Cumming On Politics

From Varsity 25 April 2008

I’m not the only person feeling invigorated by the US presidential stuff. Over the holiday my ten year old brother, observing the colours of my father’s rug-challenged skull, exclaimed:
‘Hillary’s beating Obama’.
Aside from the robust impertinence (the kids in ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ would never have gotten away with a line like that), it at least shows how the contest has captured the imagination, even amongst an age-group which genuinely believes ‘Soulja Boy’ to be musically talented and free of retardation.
It’s easy, really. Get a hip young black dude, a haggard white sour-faced whale, talk about how great both are. Then make them fight each other for years for the right to lose to a deranged ‘Nam vet who looks like the violent, lecherous younger brother of the Emperor from Star Wars. All the elements are in place. It’s perfect PR for the democratic system, really. One wonders why they didn’t think of it before. Actually I say perfect, but I mean almost perfect, because there are some flaws with it, the most important of which is the fact that Obama and Clinton have both been so ravaged by their ambition that they have gone entirely mad.
Obama started this madness, probably, when he seized on Hillary’s (in hindsight gravely erroneous) ‘anti-hope’ mantra, and cunningly flipped it on its head to make himself the candidate of ‘hope’. Abstract concepts are great things to run on, because they mean nothing. However, what Obama has proven is that by twinning the abstract concept with another descriptive noun, picked at random, you can mean even less than nothing. I like the guy, even though he does always look like he might disappear and compete in a long-distance running race, but his bestselling book of ideology, ‘The Audacity Of Hope’, could just as easily have been called ‘The Complexity of Dream, or ‘The Danger Of Creed’. ‘The Belligerence of Humour’, anyone? If he’d gotten Robert Ludlum on the case in time (i.e. before Robert Ludlum died in 2001), they could have called it something even funkier. ‘The Chicago Compromise’, perhaps. Or ‘The Honolulu Hopefulness’.
In amongst all the routine mudslinging there have been some genuine moments of comedy: the word ‘misspeak’, for instance, when the meaning is ‘lie’. I think we can all agree that ‘misspeak’ sounds friendlier: it suggests that there was some kind of purer, inner truth, cruelly distorted by the evil mouth. Almost as good are McCain’s ‘senior moments’ on unimportant issues like the difference between Iran and Iraq. Senior moments are justly celebrated for their hilariousness, but your mother posting her car-keys has fewer global implications than, say, a war. When it comes down to it, do you really want Harold Bishop’s cake-filled finger on the button?
Unfortunately I suspect the answer is yes, particularly when the alternative is, basically, an older, thinner version of the Carlton character from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I’d vote for Will Smith, who’s never made a bad movie, but Carlton was always getting bitched on. As for the white whale, I’ll say only this: would you trust someone who thought it was a good idea to delegate her husband, the President of the United States’s, sexual needs to the work experience? There are some responsibilities which must simply be taken on the chin, and I don’t like her priorities.
It’s irrelevant anyway, because the strongest candidate by miles was the dangerously crackers black Republican Alan Keyes, whose entire being was given over to righteous indignation for the ten minutes he was around, before his anti-discrimination ticket resulted in him being, er, discriminated off the radar and out to pasture. He deserved a go, if only so we might have seen what vengeance he was capable of wreaking on the electorate.

Cumming On The Boards

From Varsity, 7 March 2008

There are loads of plays on this week, and all forms of theatre are rubbish, so it has not been a good week. Of all the performance art forms, the theatre is the most singularly terrible, as agreed by people all over the world. In fact it is very easy to prove its worthlessness simply by describing it, much as it is possible to prove to people how much they dislike seagulls, simply by mentioning them.

The experience of watching a play goes as follows:
Beforehand: Purchase tickets, potentially from the internet, necessitating a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey style selection of seats, from a map which invariably ignores important details, like how much the paunch of the lady next to you will spill tsunamiesque over your own thigh, and how close you are to the ice-cream chappo for half-time. The two are potentially connected.

