Getting Thrown Out Of...
By Jack Nory. It was pointed out to me last week, by a friend of mine, that my articles thus far have verged on the nasty side of cynical. I have tried all week therefore to refrain from cynicism - I even read FOX from cover to cover and thought what a charming and intelligent magazine it was; so intellectual and erudite, I even imagined Germaine Greer smiling at the thought that the new generation of feminists had used the liberty that she and countless others had thought and fought so hard for, to identify the best place to pull 'bits of hunky Northern rough'. I continued in this vein of general naivety and goodwill to everything and everyone all week - I even walked past the science complex on the Banbury road and marvelled at the neo-Croydonist architecture - right up until the point where someone told me in hushed tones that 'the Bodleian is the place to pull'. Nor was he alone in propounding such silliness - that same article in FOX claimed 'many an eye-meet across those desks' in the PPE reading room 'has led to better things.'...
Columns: Unwise Words
As I wandered home at the end of an exhausting day, it struck me with uncommon force what a peculiar set of occurrences had overcome me in the last 24 hours. The day had started as usual, nothing much to report as I set out on my regular journey to pick rose buds next to the convent school. I always did this on a Wednesday morning, and then wandered into the centre of town to distribute them among such people that passed who would allow me to take their fancy....
Columns: Political sketch
Orford University was in the dock this week as it emerged that an applicant to Moribund College had failed to get a place. Lara Hippocampus, who applied to study Medicine, was turned down for allegedly "not scoring highly in tests". Despite her 10 grade A* GCSEs, Moribund chose to not to offer Laura a place and instead give it to someone who was not a state school girl from the north. The headmaster of Lara's school, Chris Release, called the college's action a "disgrace, and indicative of an alarming trend." Statistics show that Moribund rejected scores of other teenagers this year, many of them from state schools, and most with top grade GCSEs. Mr Release suggested that the scale of the problem might be larger than previously suspected, and hinted at the existence of hundreds, "maybe thousands" of other such cases of promising applicants being rejected. "it is an indictment of Orford's elitist attitude that fewer than one in three applicants are offered a place."...
Columns: Postcard From The Edge (Of Europe)
Finding out that your tutor is in league with a Belgian chocolate mafia is something to rattle the most stable of minds. I hadn't found that out yet, dear reader. He might just be keeping guns for a legitimate reason, such as shooting French tourists, but I felt, not for the first time in this little country, involved in something I did not quite understand. I had asked why chocolate formed a traditional accompaniment to every parcel delivered, and now he was pointing a gun at me. There was something rotten in the state of Belgium, and defending that corrupt cocoa-y mass was my moral tutor, with a small revolver. "People all want chocolate" he was saying. "They all get chocolate. If we do not make this decision for them what will happen?"...
Columns: Discourse
Ha. I lied. Last week, I told you all that I was going to write a piece on conceptual cookery in this issue, entitled 'how to make an intellectual hash'. But I've changed my mind; because which of us in our right minds would want to do that in our time off as well? Besides, people here spend far too much time as it is attempting to see out of their own mouths (work it out), when they could be cooking and shagging and laughing and doing hobbies that they're not particularly good at. In my opinion this is how people develop drinking problems: by taking their work too seriously, and their lives not seriously enough. So, this week, I'm going to stop buggering about with theories and tell you how to do something basic which will improve the quality of your dinners, and hence your life, infinitely more than any quantity of intellectual hash. Pancakes....