High class tart

(My apologies for the cheeky heading!)

Thursday 22 Oct

I didn’t have to go hunting for a lemon tart in Oxford (see my earlier account of the lack of these culinary delights in Hobart and the reason they matter); instead, it came and found me.

Anne is a fellow of Linacre College and had invited me and a couple of the other new/visiting maths education folk to one of the formal dinners. Fortunately I brought my skirt with me (lucky I go to church, huh!); and I mostly remembered my table manners.

Linacre has a very egalitarian approach to formal dinners by Oxford standards, as there is no “high table” for the senior people and their guests, although we were still sitting apart from the students (Linacre is a graduate college, so the students here are more mature than the usual undergraduate riff-raff!).

The food was very good, and the company enjoyable. The lemon tart counted as part of “dinner” and was quite delicious (there is, in fact, a separate dessert event after dinner, but in a smaller room and this had been booked out before we could sign up). Since I can’t remember the results of the great Melbourne taste test, I cannot say where, exactly, the Linacre Lemon Tart would fit on the Lemon Tart Hierarchy, but it was definitely up there with the best of them. I did, however, have to give a very quick explanation about the whole Lemon Tart Taste Testing Saga in order to explain why on earth I was sneaking a photo of this particular dinner item.

On the way home, we had to sing Gaudeamus Igitur for the benefit of Andreas (another maths ed visitor), who had noticed an aspect of the dinner different from his expectations. He’s from Sweden, and in Swedish universities, apparently, everyone would have been singing before the first course was half done.

I quite like that idea.