Then for the next ten months, or week, you fret furiously over the tickets, for which you have already exchanged your money. There’s no going back. You’re not in Kansas anymore. Will it be fun? What will the people say? With whom should I go? These are just some of the questions racing through your mind, and there are many more.

The dilemma about whom to take is acutely felt. In theory it should be the perfect platform for crafting a cheeky chirpse, as the outing encompasses all of the elements essential to a date; specifically disproportionate expenditure, long periods of silence, feeble wordplay, and a suicidally wistful sense of anticlimax. And that’s before you start excusing yourself with puns based around the theatrical uses of the words ‘performance’ and ‘wooden’, as in:

Nathalie: Did you see ‘Harry Potter’ in ‘Equus’?

Ed: Yes, I thought his performance was a bit wooden.*

Nathalie: Well, in some ways, I don’t think your performance was wooden enough.

Ed: I’m sorry. I couldn’t see the wood for the tease.

But if one doesn’t take a girl, whom does one take? Going with a male friend, jovial as it might be in theory, runs the risk of making you look like an uglier(much) version of televised homosexuals Jake Gyllenhal and Heath Ledger (pboh), happy to embrace their love in the documentary ‘Brokeback Mountain’, but uncomfortable displaying their mutual affection on the red carpet.

Taking one’s mother is also out of the question, for fear of her suspicions that you have fallen into either of the traps above, and are taking her in fear and shame. The most sensible option is probably to fly solo, perhaps selling the spare ticket to a tout at the door, like this:

Tout: Mary Poppins, buy or sell.

Ed: I’ve got one to sell, I paid £50 for it, but I’ll let you have it for £30.**

Tout: (rustling his leather jacket, with a rustling sound only possible with leather) I’ll give you a tenner.

Ed: Right you are, sir.

The zenith of the evening’s misery, of course, doesn’t happen until you’ve sat down, expecting to be entertained, when all of a sudden all the lights go out and two people (sometimes more) wearing face-paint and fancy dress wander on and start talking, and then don’t stop talking for hours and hours, almost literally never stopping. They often don’t even talk about fun things like videogames and football, but instead about how their not shagging the people they want to shag, and how they want to kill so-and-so because he makes them so cross. It’s a bit like being muted and strapped to a chair in a dark pub whilst Iain Duncan-Smith talks to a cadaver about tax law, at a volume just loud enough to prevent coma but just too quiet to understand.

Then, when they do finally stop, after autumn has set in and all your library books are overdue, you give a little celebratory clap and leave the room to drink some gin and set fire to yourself. But you only get out for about a minute before somebody announces that it is, in fact, only half-time. At least you can stop reading a newspaper.

*Some of the names have been changed.
**Still changed.

Gormley's Turning To High Art At Home

From The Camden New Journal, 31 May 2007

After making his mark around Britain and the world, one of our best-known sculptors is back, writes Ed Cumming

ANTONY Gormley’s art has led him all over the world – to South-East Asia, to China, to Venice, to Gateshead – but it is fitting that London should finally see a major exhibition of his. Born in Hampstead, Mr Gormley has lived in Camden for almost all of his professional life, and his state-of-the-art studio is a short but dramatic walk away in King’s Cross.

“I suppose I first moved to Camden for Romany’s (the hardware store),” he explains with a laugh, “but then it moved.”

He retains a lot of affection for the borough. “It’s good because it’s tribal,” he says. “It always has been, I think, though there’s less mohicans than there used to be.

“It has the texture of everyday life. It’s got its own energy – it’s cosmopolitan without being chic.”

Local institutions feature high on Gormley’s list of favourite things.

He says: “I like the Jazz Café, I like the canal. I used to like the Camden Palais but I haven’t been since it’s been Koko. The High Street’s great – it’s common ground. It feels like it could be a village high street – it’s rough and ready.”

But despite his urbane familiarity, moving into the city for a new work, Event Horizon, marks a significant change of artistic direction for the sculptor whose most famous works, The Angel of the North and Another Place, are both set in large expanses of open countryside – in the latter case on Crosby Beach near Liverpool.

