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. 

In a sea of rubbish, a rare serious point

The below is a letter drafted by CUSU to send to Varsity's 'sponsors', in response to the tabloid edition of Varsity earlier this term. Essentially it's a threat. I believe CUSU motioned, in the end, not to send the letter (though this is nowhere in the document), but have nonetheless posted it as an Appendix to their most recent council agenda for all to see. In keeping with the spirit of transparency sweeping the nation I'm reproducing it here. 

Anybody think this is a sensible use of students' money/time? Or a fair reflection of students' views? One might argue that as the students' union of Cambridge University, they had a more important duty to freedom of speech... 

I have put the most offensive part in bold myself. CUSU discussing using its power to threaten Varsity's commercial existence? They point out (in Appendix A, their similar letter addressed to Varsity itself) that they are not asking sponsors to withdraw their support, but rather to remind Varsity of their equal opportunities policies, and how they might relate to the tabloid section. Not very convincing. I understand that these officers have to do something with their free time, and usually it's hilariously trivial, but I'm rather fond of Varsity, as you might expect, and this is ridiculous.

For those of you interested, this is the link to the agenda:  

http://www.cusu.cam.ac.uk/union/council/0809/easter/2/

Appendix B:

We are writing you in regards to the Varsity Cambridge Student newspaper, which receives support from your organisation. The Week I Easter Term edition of Varsity featured 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 tabloid pullout featured a “page three girl” as well as various instances of negative portrayals of women.

The choice to publish the tabloid pullout was a serious error on the part of the Varsity newspaper editors. As a major student publication, the editorial team has a degree of responsibility to student welfare. Although a news publication should not strive to avoid controversy or stimulating debate, this needs to be weighed against the wellbeing of the student body. The large number of students – male and female – who have expressed shock, outrage and severe discomfort in reaction to elements of the pullout is a sign that Varsity has severely misjudged the welfare consequences of publishing the tabloid. We are disappointed that Varsity neglected to consider the wellbeing of its readers and the wider social impacts of reproducing harmful attitudes towards women.

We are also worried that Varsity was in fact aware of the harmful effects of the tabloid, but chose to publish it regardless. It is unacceptable that the strong objections of the two female members of the editorial team were ignored. The inclusion of the tabloid under weak claims of “satire” demonstrates a failure to recognise that satire includes exposing or denouncing folly, rather than simply reproducing it. The attitudes demonstrated by the tabloid pullout are banal and orthodox, mirroring the same reactionary attitudes towards women as tabloid publications which regularly exhibit racist and xenophobic tendencies. One can only conclude that the editors and writers confused ironic critique with intentional offense, which is inexcusable and disappointing in a student publication.

Supporting student publications and freedom of speech is obviously essential, yet editorial independence and lively debate do not have to come at the cost of student welfare. A publication that purports views which are disrespectful towards women, and which normalise such disrespect, is not acceptable journalism. We believe that the Varsity editorial team failed to adequately exercise the discretion necessary to strike this balance. We contacting you because as a supporter of Varsity, you have a role in ensuring that the publication is in line with your equal opportunities policy. We would like you to be aware of the harmful effect the publication has had on many students so that if you feel it is appropriate, you may communicate your organisation’s commitment to equal opportunities to the current and future editorial teams at Varsity.

We are asking Varsity to make a visible commitment to student welfare and against harmful attitudes towards women by publishing an apology in the next issue of Varsity. We hope that future editorial teams take their responsibility towards students more seriously, and exercise more rigorous judgment when making editorial decisions.

Sincerely,

The Women’s Union

Ed at Large - Granmentira

There’s a moment in ‘The Thick Of It’ where the put-upon Conservative shadow minister expresses his disgust of the internet to a junior aide: ‘Have you ever googled yourself?’ he asks, ‘It’s like opening the door to a room filled with people who hate you.’ As I have discovered this week, he couldn’t have been more right. In addition to my other duties, you see, I have been keeping a blog about Arsenal called UpForGrabsNow, and have come to two (2.0?) conclusions about the internet.

