Livy and let Livy, that was our motto
My series of pieces about my somewhat distracted run up to finals at Keele in 1984 might have given readers the impression that I was doing very little reading and paying little heed to my papers.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Indeed, reflecting on my two happy academic years living in Barnes L54, 1982/83 and 1983/84, I realise that there is an element of that lifestyle that has gone unmentioned in these pieces so far.
The newspapers.
From the outset, we took The Guardian as a flat through our kitty during term time. We also, if I remember correctly, took both The Sunday Times and The Observer on a Sunday.
Everyone in the flat at least dipped into the papers. The main beneficiaries of the paper habit were undoubtedly me and Alan “The Great Yorkshire Pudding” Gorman. In part, this is because we probably did more reading and dipping than anyone else, but also because we became addicted to doing The Guardian crossword.
Quite often, one or other of us would be up earlier, if we had lectures or classes to attend while the other did not. More likely Alan would get to the paper first, as he more often had early classes and I would quite often stay at Bobbie’s and return in the morning. A note, along the lines of the above picture caption, might well be waiting for me in those circumstances.
Sometimes the earliest riser couldn’t get very far and the second-dipper would make most of the progress. The second-dipper’s note might have a more competitive tone to it in those circumstances.
It was an exercise in co-opetition rather than competition, though. Our mission was to complete the crossword between the two of us. We would regularly spend time on the puzzle together to finish it off, perhaps late afternoon or over our evening meal. Quite often we would succeed in completing the puzzle. Only occasionally would we be seriously confounded and fail spectacularly. Fairly often, we would struggle with just one or two clues at the end.
We became familiar with the compilers – some easier than others. Often our nemesis was Araucaria, who was known as a difficult compiler. An example from our era is shown below;
Araucaria May 1984 16 May 1984, Wed The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com
In those days, there was no Google or ChatGPT to resort to if we were stuck. We might check the spelling of a word in the dictionary or resort to my trusty copy of Roget’s Thesaurus if desperate, but the clues that confounded us tended to be factual items.
I remember one occasion when we were both struggling to work out where Tanganyika Territory was, to try to resolve a clue. I think Alan might even have ventured to the library to get intelligence on that one and I vaguely recall that the intelligence did not help us solve the clue. That was probably one of Araucaria’s. Forty years later, I have only just learnt the significance of the compiler’s name.
BillyKwiki at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
One other vain attempt to solve a sole remaining clue lives clearly in my memory. The clue was something to do with a Roman writer/historian and the answer only required four letters – blank-I-blank-Y. The answer, to spare you the agony that Alan and I went through, was LIVY. But neither of us were familiar with the works of Livy. Indeed, the only four letter word Roman writer either of us could think of was Ovid. I became convinced that Ovid might well have been known as “Vidy” to his friends, after which we explored many different permutations of “blank-I-blank-Y”. We had a good laugh over some of the possibilities we invented. We would advocate a name and then extemporize the tale of this imagined Roman’s character and works.
One or two of the ideas we explored, tongue in cheek, would not pass the political correctness test. The only Roman historian I could think of was Flavius Josephus – who knows how his detractors might have nicknamed him? Alan and I spent an inordinate amount of time and effort coming up with possible answers to this crossword clue, one of which was probably Livy, but we gave that idea no more credence than any other permutation we could invent.