Mr Gormley warmly acknowledges the difference: “It’s the same old body, just in different places. They’ve always interacted with their surroundings.”

Event Horizon features his distinctive human casts set out all over the rooftops of London, viewable from a special gallery in the Hayward. It is an impressive spectacle, at once alienating and moving.

“The figures have always been isolated, but I wanted to convey the topography of London as if it was a rural setting.

"I treated building as if it were geological environment – I’m trying to balance the experience with objecthood – I have always seen my works as places, rather than things.

“I want people to look out over London with the same innocent eyes as, say, a goatherd looking for chamois in the Alps.”

He laughs – “actually, maybe those eyes aren’t so innocent.”

As well as Event Horizon, the exhibition features a number of new and old works exploring the architectural aspects of the human form. One of the most striking is Blind Light (which is also the title of the Hayward exhibition), a glass room filled with mist and bright white light. Visitors walk into the room and become unable to see, though they are visible in silhouette on the outside.

“The viewer becomes the view”, Mr Gormley explains. “They can’t see anything, so they become consciousness in a field of materialised light. People are either comforted or terrified – not knowing where you are leads you to uncertainty about who you are.”

The architecture of the body is related to the physical architecture of the buildings and rooms we inhabit: “Inside and outside are simultaneously separated and connected – windows and doors are very important, as is light.”

It is these things which explore the “private space of the other”, the subject of most of Mr Gormley’s works. The show has become the hot-ticket of the summer exhibitions – while it divides opinion his work has always been simultaneously democratic and personal.

Some have described Blind Light as a “retrospective”, something the artist rejects: “It’s not a retrospective. I think a retrospective is something that can happen after the artist is dead. There are 10 old works, and 35 drawings, introduced amongst the new stuff.”

He seems to delight in the challenge of progress: “It’s new work to push things forward. You’ve gotta keep ’em on their toes”, he says.

And then he has to go – “to strip naked and be cast”. It is the official opening day of the exhibition, and he is already moving on. It is ironic, perhaps, given the brooding, monolithic nature of his figures, but nobody could accuse Antony Gormley of keeping still.

Cumming On Flattery

From Varsity, 22 February 2008

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Actually they don’t. Someone whom I previously believed to have been Oscar Wilde said it, once, and he was presumably fairly confident that he was great and that loads of people wanted to be like him, so it wasn’t a problem that people had started to make off and desecrate his image.
For the rest of us, drudging his aphorism from the pit of inanity, imitation is actually one of the more sincere forms of mockery. Sincere forms of flattery are forms which involve other people telling you how great you are, in terms which articulate an aspect of yourself you already know, indisputably, to be great. For instance, to a woman with nice eyes:
“You’ve got nice eyes”
“Thanks.”
She knows she has nice eyes, and walks around thinking it most of the time. But just in case she was worrying that she no longer had nice eyes, this sincere form of flattery is just what she needed to pep her up. An insincere form of flattery would be going up to a woman with horrible eyes and saying:
“You’ve got nice eyes”
“Thanks.”
I agree that superficially the differences seem limited. But imagine the poor woman, walking around not knowing she has nice eyes, being told that she does, and wanting to believe it despite it not being true. Eventually, the aggregate of other people’s opinions will out, and she will be forced to concede, as before, that she does not have nice eyes. Probably after this she’ll begin eating curry, alone, in front of the hit TV serial ‘Skins’, weeping quietly into an empty carton of Pop-Tarts. This must be worse than the first option.
But these are the sincere and insincere faces of flattery.
The faces of mockery are much harder to put one’s finger on. Sincere mockery, as above, is very easy to achieve through imitation. All that is required is for the instigator to impersonate, crudely, the target of his offence with less wit and verve, more crude sexual slang, and a great deal more cursing like a sailor. If we are feeling highbrow we might look to Iago in ‘Othello’, if not the Hollywood Actor Sylvester Stallone’s impression of a human in the recent film ‘Rambo’ is another convincing example.
Insincere mockery, on the other hand, is very hard, as it requires the mocker to be secretly jealous of that which he attacks. For instance, in the above example I mocked Sylvester Stallone for impersonating humans, whereas in reality I would give loads to be like him, if just for a day. This is more on account of his close working relationships with Mr. T. and Lando Calrissian than his ageing, KFC-esque musculature. Watching ‘Pride and Prejudice’ the other day, I was moved to exclaim how much I would like to hit Keira Knightley in the face with a brick, if only to wipe that quasi-moronic Bend It Like Beckham half-smirk off her mouth once and for all. This, I concede in the colder light of day, was probably only insincere mockery. I would willingly swap (pre-brick) faces with Knightley, if just for two days, because it would offer an unrivalled opportunity to receive sincere flattery (see above), thanks to the exhaustive list of things Keira Knightley thinks are indisputably great about herself.
It is always better to be the real deal, rather than the tribute act. Just ask ‘Noasis’, ‘Badness’, ‘Bjorn Again’, ‘Kasabian’ or ‘The Bootleg Beatles’. They’ll tell you. But they won’t be flattering or sincere.

