Dinner at the Val Moret Hotel in France.
By Malcolm Mackley
My wife and I were travelling between Calais and Trient in Switzerland and had decided to break our journey by staying overnight at the Val Moret hotel in the middle of France, near Troyes. We had stayed there before and knew that its evening dinner was excellent and incredibly varied. We sat at a table for two and enjoyed our meal that was complimented by an excellent bottle of local Champagne that was offered for an overnight ‘demi pension’ hotel rate.
I find it necessary to wear hearing aids and my wife (Margaret) often has to tell me to speak more quietly when we are in conversation at public places. At the conclusion of our meal we both enjoyed a glass of Ratafia, a digestif. At this point, an English couple sitting adjacent to us, but across an access passageway started to engage us in conversation. The woman was animated and admitted that she had been ‘ear wigging’ our own conversation. The man was more reserved and what emerged was two independent conversations developing across the passageway between the females and males.
My own conversation was quite measured and I was unable to detect whether the man was the woman’s husband or a ‘companion’. However, I briefly told him my own life story saying that I had spent thirty years teaching students at Cambridge University.
He immediately responded, ‘Surely at a place like Cambridge, you should be teaching them how to think.’ He was, of course, right. Maybe it was the Champagne and excellent meal that had loosened my tongue?
Subsequent reflection on the point has troubled me and I have concluded that Cambridge is in fact supreme in the way it teaches gifted undergraduate students in order to pass very challenging exams and with this, there is a significant component of teaching the students how to think. However, for me in an Engineering Science department, it was when students got to a Graduate or PhD level that the real potential to ‘teach them by example’ how to think became really possible for those students who were receptive to being taught in that way.
08 September 2025
