Response to 'Whipping Boy'

A few weeks ago Celia Walden mentioned me as her 'Whipping boy' in her notebook. The piece attracted an unusual level of sympathy. Grateful as I am, don't feel too sorry for me. I wrote a response that the Telegraph declined to publish, but it is reproduced below for kicks.

The original can be found here

It should be restated that neither this, nor the original, ought be taken too seriously.

Celia Walden has seen fit to write a cruel expose of my travails on the Telegraph Features desk, coining for me the name ‘whipping boy’. I suppose this is not the worst sort of boy to me. ‘Rent boy’, ‘cabin boy’ and ‘jam boy’ all strike me as more offensive epithets. However, some of the claims in her article are exaggerations, others are entirely fabricated, and - most scarily - some fall short of the far more disturbing truth. I am far less brave than Just William. I have certainly never used Brylcreem, and I have infrequently worn a suit to the Telegraph – though if I did it would probably be ill-fitting. I also got the Tintin diary correct first time. Beyond these I offer no more corrections for fear of drawing back too far the veil of mystery: the Telegraph joins sausages and legislation on the list of things you don’t want to see being made. But there is certainly some license both ways.

The piece has provoked a range of responses: my father speculated that my reputation (what?) had been irreversibly stained. A lawyer-friend wrote that he didn’t know what was worse – the fact that I’d been publicly humiliated by my middle-aged (his word) ‘boss’ or the fact that an online comment-maker had compared me to the poor boy in the news for being sadistically sexually abused by an older child. Some, particularly those on similar ladders, were very jealous: sitting between Celia and Bryony Gordon on the Features desk seems to be considered one of the more coveted spots in the unpaid world – there is definitely a perception in some quarters that my placement is a bed of roses and I should be lickspittlingly grateful for every second. I try at least not to be actively ungrateful, but nobody likes a toady, do they?

Anyway none of these responses is quite on the money (a cruelly ironic metaphor in the circumstances), but certainly rumours of my enslavement have been greatly exaggerated. In the first place I like Celia very much. She is tall and glamorous as you might expect, and her expensively-perfumed cashmere coattails seem, on balance, like rather pleasant things to desperately try and grip on to. Being ‘cougared’ by her, as she keeps threatening, would have the ancillary benefit of cuckolding Piers Morgan, and thereby dramatically enhancing my standing in the media (and indeed the wider world). Secondly, she has gone out of her way to give me things to do beyond fetching her hoisery and her teas (or as is more often the case a soya latte), though I don’t really mind either. The same can be said of many of the Telegraph’s staff: in a competitive and extremely busy world, I’ve been surprised at how ready so many have been to go out of their way to help me.

End of Cambridge

From Varsity, 17 June 2009

Just less than three years ago my father dropped me off at Clare in the old family Ford Galaxy. He had studied here himself, and seemed nostalgic as we unpacked my belongings into my set in Memorial Court. I asked him if he’d have done anything differently were he to have his time again. ‘Worked less’, he replied, looking around a court almost unchanged in thirty years.

As I come to the end of my time here, it’s tempting to ask myself the same question. If I were to start again is there anything I’d do differently? It is difficult to answer. It is hard not to equate the suggestion of alternatives with regret for the present, and I’m quite uncomfortable with the idea of regretting anything so early in life. Regret is a melancholy for life’s lost possibilities; the roads less travelled littering all our pasts, and university a place where this sense is acutely felt. I hope the self-absorption of all this is excused; no one perspective will be the same.

For such a permanent place, founded on glacial academic progress, the undergraduate experience at Cambridge has seemed overwhelmingly speedy. Though I have a sense of an awful lot having happened in the past three years, there is also the feeling I haven’t been here very long at all. Lurching from supervision to supervision, essay to essay, exam to exam, with a thousand other things in between, the modern Cambridge undergraduate degree has an unequalled intensity; life here is condensed into eight-week paroxysms, followed by lengthy vacations of exhaustion.