Ugg Boots

From Varsity 15 February 2008


On the whole I try not to read the fashion pages, let alone write them. They’ve always seemed to me to be a frustrating combination of the inane and the hurtful, sprinkled gently with the visually depressing. Each picture of somebody beautiful wearing a brown coat is another beautiful person wearing a brown coat that isn’t me, or even wanting to step out to the pictures with me, which is the perennially acceptable alternative. Fashion pages, in general, are to my mind the print equivalent of having a big mirror above my bed, emblazoned with the lyrics from Ludacris’ 2002 hit ‘Move Bitch’.
Aside from anything else, fashion pages imply that there might be something wrong with the way I’m presently dressed, which is a nasty thought from which only bad things can come. Appearance, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder (a fact convincingly reiterated by provincial dancefloors and the continued employment of David Schwimmer), and I like to think it’s all a matter of personal taste, like how you take your fried eggs (on the chin, in my case).
Unfortunately, Ugg boots are terrible. I know this because I have seen them, frequently, adorning the feet of girls (and one boy) who ought to know better. Footwear, like many of the more basic innovations, occurs because it is appropriate to its environment. Football boots, for instance, are popular amongst people playing, or at least intending to play, football. In the same vein flippers are used more often by people swimming than people walking on dry land.
The Ugg boot, according to Wikipedia, the well-known shapeshifting encyclopaedia, was invented in Australia by sheep farmers, who had both ready access to sheep and very infrequent contact with other people, other people who might notice that they had a mammoth’s muff strapped to each ankle. Later on the boots were adopted by fighter pilots, who had a need for warmth in an unpressurized environment, and for whom other people were also less of a problem (I suppose it could be argued that in many ways ‘other people’ are the problem if you’re a fighter pilot. Them and missiles).
None of these factors is applicable to the modern high street, which has both a proliferation of other people and also a marked absence of sheep and missiles. And although it can get really quite crowded of a Christmastime Saturday afternoon, Topshop still has a little way to go before it matches the climatic extremes of, say the Australian outback, or the Korean War. Wearing an Ugg boot in a modern, urban environment, with its wealth of other possible footwear choices, says four things of the wearer:
a) I am not only a sheep, I am, like, wearing one.
b) I have too high a disposable income for someone of my taste and judgement.
c) I have not yet learned to fully appreciate the gift of sight.
Still, it’s difficult to know exactly what to do to fix the issue. My original plan was to blind everyone who owned a pair, until it was pointed out to me that not being able to see would make it more difficult to dress oneself, and so the easy to slip-on Uggs would gain ground. My second was to invest in a pair myself in a fit of self-serving hypocrisy. The third was to ignore them, and hope they will eventually go away.

