The other day, I went to Nottingham to chat with the guy who is the expert on what I was planning to do my Ph.D. on, and I was trying to be open-minded with regards the possibility of doing said Ph.D. in that very place. So, in the hour before our meeting, I took myself to his department's little cafe, purchased a coffee and a swirly danish pastry thing, and sat down with the only of his articles that I hadn't yet read. Now, I had intended to try out their croissant, as a pseudo-jocular-but-in-fact-very-serious method for evaluating the place's potential lurability. But there was no croissant. This left me in the awkward position of having to base a highly important evaluation procedure around a foodstuff in which I really do have no expertise. I was not particularly enamoured with the danish pastry - it was incredibly sweet, with outrageous amounts of icing and stickiness, and, unsurprisingly since it was not a croissant and was not aiming for this quality, had almost no fluffiness at all and could even have said to have been rather hard. I felt slightly unsettled.
There was, however, a sign in the cafe declaring the price of croissant.
So, I could make a judgement based upon the experience with the danish pastry, which is bound to produce a disproportionatley low score since such a thing is intrinsically inferiour to croissant.
Or I could make a withholding of judgement to some as-yet-undefined point in the future - on the grounds that the availability of croissant is usually dependable and I just happened to be there on a bad day - which future point may not even take place until the decision of the place of the Ph.D has been made, in which case the croissant really has been bypassed altogether leaving the decision entierely at the mercy of more conventional means.
I find this a most awkward and dissatisfying situation.
On a lighter note (oops, unintentional but harmless pun!), I have recently been surprised with a lovely croissant in B-Bar. On previous occasions, the B-Bar croissant has been quite dry and even a little tough, and has really presented no other option than to be submerged in coffee prior to consumption. Now, not one too make too hasty a judgement, and as one who works around the corner from B-Bar, I gave the place another chance. And the croissant was pretty much perfect. So B-Bar is unreliable but with great potential. I had not previously thought of factoring time into the croissant criteria.
8 comments:
You could base you judgement on the fact that there was no croissant at all—perhaps the sign in the cafe is just a cruel joke that the department likes to play upon croissant-lovers?
However, I am sure that this is not the case.
Well this is it. I mean, the existence of croissant diaries may indicate something of a fussiness, but really, when it comes down to it, as it sometimes does, I'd be happy with just any old croissant.
I don't think I'm going to go and study at Nottingham!
Hmm, I'm quite enjoying these croissant related adventures. I wonder if they'll develop into some sort of saga...
Please, sweetheart, don't come to Cornell to study. The croissants in Ithaca absolutely suck. Very hard.
If you are into pancakes, however...
I met Lynch and Pinch. Had drinks and dinner with Lynch. Lynch is very shy. Pinch is suitably geeky.
Mama: oui, your analysis of the Nottingham situation, c'est vrai! Suffolk is calling....
Le: ooh, wow, lucky you re those meetings. But Michael Lynch, shy? How funny. He's such a total academic dude re science and images.
Richi, this Lynch chap has in particular done some work on image-processing in astronomy that you might find interesting - I'll show you sometime.
Yeah, So, Lynch is shy, very soft-spoken, taciturn, "normal". For whatever reason I was expecting a really passionate, enthusiastic, and very eccentric person from reading his stuff. But he is just calm, gentle and careful. And resembles a teddy bear or Santa.
Which reminds me of course of Flaubert: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
I liked that from Flaubert. That was cool. Sometimes I think that my life is very ordinary. But then I behave in a kind of loopy way and people think I am not quite ordinary. But I do all sorts of mundane things. And I like the ensuing contradiction of perceptions. And also, I guess this must be the case with many people, who you kind of think, oh wow you must lead some kind of extra-ordinary life because you're so cool and groovy, but they still have to eat and poo.
LOL. It is true, even extraordinary people must poo I guess. Even the uptight ones! Hee, hee.
Re Michael Lynch, just had a browse for him on the interweb and by all accounts he sounds like an impressive person. Funny to think of him has shy!
Post a Comment