Why do People Do This?

I was going to title this piece 'No-one likes a smarta*se', but I couldn't quite bring myself to put such a rude word in a blog entry title.

So anyway last Thursday the OH and I went out. This has been a Rare Thing for the past few years, what with my eyes and the thesis and a general disinclination on my part to stir out of the house to mix with people. It was a bit of a last minute decision too. The place where I did my Ph D, the Institute of Northern Studies, holds a series of seminars over the autumn/winter months about various aspects of Nordic and Scottish culture and language, getting in experts from wherever to come and talk. Last week it was a Professor of Music from the Scottish Conservatoire talking about the language of Burns and its interaction with musical settings of his poems. OK it wouldn't float everybody's boat but it popped up on my Facebook feed, we thought it sounded interesting and we went. Incidentally if you don't know already, for the purpose of this blog post you need to know that the Scottish Conservatoire is in Glasgow. 

There weren't many people there when we arrived so there were attempts at conversation which kept away from the 'is this all there is likely to be coming?' and in an effort to keep the conversational ball rolling I asked the speaker if he had come all the way from Glasgow 'just for this'. To which he replied he had had come 'actually all the way from X which is Y miles SW of Edinburgh'.

Now that may be factually correct, but it wasn't the point of the question and he must have known that. The question was whether he had come all the way from the Central Belt to do the talk, and I said Glasgow because that's where he works and could have had no knowledge of where he actually lives. So why he answered in the way he did I have no notion. All it did was make me feel (and presumably  look) stupid, and put my back up. I listened to what he said in his talk and it was very interesting, but I took no further part in the discussions or the Q & A. Even though the discussion strayed to Hugh MacDiarmid and I had something relevant to say I thought why bother? he'll just say something else that will make me feel about five years old, and really I don't need that sort of lordly and public dismissal at my stage of life. 

It won't put me off further INS seminars, but it did put me off going to hear him again!

I am about to travel south tomorrow for ten days so the blog will once again become temporarily  inert, but hopefully lots to blog about when I get back!