Cumming on a Treadmill

From Varsity 16 February 2008


I've recently taken up exercise, in the allegedly ‘mild’ form of occasional jogging. This is largely because I am overweight, obviously. There are only two sorts of people who go jogging: fat people who want to be thinner, and crazy people. Ask yourself, when you get home, which category you fall into, and adjust your spiritual self-worth accordingly.
However, it is also partially because I think it’s good to try everything once, with the obvious exceptions of Dr Pepper and bungee jumping (the former because I am engaged in legal proceedings with the company over the exact sense of the word ‘misunderstood’, and the latter simply because as a concept I think it’s madder than a bin full of Britney).
Although this said, it might be more accurate to say that exercise has taken up me. Certainly it feels like I’m the one being lifted, and then dropped, heavily, back to the floor again, and certainly I’m the charitable case in the exchange. Exercise doesn’t owe me anything, whilst I, over the years, have clocked a number of savage crimes against exercise. For instance, just last weekend I visited three restaurants within two hours, just for fun.
Two things I have noticed on these tentative jogs are that my heart beats faster, and hurts, and that my breathing becomes shorter and less effective. In fact, it often feels like I might actually be damaging myself, rather than making myself better, through this effort of self-improvement, which is not what I envisioned at all. What I envisioned, originally, was that I would hope to Parker’s Piece, have a Pizza Hut for lunch, jog back, look in the mirror and watch, enthralled, as my vision improved and my musculature defined itself, not unlike the scene in the first of the recent Hollywood adaptations of the comic series ‘Spiderman’.
You can only imagine how frustrating it was when it didn’t happen at all like that. After jogging to Parker’s Piece, I was sweating so profusely that I had to sit on a bench, where quickly the perspiration caused my ambitiously sleeveless Nike t-shirt to mould rather exactly the contours of my upper torso. This unfortunate state of affairs, combined with my sedentary posture, made aspects of my anatomy somewhat resemble those of a lady, a fact not lost on a quintet of passing schoolchildren, who demonstrated both a surprisingly boldness with their elders and an extensive, readily available vocabulary of biological terminology.
After a few minutes sat on the bench, whilst I thought about how they collectively resembled nothing so much as a hive of miniature, navvy Gordon Ramsays, and how Gordon Ramsay’s face resembles a sphincter, I composed myself enough for lunch as they scampered on their merry way, presumably to set fire to a dog turd, or loiter in a newsagent’s all at the same time. I wandered up with customary joie de vivre, only to be turned away from the door, mysteriously on grounds of ‘odour’. My pleas for clemency, and even offers of eating in the loo, cut no mustard.
It was really quite depressing.
I’m not sure if any of my erstwhile readers have ever been turned away from a Pizza Hut on grounds of odour, or even been turned away from chain pizza joints at all, but I ought to warn you that at the time, it feels like a relatively low socio-cultural limbo pole to master. This is particularly the case if, like me, you pride yourself on only ever having been banned from a fast-food restaurant once, the result of a misunderstanding over the exact sense of the phrase ‘Dr Pepper’.
I jogged on.

