It's graduation week.  There are 15 ceremonies at the rate of 3 per day, and this year I am attending 10 - 4 where I am Presiding Officer and 6 where I am attending but taking no formal role.  Apart from the ceremonies at which I preside, I also attend all those where there is a Senate Award winner, plus one or two others for reasons such as an honorary graduate who is known to me.

It's not actually the ceremonies I want to comment on today, but the lunches.  I know these will be a closed world to most readers of this blog.  Each day during graduation week there is a special lunch served at which the university hosts each day's honorary graduates and their families, as well as a number of civic dignitaries who come to take part in the ceremonies - the Lord Mayor, both of our local Bishops, the Lord Lieutenant, the Master Cutler and so on. The University contingent is made up of those who are reading the names and those who are presiding at that day's ceremonies, with other members of the Unviersity Executive Board attending when they can.

One of the most delightful aspects of these lunches is the conversation - a group of interesting people thrown together for 90 minutes while the Octagon is re-set for the afternoon ceremony. This week I have listened as a colleague from Journalism has given an expert's view of the crisis at News International, discussed opera with a local dignitary, been part of a conversation about the energy conversion for various types of meat, received an explanation of environmental controls on oil rigs off the coast of Africa, and been involved as conversation has flowed over many other topics.

When I first arrived in the university, staff from a variety of departments used to meet together for lunch.  Those around the table varied through time, but among my lunch companions have been an applied mathematician, a sociologist, a scholar of linguistics, colleagues from the Management School, and many others.  The varied conversations that such a mixture engendered seem to me now to be things of the past.  Colleagues today collect a sandwich to eat in their own rooms, or generally eat lunch with others from the same department.  Is it that we have less time, or that we are no longer as interested in wider concerns as we once were (perhaps made narrower by the focus on the RAE)?

But there is little to compare with gentle conversation with those from very diferent backgrounds to set the mind on to new tracks and create new lines of thought.  That's why I particularly enjoy the graduation lunches that I am privileged to attend as a member of the University Executive Board: they are very stimulating events.  I am very lucky to have the chance to be there - and I recognise and acknowledge that good fortune.