My brain goes buzzy when I have to push it into understanding things it doesn’t want to learn

I am in the Victoria and Albert museum with my brother who is just back from Kabul. 

I picked the V&A as a meeting point; he can’t put me in any physical danger here, which is a bit of a thing with him. Like my husband, only worse.

Always good to avoid open spaces, such as Hyde Park, where there is a river, for example.

We have wandered around, looking at kimonos and such like but now we are in the café, talking about stoves; he has a problem with a chimney and is deferring to me as an expert, what with having had to light two stoves every day for the past 22 years, just to stay alive.

“My area of expertise is the daily life of a Victorian scullery maid,” I say, “it doesn’t extend to flue-lining, which is what your problem is, by the sound of it.”

I move him on to talking about his children. His eldest, Matteo, has just got into Cambridge to study Classics. I know my brother is worried.

“It’s not really that,” he says, “it’s just we had a couple over for dinner who’d both been to Cambridge. They talked about Cambridge all night, even though they graduated 20 years ago. I mean, it was as if getting into Cambridge was the absolute pinnacle and nothing since has ever matched up.”

“But Matty isn’t going to be like that,” I say, “he’s just mad about Herodotus for some bizarre reason.”

“Have you read Herodotus?” my brother asks.

“No,” I say, “I’ve been too busy lighting stoves but you forced me to help Matty edit his essay on Cicero, remember? Is Herodotus worse than that?”

“Try reading a primary source in Greek,” my brother says, “like Herodotus.”

“Who is Herodotus anyway?” I say.

“Look him up on Wikipedia,” my brother says, taking out his phone

.

He passes me his phone. I discover that Herodotus “is a fifth century Greek historian — “The Father of History” (first conferred by Cicero) —and the first historian known to have broken from Homeric tradition to treat historical subjects as a method of investigation-specifically, by collecting his materials systematically and critically, and then arranging them into a historiographic narrative.

“What is it about reading that,” I say, “that makes me not want to read on?”

“I’m just worried,” my brother says, “that Matty will think that the world begins and ends in Cambridge.”

“You mean that he might get too big for his boots?” I say.

“Nothing worse than an inflated ego,” my brother says.

“No better man for bringing an inflated ego to its knees than you,” I say.

“Well I learnt that from the master,” he says, darkly.

“You were younger and meaner than me but thank god you were fat,” I say, glad to be safe enough to say it (not being in Hyde Park and standing by a river), “I mean ‘Fatso’ was the only weapon I had.”

“Anyway,” my brother says, “Matty’s on the right course. He’ll be with loads of other people who can read a page of Herodotus without losing their train of thought. Instead of people like me, who start at the top of a page of Herodotus and end up halfway down itching to go for a walk.”

“Or people like me, whose brain starts going all jittery and buzzy, even when I read that small bit about Herodotus on Wikipedia. I mean, what’s that all about?”

“What do you mean buzzy?” he says.

“Literally buzzy,” I say, “it happens when I know I’m going to have to push my brain into understanding things it doesn’t want to learn.”

“Or is incapable of learning,” my brother says.

“It’s like my brain starts running away from certain types of information. I can literally hear it running away.”

“Hear it?” he says.

“Yes,” I say, “not actual footsteps — but there’s a funny sort of sound.”

“I think what you’re hearing,” my brother says, “is the tinkling of a third-rate intellect.”

“I mean,” I say, “if you asked me now, who Herodotus is after just having read that bit on Wikipedia, I’d be hard pushed to tell you. I mean what’s that when it’s at home?”

“That,” my brother says, “when it’s at home, is the age-related disintegration of a third-rate intellect.”

“Like I said,” I say, “no better man.”