Penetrating Questions

From Varsity 24 January 2008


A Varsity survey has revealed a correlation between academic failure and sexual activity amongst Cambridge students.
The online study, which asked over a thousand members across the University in depth about their sex lives, shows that students at poorly-performing colleges are more likely to have high average levels of sexual partners.
Peterhouse, the University’s oldest college, came 25th in the 2007 Tompkins Table, but 3rd in the promiscuity table, beaten only by Fitzwilliam and Homerton Colleges. At Homerton, 26th in academic achievement, students have had on average 7 sexual partners.
Christ’s College, 2nd in last year’s Tompkins list, reported the highest number of virgins, with 28% of respondents never having had sex.
Christ’s also reported the lowest usage of recreational drugs, a category which Clare topped, where 55% of respondents are users. Clare came 17th in last year’s Tompkins Table. Drugs usage across the university as a whole was 28%.
The results also revealed a range of activity according to subject choices. Almost half of all mathematicians have never had sex, whereas the average Medic has had at least eight sexual partners. CUSU President Mark Fletcher seemed unsurprised by the findings.
He said: “It’s obvious that the mathematicians haven’t found the winning formula yet. But it’s good to see that ‘Doctors and Nurses’ is still a popular game.”
Surprisingly for such a similar subject, Vets come near the bottom of the table, with fewer than two average sexual partners per student. Perhaps their preference for animals extends into the bedroom.
Far from its nerdy reputation, the findings show Cambridge to be a vibrant, sexually active university, in some cases surprisingly so. 60% of those who have had sex have done it outdoors, and a quarter have tried S&M. Luckily for common rooms everywhere, only 15% have engaged in group sex.
King’s College emerged as the kinkiest college, as well has having the highest proportion of gay and bisexual students. Downing emerged as the straightest college, with only 3% of gay and bisexual students, well down on the figure of 16% for the university as a whole.
The averages quoted were adjusted to account for anomalies. One particularly ambitious student at Trinity College claimed to have slept with over 70 women. Regardless of its veracity, this would otherwise have hauled up the achievements of his college mates.
A section in the anonymous study allowed for respondents to submit anecdotes about their sexual activity at Cambridge. Amidst the predictable list of joke entries, such as ‘I bummed a heron’, the responses included some fascinating and occasionally touching accounts. Tales of outdoor frolics and unfortunate timing abounded, not to mention more straightforward misapprehensions of gender.
It is also clear that conventional religious attitudes no longer apply. Only 10% of people believe in not having sex before marriage. Mark Wolfson, J-SOC spokesman, was unsurprised by the findings.
He said: “Even among more religious people, sex before marriage has become much more prevalent. Maybe the 10% who disagree just aren’t getting any!”
Some results confirm long-held stereotypes. Those involved in postgraduate study are less likely to have had sex than their undergraduate counterparts. Third-year students are the most active, with 90% having had sex. It suggests that as long as you believe in sex before marriage, you will have lost your virginity by the time you graduate.
Not all of the results are so light-hearted. 61% of students have never had an STI test, despite 44% having had a one-night stand. 5% admitted to having had a sexually transmitted disease, far below the reported 1 in 3 people who have it nationally. The question of schooling in universities raises its head again; the survey clearly shows that those who attended state secondary schools tend to sleep with other state-educated people. Privately educated students show no statistical preference either way.
The most interesting results are tabled on these pages. The survey offers a unique and unprecedented insight into the most intimate habits of the University. Its reputation as a University is founded on a belief in asking, and answering, important questions. Hopefully these findings will provoke some more.

An Unsurprising Elite

From Varsity, 28 September 2007


I don't know why anybody is surprised that the best-qualified students are offered places at the best universities.

With the hand-wringing surrounding the Sutton Report's statistical demonstration that students from elite schools filling the elite universities, you might think that people had forgotten that our higher education is, at its pressure points, supposed to be meritocratic. Oxford and Cambridge take the best people they can get according to their own criteria for selection, which, using A-levels as the baseline, take into account grades, tests and the interview. The success of the system is borne out by the continued desirability of Oxbridge graduates as employees.

It is a set-up both more comprehensive than the standard UCAS procedure and more weighted towards students at the best schools. To look only at A-levels and personal statements would be to favour those at the lower end of the scale. The interview, on the other hand, rewards students raised in the classic public school tradition, of noisy debate, callous put-downs and a casual disregard for the supposed limits of the syllabus. They favour the bold, the articulate and the conversationally adept, as well as those whose knowledge of a subject goes far beyond that which is required for an A-grade. Funnily enough, these are all characteristics which help people get ahead in the wider world, particularly the high-end professions – banking, law, the media – many of whose employees are supplied by Oxbridge.

And where the top schools foster talent and ambition, our lesser institutions are prone to stifle it. With every facility in place to encourage those from all walks of life to apply, from access schemes to top-up fee exemptions, applications are still frustratingly low. But almost all interpretations of the facts assume that good state-school candidates are being swatted away in favour of some sort of undefined conspiracy involving old school ties and class-based snobbery. This might be because state-school teachers perceive Oxbridge as an undesirable destination, presumably the result of unfamiliarity with what is, in reality, an inclusive atmosphere. Or perhaps they have just started to buy into their own myths and truly believe that there is no hope for their candidates.

