The Pied Pyper
No faculty would be complete without its requisite jester, executioner and bug-eyed person who sits in a dark corner; eccentricity has always been welcome relief from the social norms that we relentlessly obey despite them being stifling sometimes, like a scratchy necktie. So then the highlight of the term must have been having Dr. P—(whose identity has been cruelly unmasked by my thirst for a catchy title) to teach us Physical Chemistry.
Already, images begin to coalesce in the head about what such a peculiar person should look like, as I had been forewarned by word of mouth. I imagine a debilitating baldness, wispy white hair, and horn-rim glasses, and because social expectation works in mysterious ways, I was absolutely correct. Dr. P—is, as most people like to say, "a fossil of a man". Staring down his tweed jacket and Victorian-wallpaper tie, I felt transported momentarily to the Ascot during Thatcherite Britain, in the mid-decks amongst the crushed betting stubs and people rubbing their foreheads with large handkerchiefs, hoping to return home a richer man. But of course, appearances are deceiving.
Having furiously and waveringly rearranged a single pencil and a pad of print-out paper on the desk before him, Dr. P--, finally satisfied with his handiwork, hastily excused himself to go buy a coffee. Naturally, I was already raising my eyebrow with a higher frequency than usual. Not too soon he returned with a cup of the palest coffee I have ever seen and a bar of Kit-Kat, and after rearranging that into some sort of cipher for what must have meant "I am a little funny in the head, but don't mind me", he cut to the chase about Thermodynamics.
Now Dr. P—is obviously terribly intelligent (and is ambidextrous!) but one must also understand that what we were learning had not changed much since the 1960s. Dr. P—still lived in that era, fondly recalling the days where the Boltzmann distribution was taught at the GCSEs, and it was of course apparent from the way he did things.
Disrupting my internal giggling at his apparent silliness, Dr. P—asked if I had an eraser, so nonchalantly I picked out my mechanical eraser (everyone knows what I'm talking about right?) and handed it to him, whereupon he gawked blankly at it, calling upon 30 years of chemical training to figure out how to use the damned thing. Quietly, I then slipped him my good-old-fashioned rubber, and his eyes lit up as though they had glimpsed fantastic ideas from a great distance. Of course, this was worth a little exchanging of dirty looks with my supervision mate.
Time wore on, and Dr. P—reached into his green basket (no doubt a prized possession, as on the first day he had told us to hand up all assignments by putting them into the green tray, and when some students casually nodded he wheezed "Come look at the green tray, you won't know what it looks like if you haven't seen it!" before pulling them over, panting heavily, like a man introducing his bride to people who would not look at her) and said that we should look at some recent examination papers as he pulled out several sheafs of yellow, crinkled paper. It read 1979. "Maybe we should look at more recent ones," as I secretly hoped to see some paper that had benefited from the relatively modern technology of photocopying. "Ah," as he extracted another yellowing sheet which by then I thought I could see printed on it the words "Germany surrenders!", and it turned out to be from 1983.
I reached over to peer more closely at the question, gently folding down the corner of the stapled sheets, anxious that they would crumble like ash between my fingers. Immediately Dr. P-- snatched the paper away and began babbling about students always trying to fold his papers for the past 20 years, and yelping as though someone had dug up his garden and filled it with used condoms. We were soon ready to leave, and I felt like raising a salute to him, like in the good old days of Rule Britannia.
What would we do without such people? Anachronistic and irrelevant as they seem to be, they do tell us about what things were like back then, like a microcosm of ages past and a living time capsule, and as odd as we think these things are, we still relish the prospect of being given a glimpse of some historical era through the entertaining but sometimes bothersome act of interacting with its last remaining bastions. After all, a day will come too, when I think that 2004 was a recent time.
