungover to make the transition to class, arriving babelas in my office?" she raised a bovine eyebrow. "Have you heard how noisy it gets - the passage amplifies every whisper outside the lab, or from the Beattie Theatre? Their heads would explode and SuperCare would refer me to a clause in their contract which specifically excludes the rinsing of exploded cranial matter from office ceilings and walls. And how would I explain the sorry throughput rate when a mere fraction of the class survive to the end, as a result?"

"And the first name thing?" enquired Gramsci. "How do you feel on that one?"

"I can't say I've ever noticed students - even first years - being expected to call their lecturers anything else!" she retorted. "Only non-academic staff, and outsourced staff like cleaners, are expected to 'Professor' and 'Doctor', and only when, uhm, _other_ factors are present." Gramsci wisely chose not to pursue that.

"So what about the point about expectations of instant reply, then?" he asked.

"I think that's a misreading!" shrugged the Cow. "Martin Hall also sends email at 2am, and I'm sure he does so hoping that the responses will only pour in six hours later - giving him sufficient time to clear customs and become airborne over the Pacific in the meantime. Sending email at ungodly times does not imply the expectation of a response at ungodly times. That's the beauty of email - it's asynchronous. You can respond when you're ready, when you're informed and when you've had sufficient caffeine to ensure brain functionality and prose resembling English. A phone call, or a physical visit - even diarised - doesn't necessarily provide that safeguard. The trouble is," she continued, "that most people seem to have insufficient self-control to avoid hitting the 'reply' button immediately on receipt."

Gramsci thought long and hard. Perhaps, he mused, it would be better if most computers rewired their "send" key to be a "pause" key, physically close to the "oh &^%£ what have I done? Let me undo!" key. Perhaps he should have a word with the manufacturers...

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Carnivorous Cow has often wondered how, in a climate of Politikal Korrektness, one communicates interest beyond the "I value you for your noble contribution to the betterment of humankind" kind. How, in other words, one lets the object of one's lust know that you're interested in what's in their jeans as well as what's in their mind. Clearly some people are getting it right - why else is the staircase in Beattie so busy? - but.... how do they embark on those tentative first steps?

Gramsci looked up from his breakfast. "I read," he muttered, "some time back, about some Japanese solution in the press - some technological gizmo that emitted 'I'm interested' signals when set to do so. The gizmo would in turn pick up signals from other such, set either to 'just friends', 'not interested', or 'also interested', and where there was a match, convey this to the owner, who then, presumably, would be a little less nervous about the advance."

"Ah!" said the Cow. "And is there a 'I'm interested - but not in you' emergency setting one could switch to in case the person who came bearing down on one turned out to be the incarnation of their worst nightmare?" Gramsci wasn't sure about that.

But then, quite by accident, the Cow strayed across something else that seemed to address the same predicament. Enigma offers an anonymous way to gauge interest, via email. One enters one's email address, and that of up to ten recipients, and sends off a message into the unknown. The recipient is then informed that "someone" is interested, and invited to respond, typing in up to ten recipients in whom they may have an interest. If there is a match, then identities are revealed.

Otherwise not. One is left merely with the uneasy notion that _someone_ out there has the hots for you... someone that doesn't rate highly on your vleislys, and right now is feeling miserable that you don't share their same sweaty-palmed feelings. Someone, you hope, that has been taking their medication regularly. The Cow felt a bit nervous about this. She knew how quickly medical aids ran out, and how widespread the incidence of emotional-support-in-a-tablet was among colleagues. She wasn't sure that Campus was really equipped to deal with a sudden epidemic of Unrequited Lust and wholesale rejection, but she hoped, desperately, that some website out there had the answer for that, too.

Carnivorous Cow listened patiently as Mr Timberland enthused about The Cricket. She wasn't quite getting it - it was just cricket, after all - but he saw it as a metaphor for something bigger, something more profound. Exactly what, she couldn't say.

"It's a death struggle!" he asserted. "One gains at the expense of the other. For one to win, the other must lose! Like all the great activities - there can be no 'win-win'. It's bigger than that. It's like war! Like sex!"

That took the Cow by surprise. Long an advocate of the link between sex and power, the Cow could bore anyone beyond tears with sex-as-conquest better than most, but sex as death struggle? For one to win, the other must lose? She wondered worriedly about Mr Timberland's sex life, and hoped desperately that the absence of corpses piling up in his office was a good thing rather than a sign of repression.

"Perhaps," she ventured timidly, "it's a mutual struggle to the death - le petite mort, and all that?" But Mr Timberland's mind had already wandered elsewhere. "I wonder," he muttered distractedly, "if they can maintain their form into the test series?"

Carnivorous Cow could be forgiven for thinking she'd woken up on the Monty Python set, during a Ministry of Funny Walks skit. All around her were men out-Cleesing John Cleese, with pained expressions on their faces. The Cow sighed loudly. The Great Traffic Jam taking its toll.

Bandwidth ground to a halt as everyone checked the times of their colleagues. Mr Timberland announced proudly that - while his times were on a downward trend - he had still managed better times than certain other gentlemen of his acquaintance. One of these acquaintances admitted to being pleased, and not, about his time, as he'd had two bouts of cramps on the route. Another colleague was simply pleased that he'd made it. Meanwhile, the shaven-legged youngster whose car had been stolen, posted better times than them all.