Meanwhile, those from the elite schools admirably strive to rise above the politics of envy and prove their worth. At Westminster School the academic norm is increasingly 5 A-levels, almost invariably at Grade A. At Winchester they scarcely bother with the GCSE exams at all anymore, with students taking only the bare minimum required to meet university regulations.
It is true that the best schools find a way around every measure that either Oxbridge or the government dream up to confound their excellence. Good on them. They are, after all, businesses, in a competitive market, offering a first-class education to those either able to foot the fees or bright enough to secure a scholarship.

Yet the Government’s approach is directly damaging to children fortunate enough to attend these schools. If applications were done blind, with no heed paid to schooling, then it is likely that 70% or 80% from some of these places would go to Oxbridge, which is far higher than the 40-50% of admission success achieved currently by Westminster School.

The argument goes that Oxbridge takes into account factors which might have held people back from their true potential, which is all well and good were there any way of measuring which factors hold people back the most. The drive for “equal opportunities” (has there been a more redundant phrase?) access means that Oxbridge are under increasing pressure to reject those who, say, come from good schools but broken homes, over those from comprehensive schools but happy, intelligent, educationally-minded families.

Neither can be absolutely right, but in the continual quest to find the brightest people, Oxford and Cambridge must fight the urge to take people because their background corresponds convincingly with their grades, regardless of how many of their access criteria it might fulfil. The mere presence of private schools is an extension of the free market economy we believe in so strongly. It’s not fair, but then neither is the fact that the rich have bigger houses, faster cars, and safari holidays. Given that most parents who pay for school do so with the intention that their children end up at the best universities, it sends out entirely the wrong message if there’s any suggestion of punishing them for doing so at the crucial moment.

It is difficult to reconcile this with our hazier concept of an educational meritocracy, but the only sensible solution is to err on the side of excellence, measured by the systems, like A-levels and interviews, that do exist. If this means that Oxbridge ends up taking the entire year from Westminster School, and none from Westminster City, so much the better. The message would at least be a clear one: Oxbridge respects ability, nothing more, nothing less, and regardless of which school you went to.

The problem is that it seems hard to imagine any near-future world where the skills bestowed by our elite schools would fall anywhere near the average or even the higher-end of the average strength of our state schools. The disparity must not be rectified at the expense of our production of talent.

Cumming on Love

From Varsity, 8 February 2008


In the week coming up it’s Valentine’s Day. I have always rather enjoyed Valentine’s Day, for the simple reason that I’ve never been involved in it directly, and so have never had to put up with the glutinous mountains of tawdry, over-sentimentalised deer-shit which come with it. Every time the 14th of February swings around I sit back, climb into my y-fronts, draw the curtains and watch the spoof-disaster movie ‘Airplane!’ with Leslie Nielsen (he’s getting a bit old for the journey now, but we still speak on the phone), revelling in the fact that at no point in the evening will I have to pay £7 for a portion of garlic bread crafted (often without irony) into a heart shape.
Neither will I feel obliged to artificially inflate the tone of my conversation to be appropriate to the red and pink balloons loitering outside the restaurant. I hate balloons outside restaurants on Valentine’s Day. If they were people, balloons outside restaurants on Valentine’s Day would be chain-smoking 75 year-old Italian timeshare touts, drinking Grappa from a hip-flask and telling passing 14 year-old English tourist girls how priiityy their eyes were while masturbating furiously into their mothers’ handbags.
I will also not have to do with anybody that takes Valentine’s Day seriously. This is very important, because these people do exist, and they’re awful. Received wisdom would have it that the majority are girls, measuring out their self-worth according to how many roses/mystery cards they receive on the big day, but I have an inkling that this is not the case. I think the people who really care are the boys who, realising that their girlfriends are going to be measuring their self-worth by how much crap they receive, take it upon themselves to provide the full service, musical teddy-bears and all, in the hope that this ceremonial emptying of their wallets will precede imaginative, varied and mercifully short-lived copulation. They are wrong, of course, because what Girlfriend will really want to do is have a tender snog on Clare Bridge and then go home, where she can sleep, smugly, having rung her mum to talk about how great her Valentine’s Day was.
Even writing about it reminds just how little I enjoy the whole thing. Valentine’s Day in England today smells to me like a man standing in the rain outside the Sportsworld sale, clutching a Donnay golf umbrella and wondering if noon is too early for a Smirnoff Ice and a kebab, whilst simultaneously smoking a B&H gold and texting pictures of Cheryl Cole to his mate.
However, perhaps for some of the above reasons, this year I have decided to do go out for Valentine’s Day. My intention is none of the things above, but rather to show somebody a pleasing time in an ostentatious fashion. What I have a mind to do is head to a restaurant packed with Valentine’s Day people with a girl. I shall have a sign, not to mention extensive body language, indicating we’re not ‘together’ in the way that men mean when they question siblings in nightclubs. I shall then proceed to show the restaurant and its faux-loved-up diners ‘how I roll’, which will principally involve purchasing expensive food and drink, tipping heavily and reading from a lengthy and pre-prepared list of jokes, cultivating much mirth at my banquette. In this fashion I will, hopefully, make everyone else feel bad about their own evenings. Then I will go home, in time for Airplane!, alone.
It should be noted that I have yet to find a willing accomplice for this scheme. If anyone fancies it, write to features@varsity.co.uk , with the guarantee that there will be no columns entitled ‘Cumming On… Your Name’

