DIAMOND GEEZER

THERE ARE MANY ADVANTAGES to being a senior lecturer in a liberal arts course at a university in an extremely relaxed country. The most obvious one is the fact that my teaching responsibilities are reduced to two days a week for twenty weeks a year, which is the plan set out by the absurd pan-European “Bologna” agreement, a method set up primarily to keep students at university for as long as possible in order for them not to inflate the unemployment figures.

ANOTHER ADVANTAGE IS THE FACT that I do not have to spend much time with my colleagues – or indeed with anyone – due to our timetables being mutually independent of each other.

THE NEXT STEP in this cadency is that when I do have to mix with my liberal, woolly-headed colleagues I have no need to discuss anything of any true importance with them. Most of them have no idea about, for example, the recent Euro 2012 football tournament, the Chinese programme to colonise space, the banking crisis or – the issue of the day – the first ever divorce between Thetans, as Tom Cruise prepares to be skinned by Katie “Earthling” Holmes.

INDEED, FOR THOSE COLLEAGUES of mine who teach subjects such as “Intellectual History of the Identity of Cities”, “Philosophy of Landscape”, “Culture of Analysis of Linguistics” or “Echoes of the Fox in Early English Literature”, the most important matters of the moment mean nothing. And the financial matter most discussed today would never pull them out of their ethereal complacency

“BONUS” BOB DIAMOND, head of Barclays Bank, resigned today in the wake of the Libor interest rate fixing scandal and selling of anti-interest rate fluctuation packages against rate increases. The first misdemeanor (as it is not yet a crime) probably negatively affected hundreds of thousands of people who are buying property worldwide; the second has sent at least (as far as is known) two hundred small businesses into distress and liquidation.

NOW THAT “BOB” HAS RESIGNED, he will be free, tomorrow to say whatever he thinks is true as he faces an investigation into false Libor submissions. Whatever happens during this inquest, and whatever subsequently takes place with Marcus Agius, helmsman of the bank that has “stiffed up” so many of those who rely on interest rates, this will not deflect my happy, giggling colleagues or my morose, introspective ones, from their way of looking at the world. And, as one sometimes thinks (or even says, in the right company) when visiting the zoological gardens, perhaps they are really happier than we are.