The Cow's manager hobbled into her office complaining of a twisted knee. Incurred through old age, he protested, rather than through the vigorous contact sports of one's youth. The Cow sat, injury-free, feeling left out. Even the long white dress, restricting her movement, didn't produce a Funny Walk. She tried to summon the energy to sulk.

A quiet tapping on her desk distracted her. She looked down to see Gramsci the spider hobbling along painfully. No Argus for him, so the Cow asked what the source of his injury was. "Cricket!" he replied, dolefully.

The Cow picked up the phone. Her office had been sprayed fairly recently, but clearly insects were untouched by the poison if the crickets were beating up on the spiders. "No, no," interjected Gramsci. "Not _that_ cricket! The match!" All those celebratory beers following the trouncing of the sheepshaggers had worn out all four pairs of legs.

The Cow sighed heavily. What was it with males and their sporting pursuits? Whatever happened to "a healthy mind in a healthy body"? Sport, she concluded sadly, was bad for one's health. As participant or spectator.

"How very odd!" Carnivorous Cow remarked to Gramsci. "I was conceived as the Profumo Scandal was selling newspapers all over the English-speaking world, and now he goes and dies on my birthday!"

Gramsci agreed that it was an interesting coincidence. He started muttering about sexual intercourse beginning in 1963, only stopping when the Cow threatened to squash him underfoot, and then took to musing on other interesting coincidences raised by the Profumo Scandal.

The Cow had had a Russian Spy connection in her own history - though beehive hairstyles were thankfully long out of fashion by then - and had also been fond of visiting an osteopath in her youth. However, she'd stopped short of posing for the papers, or giving lurid details of what she got up to in swimming pools, and despite having had some unhinged and possessive lovers in her past, had yet to have her front door sprayed with bullet holes.

Still, John Profumo lived to 91 years old, so there was plenty of time...

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Carnivorous Cow stared excitedly at her inbox. 474 comments on her blog within the last hour - Mr Timberland's fan club had been busy! She summoned her browser and gazed in amazment at what was on offer: Pictures of the Periodic Table! Britney Sex Spear Tape! Latin Porn! It all sounded so exciting, she didn't know where to begin!

It was her curiosity that led her to decide on the Latin Porn. What was it, she wondered: the unexpurgated Cena Trimalchionis? Caesar's Phallic Wars? Besides, she'd always wondered what Romans wore under their togae and tunicae.

"Alas," she grumbled to Gramsci, "it was nothing more than spam! Even the sycophancy was disappointing - 'I love you so much!' was followed by 'It is very healthy I will come often on your the most excellent site. Respect to admin.' The sentence construction seems inconsistent with Latin - some of the phrases look like the instructions printed on electronic appliances from Korea!"

Gramsci made sympathetic noises. He too had been disappointed by such things before. How had he been to know that "Two women in bed" was not about overcrowding in hospitals?

Carnivorous Cow smiled sympathetically at the question. It wasn't the first time she'd been asked. "Is Mr Timberland married?" usually followed a positive response to "is Mr Timberland real?", though sometimes "who is Mr Timberland?" found its way in before. Mr Timberland, very real and also, very married, had a fan club.

It was a source of some amusement, this fan club of Mr Timberland's. Especially as some of the fans knew him, but didn't know that he was Mr Timberland. How would they reconcile the flesh-and-blood person they knew with the latte-drinking, kilojoule-counting SNAG they stalked on the blogspot?

The Cow sighed deeply. It was quite easy, she mused, to assume that the single dimension to which one was exposed each day constituted the whole personality. In far too many cases that was true, tragically, and once one had exhausted the Florentine Cinquecento, no further conversation was to be had, no further terrain to be uncovered - unless one was brave enough to release the straining buttons of the threadbare raiment sheltering the amoeboid corpulence from critical gaze.

But recently she'd been provided with evidence that this wasn't universally the case. She'd been sent a URL which provided an interesting new vista on someone she'd always suspected had another, secret, life. Only, this wasn't quite what she'd pictured. She'd be a little more cautious when approaching the reference desk, now...

Mr Timberland arrived on Campus the other day, walking with difficulty after a too-intimate encounter with a bicycle saddle over several aching dozens of kilometres. Mr Sunshine he certainly wasn't... but neither was he Mr Timberland.

On inspection - which was easy, as he couldn't move out of the way quickly - he was wearing Camel boots, Calvin Klein jeans, and a Jeep shirt. No Timberland anywhere, unless it was reserved for socks and underwear, which modesty prevented the Cow from examining too closely.

This threw the Cow into an existential crisis. Was the continued use of the moniker "Mr Timberland" appropriate, given his move to other brands? And could she continue to masquerade as a Carnivorous Cow when her practice had long ago ceased to reflect her principles, on issues as diverse as politics and monogamy....?

She turned, as aways, to Gramsci for advice. Cleaning his maxillopedes, he advised the Cow to stick with whatever got the best results. But then, being a spider, he was a past master at spin...