It might be argued that this is preparation for real life, but it isn’t really. Life isn’t like Cambridge at all. Life is imprecise, unpredictable, more evenly stressful. Many jobs are less intense than a degree, but then few degrees make you get up at seven in the morning every day. Cambridge lets you know exactly what you’re going to do well in advance, but then encourages you not to do it, or at the least to make sure you have fun doing it, and doing other things as well. It is a structured playground; an assault course for the mind and the character.

Before I came I wasn’t sure what to expect, and now I’m not quite sure what has just happened. But looking around the debris of three years I can draw a few conclusions. I certainly haven’t worked too hard. I have gained a band of loyal if disreputable allies, a taste for the good life, a limited understanding of English literature, and a much greater understanding of how to do things effectively at short notice. I have lost a great number of illusions, particularly that life might always be an endless horizon of opportunities. Perhaps this counts as growing up.

The quality of a party is determined finally by its guests, and it is the people at Cambridge that have made it great. What I will miss are conversations. Conversations about great poems with great minds, conversations where I disagree with everything being said, conversations had blind drunk with friends just made, conversations to hatch wild schemes for the future, conversations with people brighter, funnier, more brilliant than myself. These have taught me, and it is these I will treasure most. The constant sense of vibrant, engaged exchange. No library could have given me this, no number of hours passed poring over books, but equally no other university.

Defending drug use, the comedian Bill Hicks said “I had a great time doing drugs. Sorry. Never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone, never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a car, a house, a wife or kids, laughed my ass off, and went about my day.” This is perhaps close to my Cambridge experience. I haven’t done anything to change the world, but it has been addictively exhilarating and played out at breakneck speed. It is time to do something else, however. Like any party it has to end eventually, but equally it is closest to the end that you least want it to stop. I’m not sorry to leave. Maybe there are some things I would have done differently. This is not regret, this is simply the way of education. 

The Spotify Drinking Game

My friends and I have invented a game. We may not be the first, but since I know of noone else I am taking this opportunity to codify it.

It is, I suppose, connected to drinking as it is a drinking game, so fundamentalist monotheists turn away now. But it fulfils an important role, solving two pressing issues: how to deal with the laptop-music problem where nothing is listened to for more than ten seconds, and also parties full of boring people unable to converse. 

The game goes like this: one person is 'DJ'. They play a series of songs from spotify. The other people in the room then race to identify the song. The first person who shouts the artist and song title out correctly nominates a drinker. 

If the song is identified within 5 seconds, then everyone bar the identifier drinks. If the song is not identified after 30 seconds, then the DJ must drink as a punishment. Incorrect identifications incur a fine of a drink.

That's it. Simple. But very effective. 

Albums you used to love and forgot

One of the many, many benefits of Spotify is its ability to remind you of, and immediately provide for you with, albums you used to love and forgot about. This week, mostly, I have remembered Rival Schools' album 'United by Fate'.  This will be number 1. on the list of albums you used to love and forgot.

What happened to those guys?

Then, listening to Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe/Newswipe mixtape, it was Grandaddy's 'The Sophtware Slump'.  This is number 2. on the list.

I'm still cross that Facebook wouldn't allow me to create a protest group entitled '1,000,000 strong against Adam from Spotify'. 

Father's Day at Pizza Express with Peter Sutcliffe.

Pizza Express is currently running a Father's Day promotion, the poster for which features a grainy black-and-white photo of a bearded middle-aged white man on a bench with three children. It has been pointed out to me that this man bears a striking resemblance to Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. This seems a curious choice of marketing strategy. Or has the credit crunch got really bad? 

I'll look for the picture.

Eminem goes West

The new Eminem album’s opening ‘skit’ is called ‘Dr. West’. I heard it and got really excited, because I thought it sounded like Jimmy McNulty. I assumed I was the first person ever to have noticed this, and I could break it to the world. Of course, it was Jimmy McNulty, or rather it was Dominic West, in his normal posh English voice, and his appearance has been well documented.

Has anybody else found that once you’ve heard him speaking English, McNulty’s ‘Baltimore’ accent sounds terrible forever? Like a detective Dick van Dyke (in Mary Poppins, not the program where he plays a detective). Oddly enough, Dick van Dyke was the same age in Mary Poppins, 39, that Dominic West is now. Moral = Dick van Dyke is very, very old.

