September 5-6, 1999 – Antiques Roadshow and a Day in which I Crash the University Computer System

I am immediately hooked by a BBC show called Antiques Inspectors, which airs on Sunday nights. I love the format. A squad of experts goes into people’s homes and pokes in attics and spare rooms then values the antiques they find. It is light and fun. In Whitsable, England, where the first show takes place, they find some early ceramic vessels. Apparently a ship with a cargo of Roman pots went down near here centuries ago and fishermen have been dredging up earthenware for years. Despite their antiquity, they are only valued at £100-200 each.

Sadly, the woman co-host of the show—Jill Dando—was murdered in April on the front doorstep of her home in London, shot in the head. She was a well-loved news anchor. This fall, they are airing the first and only series of the show in her memory with her family’s permission.

I also love the British Antiques Roadshow. Everything is always so much older than what people bring in on the American show. When the Roadshow visits Torquay, an older British lady shows the appraiser a set of broken Japanese ceramic bowls; their fragments glued together haphazardly. There is a red scorch mark across their side. The bowls were unearthed at Hiroshima; the force of the nuclear blast fusing the broken pieces like they had been baked in a kiln. The Roadshow experts can put no price on them. The appraiser says, “They simply record an extraordinary moment in time.”

At work on Monday, I make train reservations for Mom and Brian, who arrive tomorrow. I register for health services, and pick up my mail. I also go to the Lloyds bank branch on campus to get my checking account settled. The British Council has set up the account and they have even deposited money into it. The woman at the bank says my checks will be here in 2-3 days. I don’t know it yet, but this is the start of a long saga of lost checks, recalled ATM cards, and unworkable PIN numbers that won’t get resolved for more than a month.

The office is extremely noisy. I can hear every conversation in every office all the way down the hall. Plus once or twice someone is smoking and cigarette smoke wafts into my office. The mysterious Simon has yet to put in an appearance.

Dean and Barbara arrive and, after Saroj shows them around, they ask me to lunch. We eat at a little French café in Harbourne, a Victorian suburb of Birmingham, where Dean and Barbara have rented a house. The baguette is amazing, fresh and crusty, and I devour it. I stop at the post office, which is right next to the restaurant, to mail some letters. I also buy one of the Royal Mint’s new Princess Diana £5 memorial coins. Dean is not impressed, but Barbara is a fan of Diana’s. She is very eager to hear about how I met Charles Spencer.

After sending some emails during the morning, Nasir, the university’s computer guy, pops his head into my office and asks if I sent an email message to a big group list. Apparently, I crashed the server because I listed the email addresses with a semi-colon and space between the addresses rather than a comma and no spaces. Really? He says not to worry, they’ll fix it. They will have to kill all my outgoing emails though.

• In today’s news: George Mitchell arrived in Ireland today to try and save the Good Friday Agreement, which has all but broken down. Senator Mitchell says, yes, he thinks it can be saved adding, “If I did not, I wouldn’t be here.”