Firstly, the odds of someone making rhetorical recourse to Nazism increase by a factor of three for every person who posts a ‘comment’. I say ‘comment’ rather than comment because I don’t think ‘Fuck off’ is, particularly, a commentary on anything much.

Secondly, the internet proves that there are too many stupid people in the world. Previously, if you were a stupid person and published something stupid, you could be fairly sure that someone clever would come along eventually and correct you, and the world would even out again. This is no longer so. You can now make up any old twaddle, no matter how dangerously moronic, and when you go online to check on yourself you’ll find an army of byte-sized acolytes, ready to go and tell people they got pwned and that they’re anti-Israeli for you. I suppose the point is thank goodness for newspapers like this one with their high-standards of quality and accuracy, not to mention their refreshingly generous stance on toilet humour (see last week).

Anyway. I had a rogueish scheme this week, which I’m only telling you about because I haven’t actually done it, so you’ve gotten off lightly. This scheme, derived from a combination of my own poverty and a cartoonish sense of whimsy, involved inventing a restaurant and reviewing it. This restaurant would sell all sorts of weird foods and be staffed by very strange people, and all in all would make for a most diverting read. There was a productive editorial meeting all about it:

‘I think I should make up a restaurant this week.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Might be funny.’

‘Not so much.’

‘But you make up all the news.’

‘Goodbye.’

In the end, of course, I digressed and went out with a friend who had been greatly moved by the University Challenge debacle and needed cheering up. At the back of the Cambridge Grafton Centre is a bad cinema called ‘Vue’, which I think nobody would agree is a very clever name for a cinema. Aside from anything else there is a problem with the cinema in that it also acts as a trap for innocent humans who have walked through the mall to get to the cinema at nighttime, which is quite an innocent time for humans to go to the cinema, only to find that when they get out the mall has closed and there is no way to escape except down an escalator and then down an alleyway where you might, if you were so inclined, lean against a grimy wall taking heroin for a fortnight before you were found.

If you carry on down this alleyway, turn left at a shoeshop and carry on for a bit, you reach an innocuous-looking (aren’t they all?) white building. This is not innocuous at all. For this is Granmentira, and it’s the best place I’ve eaten at this term. I ate a pork chop which was, well, porky, and the chum ate a burger, which he said was ‘nice’, and much better than the burger he’d had at Gourmet Burger Kitchen, which is the only restaurant outside of Gatwick Garfunkel’s where you can pay £10 for a main course and have to go up and fetch it yourself.

The mood was only slightly let down by the service, who became agitated when they realised we were reviewers:

‘We don’t want any trouble.’

‘Er, neither do we?’

‘No but we don’t have a website, we keep a low profile’.

‘Don’t you want business?’

‘Look I think you should finish up and leave instantly’

‘Sure but’

‘But no.’ Then he scurried off. Probably to rearm himself, the Na-

Ed at Large - Chinese takeaway

As decent and civilised readers you’ll accept my apologies for this week. Clearly you haven’t read the piece yet, but as we go on just remember that I’ve banked that apology, and that as decent and civilised readers you are honour-bound to accept it and make do. I hope I’m not too insensitive, but I’m always asked to be outlandish.

There’s a famous description of cricket, beloved of teatowel-makers, which plays humorously with the prominence of ‘in and ‘out’ in the game’s lexicon. Whilst I think of teatowels as rarely as the next man, which is to say hardly at all, I nonetheless found myself remembering this phrase this week for reasons which we’ll come to. For the benefit of the baffled, I paraphrase, but it goes something like this:

You have two teams, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. Etc.

Very droll, I’m sure you’ll agree. Except those of you who are actually unfamiliar with the rules of cricket, in which case you’re probably better served by TCS anyway. 