More thoughts on the CUSU/Varsity issue

Cambridge University is doubly blessed in its pastoral care system. The collegiate format means that students can be close enough to their peers on a daily basis to maintain a high level of awareness and response. Across the University, college women’s reps and welfare reps do superb work in raising issues, supporting those in need and liaising with college and university officials. They form a wonderful part of the Cambridge support network. Furthermore, the individual supervision-based teaching system at this university offers not only academic benefits, but also constant contact with concerned professionals, not to mention DoS’s and pastoral Tutors. In all, Cambridge offers one of the finest student care networks in the world, and we should all be proud to honour and support this.

It is the more a pity that the actions and attitudes of a very small group of people at a superficially senior level within this network ought to be abusing their positions so horribly.

Like many of us, I really ought to be revising right now, but the smell of crap coming from the most recent CUSU agenda is so overwhelming that I’m moved to try and air it before I carry on. Of all the countless examples of student politicians speeding off towards a point about ‘welfare’, leaving facts and their own intellects flapping limply in the breeze behind them, this is one of the most odious and pernicious I’ve encountered in my time at Cambridge.

To clarify: in response to the first issue of Varsity this term, the CUSU Women’s Union, after consultation with the CUSU council, has drafted two letters, listed in the Appendices to the agenda of the second council meeting of this term. The first of these letters is being sent to Varsity. The sending of the second, destined for those companies who advertise in Varsity, has been blocked.

In the first of these letters, the Women’s Union criticise Varsity for printing a ‘pull-out “Varsity Tabloid” which mimicked tabloid news as well as drawing attention to the launch of the Tab, an independent tabloid-style Cambridge student paper’. The proposed bases for this censure are that Varsity has a responsibility to student welfare (it doesn’t), and that some women have expressed their dissatisfaction to CUSU about the issue. It asks for an apology from Varsity for these inclusions, and a promise that future editorial teams will take their responsibilities towards student welfare more seriously.

As if this patronising and ill-conceived nonsense wasn’t enough, in the second letter the Women’s Union address Varsity’s sponsors. Their advertisers. Those companies without whom Varsity, unlike TCS, could not exist. As in, CUSU assembles its weight (those outside the university are understandably less familiar with its hysterical haplessness) against an independent student-run organisation, who also happen to be the direct commercial competitors of their own newspaper. I don’t know the details, but I imagine this is illegal. Or if not illegal, certainly way beyond CUSU’s mandate, even if the factual basis was there.

But there are so many other problems with the letters (one of which is reprinted below) that I’m bewildered as to where to begin. Let’s start with the most serious accusation: that Varsity is somehow endorsing a system which is harmful to women. I notice that nowhere in either letter (and here I’m using both Appendices A and B from the agenda for the second CUSU meeting, Easter term 2009) does it mention any specific aspect of the tabloid pull-out which has caused offence. Instead there is a nebulous sense of disgruntlement circling the word ‘tabloid’.

I’d love to be enlightened. Was it the ‘Camsay Street’ photo-diary, in which an undergraduate provocatively displayed her cleavage? Or perhaps it was distinguished Times columnist Caitlin Moran, posed attractively in a green silk dress? Or maybe the ‘Bedroom blues’ sexual advice column, in which a woman poses seductively with a pen. It could be all of these things – they all present women who have chosen to be photographed in attractive - dare I say it, sexually attractive poses. The same could be said of the fashion sections in both Varsity and TCS most weeks.

As I say, I couldn’t be sure, but I’m led to believe that, shockingly, it was the ‘Page 3 girl’ that caused a large part of the righteous agitation amongst the women’s officers. The photograph is of Rachel Pickles, a student from Homerton who not only volunteered enthusiastically for the role but was also delighted with the photos. I’m given to understand that she was under duress about no aspect of this, right down to the colour of her underwear. Quite right too. After all, she is an empowered, attractive, intelligent modern woman.

