Legacy

As I get older, I hear some contemporaries growing anxious about their ‘legacy’, and the fact that there is increasingly little time left for them to cement their memorial to self in place. I do not share their worry that I may return from whence I came, leaving the firmament undisturbed, but then sometimes legacy finds you. Last week on the crammed London to Exeter train, I was sat beside an Exeter student and got to talk of my time teaching there, and of her passage into her third year. She showed an interest in my recounting the fun of running a third-year critical marketing course, which sent students out into the highways and byways to hunt out suitable marketing efforts to mock, (the group that picketed Anne Summers sex shop nearly got me into deep trouble) or to find good causes to promote. One of the good cause groups alighted on the nearby Donkey Sanctuary, who were looking to globalise. Really. Before we knew it plans grew grandiose, and a plot was hatched to bring a posse or donkeys onto campus for charity and awareness raising purposes. The backlash from this visitation was worse even than the apoplexy induced by the Anne Summers scandal, as the Vice Chncellor, Dean and assorted groundstaff beat a path to my rarely disturbed door to ask what in name of thunder I thought I was doing. The uproar was not the legacy. In my history uproar is commonplace. What delighted me most to hear from the student was that now, every year, the donkeys come on campus, to the shared delight of all. Now that is what I call legacy, as Daniel breaks