Anway. Without going into the ins and outs of it too much, my curiosity was first aroused by a message in my inbox. This message went out to all in statu pupulari, so you may be familiar with it. In it were set out a range of medical symptoms, of varying grossness, and an advisory that anyone displaying said symptoms, which seemed specifically designed to include common man-flu and hangovers, was to stay in and not go out, and not let anyone else come in and go out again, unless the nurse made an outcall and insisted you weren’t infectious.

I replied to this email in a rare paroxysm of civic responsibility, observing that I had been displaying one or two of these symptoms, namely that one or two of the foodstuffs I’d of late ingested had been making their way out rather too keenly, and some others have been making their way out through the same way they came in. In which case, said the college nurse, I was to stay in and not go out until that which was going in was staying in, and not going out the way it had come in or going out the way it was supposed to go out before due time. During this time it went without saying, she said, that nobody was to go in or out until that which was causing the whole hokey-cokey confusion was out.

Nobly I accepted my fate, not least because I felt slightly guilty for imposing on the poor lady the following conversation: 

‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Well, it’s Norovirus.’

‘Phew, well that’s a relief. I thought it was certainly a virus. Is it a bacterial infection?’

‘No, it’s Norovirus.’

‘I’m sure, but it must be something, surely.  I mean I didn’t eat that much cheese’.

‘You’ve got Norovirus’

‘So you said, but what about the ‘neither’?’

One has to amuse oneself, and for a nurse I felt she was being most unspecific – nobody, except possibly slags, goes into a hospital with a broken leg to be reassured by a diagnosis of ‘It’s not Chlamydia’, do they?

When one is in and can’t be out, one has two choices for food, either one gets someone who’s out to get a take-out to bring for you to eat in, or one orders a delivery man to come out and bring food in to you. I chose the latter. In delivery food, as in life, you tend to get out what you put in. Our thoughts turned to the miraculous ‘Flying Wok’ delivery service. The Flying Wok is unique amongst restaurants, both take out and in, in seeming not physically to exist, but rather to exist, like the wind, in the motion of its little cartons of mislabelled oriental variety. Myself and a fellow invalid had a selection, not all of which were inedible and some of which were very like the dishes we read about and ordered. Like all food delivered to impatient inpatients, it was in as soon as it was out, and some of it was then out as soon as it was in.

Guiltiest in this regard was the prawn cocktail they put in, in lieu of prawn crackers, an outré gesture not so much jumbled as crazy. Prawn cocktail, like Liberace, was once rather in, but is now definitely out, as was proven by the speed with which it went in loo, a place prawn crackers have never, in my experience gone. We were quite put out: it just wasn’t cricket. 

Ed at Large - Hotel Felix

 

Sometimes, and in the nicest way, it’s good to have one’s limits stretched a little, good to get out of the comfortable areas. Not many people know this, but if you go out beyond the Great Curry Houses to the north of Cambridge, the city does not abruptly halt into countryside, but gently fizzles out like an open coke in the garage. It’s an easy mistake to make: until last weekend, I too was a non-believer. Aside from the occasional constitutional up Castle Mound, the furthest I had been was New Hall, before its name was changed to mislead idle listeners of University Challenge into thinking the tennis was on. Come to think of it they’d probably get as many points if they fielded the British Davis Cup team, but that’s a discussion for another time. Anyway, I found the trip up the hill with my rag-tag mob of a first year drinking society quite as scary as anything I’ve ever done, scarier even than the first time I asked a girl (politely) to take her trousers off, which is to say very scary indeed.

For those who haven’t been I’ll try to describe what happens, though it haunts me to this day. It starts like this: on entering the premises you walk through a kind of bright tunnel, not unlike an aquarium. You think you are alone in this tunnel, but gradually you become aware of eyes, thousands of eyes, following your movements with a malicious curiosity evocative of the scene in the first Star Wars film where the gay robots walk through the valley. On exiting the tunnel you are invited to a bar, which is not so much a bar but rather a kind of pit, into which unsuspecting males (i.e. us) are lured with cocktails to the final staging-place: the stately pleasure-domed sacrifice arena, a temple to carnivorous female sexuality whose leisure-centre ambiance disguises a history of quite brutal violence. I suspect that in years to come, as is the case with Vietnam, say, those who made the journey will be spoken about with a kind of hushed reverence.