Were I a female student at Cambridge, I would feel scandalized that CUSU’s Women’s Union had directed its attention like this. I certainly know that some of my female friends do, and if that sounds vague it is no more so than the unspecific ‘complaints’ CUSU received to prompt this madness. This is even truer than normal in this term, when female students, perhaps more so than their less-conscientious male counterparts, are vulnerable to the stress of examinations, and the subsidiary effects of this. These are Welfare Issues.

Not a newspaper publishing a picture of a student in her pants. It is yet another demonstration of CUSU’s irrelevance in matters like this. Its members, rendered practically toothless by the effectiveness of the collegiate pastoral system, resort to grandiose gestures to justify themselves to each other. Usually these are just banal, but in this instance they are dangerous.

Where do these guys get off? Do they also object to the recent fashion show, in which female students walked the catwalk in lingerie to raise money for Amnesty? Do fashion shows not have a duty to consider the welfare of students? Or garden parties? Do drinking societies not have a duty to consider the welfare of students? I must confess at this point that I selected my own byline photo for the Tabloid issue, and in the full awareness that it makes me look about two stones lighter than reality. Am I being objectified? Is that connected to the culture of grown men preying on young boys in the Middle East? Or male homosexual rape?

Or alternatively, perhaps they feel that by moving away from the broadsheet elitism of the normal Varsity, and towards the more accessible style of Britain’s best-selling newspapers, Varsity is veering dangerously close to displaying a sense of humour and self-awareness that might elevate them from CUSU’s seeming mandate of constant, leadenly hubristic hypocrisy.

The letters point out that two female members of the editorial team objected to the publication of the tabloid edition. So what? That’s the whole point of having editors. They select what goes in. On any article, in any issue, there are members of the team who might not want it published, for a wide range of reasons. This is not CUSU’s problem. Never has been, never will be. The editors of the issue in question are responsible and careful, and care a great deal about both Cambridge and the newspaper. How often does a real tabloid offer a reasoned justification for exercising its freedom of expression in the editorial column?

The letters go on to implicate Varsity in racism and xenophobia by printing the tabloid pull-out, an underhand gesture that is as cheap as it is loathsome.

Varsity is not, as the letters report, a ‘Cambridge Student Newspaper’, but rather the ‘Independent Cambridge Student Newspaper’. Big difference. It is not tied to the university. It sells adverts, and pays for itself. Unlike TCS, it does not depend on CUSU’s overbearing presence to ensure advertising revenue and smother its quality. It subscribes to the independent Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulating body of serious, grown-up newspapers, who know more about these things than the coterie of infantile student activists apparently comprising the CUSU council.

That CUSU would write a letter about this, abusing its position as representing Cambridge students as a body, is bad enough. But that it would even think about writing to Varsity’s advertisers, in a bizarre conflation of women’s lib with commercial sabotage, is abhorrent, probably illegal and, within the structure of a university hinged on freedom of expression, morally dangerous. CUSU’s power should never, under any circumstances, be used to directly threaten Varsity. If Varsity breaks the law, it is a matter for the law. If Varsity breaches the PCC’s code of conduct, then that is a matter for the PCC. If Varsity is unpopular, its readership is quite free to stop responding to its advertisements.

            CUSU is a sad dinosaur, with relevance to the student body only when it roars at something stupid. And like the dinosaurs, it needs to die or be cut back. Cambridge University is stuffed full of institutions like this, filled with students who derive a false sense of superiority from being a part of said institution. Varsity is one of them, perhaps, but Varsity charges the students nothing, and occasionally, very occasionally, might inform or entertain a couple of them. CUSU does neither of these things. Whilst the student body needs representation at a university-wide level, the last thing it needs is the current set-up, where a council of over-excitable try-hards are allowed to throw serious and malicious accusations around at random. The letters in the most recent CUSU agenda damage CUSU, unfairly damage Varsity, patronise the majority of the female students of Cambridge and, worst of all, distract from the excellent work being done at a collegiate level by Welfare Reps, women’s Reps and the wider pastoral system. Those who wrote them should be ashamed.