Cumming on Euphemism

From Varsity, 1 February 2008


The time has arrived to challenge the titular wordplay being inflicted on me by my superiors. It is quite punitive. Euphemism is not like a banana; it’s not inherently funny. But in the right hands, it acquires a life all of its own, and transforms into a power far beyond its original intent. The power of suggestion takes over, and even the most uptight and recalcitrant find themselves drawn to see hidden meanings, unintended by either the author or God. It can be a raw, humiliating experience for both.
It would be wilfully misleading to suggest that my surname has had no effect on my sensitivity to hidden sexual code. Even in my youth, when I was very small, there was always an air of erotic tension around the house. This was never felt harder than during discussion about the family tree.
One conversation, particularly memorable, went like this:
“Daddy?” said a small me, tousled of hair and Malteasered of face.
Bald of hair and stiffly conservative, he replied: “Hello there, son. Is that the family tree? He enquired, pointing to a large, folded piece of paper cocked crisply under my arm.
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Oh, how curious.” He added, before taking a delicate sip from the tall glass of Bristol stout he had perennially at his side. “Why don’t you come and show me what you’ve got.” Eager to please and rosy-cheeked, I bounded across the room and hopped up.
It was always easy to sit on my father’s knee; corduroy is very adhesive.
“I’m perplexed, father.” I said, frowning and sucking thoughtfully on my Malteaser.
“Why’s that?” he shot back, intently.
“Well, it says here that Uncle Adrian is Cumming, but I was giving Mummy a hand when she was doing the Christmas cards and she asked me to fill him out and she told me to do him as Adrian Featherstone. Why is he Featherstone not Cumming?”
“Ah.” Said Daddy, ruminating on his favoured snack, black pudding and stuffing. “Your Uncle Adrian, Edward, was Cumming when he was born, but when he became a grown-up he decided that he didn’t want to be Cumming any longer, and instead wanted to be Featherstone, so he asked the men in charge if they could do it any they said ‘Surely’, so he did it.”
“Oh.” I said.
“Yes.” He replied. “May I have a Malteaser?”
I offered him my bag, and he patted me in gratitude. But questions were welling up in my mouth, and I blurted one out.
“Why did he not like Cumming?”
“I think he was teased at school. All of the boys ran around him, chanting “Hey Adrian, are you coming or going? Coming or going? Coming or going? It’s because Cumming sounds like coming, you see.”
“Oh yes. I think so, because I was late for P.E. on the lawn with Mr. Treetorn yesterday because I was having lunch and he shouted ‘Edward’, and I said ‘I’m coming’, and people laughed.”
“Yes” he said, quite calmly.
“It’s because ‘coming’ sounds like ‘Cumming’, isn’t it, Daddy?”
“Mmmph”, he grunted, in affirmation.
If you catch my drift.