Congregation

One of my resolutions, after having received a bollocking from my department head at the appraisal a couple of months ago, is that I'll go to more seminars and talks and conferences from now on.

Yesterday we had Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz to give a talk on fair trade and the WTO, so I thought yeah, I'll go. There'll be food. There'll be wine. There'll be my chance to get my brain stimulated by a guy who became a full professor at the age of 27.

So there I sat, melon balls and parma ham, cream of mushroom soup, king prawns with sirloin steak, large glass of merlot. I couldn't feel my brain being stimulated in any form. The guy couldn't tell me, nor anyone else in that room, what we didn't know already.

After that, it was this year's graduation ceremony. This is the second time I've been to the congregation in my eight years at the university. Even though it's a complete waste of time, in my view, I'm starting to quite like it. It's things like graduation ceremony, what with all the gowns, flowers, photo taking, that register meaning for some people's lives. I didn't go to any one of my graduation dos and I don't think I've missed much, but I enjoy watching my students getting all dressed up and excited and sat through speech after speech before they get their chance to get up on that stage and have bow-tie Tsang tap their heads with an academic cap.

There were around 160 social science graduates and I put my hands together for every single one of them. I think they deserved it. None of the other morons sitting up there clapped, of course. On the way out, Simon said to me in PTH, sneering, as usual "ha ha... gu jiang nan ming... ha ha..." meaning, a single hand cannot make a clapping sound, or something idiotic like that. I said "I clapped with two hands, you moron".