All of which leads me to say that, prevailing cardiovascular indisposition notwithstanding (gosh), you’ll understand my nervousness about heading up the hill. Yet on Sunday I was taken beyond the pleasure dome, and discovered, with the surprise of someone who gets the train east from King’s Cross to arrive at Homerton (‘Ahhhhh, how interesting!”), that Cambridge just keeps going. This place is massive. We should all get out more. It would be good for our souls.

Anyway. A classicist pal invited me out for supper, and luckily for him the venue was the Hotel Felix. This is one of those ‘boutique’ hotels which wins prizes, but mostly why it appealed to me was its abundance of hilariously-phrased advertising, notably its claim to be the ‘first contemporary hotel’ in Cambridge. What? What does this mean? I agree that it is pleasant when you go into a hotel and you are don’t immediately lurch forwards and backwards in time, but I didn’t think it was so common. Perhaps it’s an outside-of-Cambridge thing.

Anyway, aside from that, and the fact that it was all delicious, it also featured my two favourite restaurant-menu phrasings next to each other, the chicken being advertised as not only ‘pan-fried’ but ‘corn-fed’. Aren’t you just sick and tired of having the following exchange:

‘Excuse me, I like the looks of the chicken. But I was wondering, what do you fry it in?’

‘Why, monsieur, we fry it in a little oil but of course.’

‘Yes yes, but what do you fry it in?’

‘Ah, bon. Well, monsieur, we fry it in a mug.’

‘A mug?’

‘Yes monsieur’

‘Have you no pans?’

‘Non. We may fry it in a ramekin also?’

‘Nono, that’ll be fine. But let me just check, did you feed this chicken corn?’

‘Non monsieur. We ‘av fed this chicken only spaghetti carbonara.’

I certainly am. But the Hotel Felix put me at complete ease in this regard, and ought to be commended. If I’d stayed for breakfast I hope I could have enjoyed a ‘water-boiled egg’ with ‘bread made from photosynthesis-using wheat’.

There is stretching, and there is mock-stretching. The Hotel Felix should avoid mock-stretching us, and more of us might make the stretch to go and see them. Otherwise we students will still only get as far as New Hall: and that, for many, is quite a stretch in itself.

Ed at Large - Cambridge Asian Restaurants

A friend of mine reading MML, who has a somewhat foxlike demeanour, believed until he was fourteen that Asian women had sideways vaginas. Before you get all uppity and in my face about it, certain things about this statement are obvious. In the first instance, the astute reader will have realised instantly that this is straight from the little book of kamikaze column openings, which given the circumstances one might consider a pretty risky description in itself.

This astute reader, and by now his slower friend too, is reading on either out of pity or a kind of engrossed horror, either of which are fine by me, and what’s more, this two-pronged appeal to other humans’ interests, an approach I have rather drolly christened the ‘twin piques’, has served me well in the dating arena so far.

The second obvious thing to say is that this opening begs far more questions than it answers. Why did he think this? And how did he find out it wasn’t true after all, the cunning linguist? Did he hold racist presumptions about other peoples’ anatomies? Does he still? But more than that, it suggests worrying things about one’s own prejudices: what misapprehensions do I haul with me whenever I leave the room? I have used my poor friend’s mishaps here as the beginning of a restaurant review, but what if, somewhere else, my own mistakes are being hung out to dry in public? There are some things I’m aware of – for instance, for years I believed in the Captain Pugwash characters being secretly obscene thing, despite this being disproven by even the most fleeting of glances at one of the books. 

And in other areas I’m convinced I’m correct in my factually unverified views, particularly when it comes to restaurants in Cambridge. By way of example, I’m convinced that Edwinn’s is either a front for drug dealers or an eatery for ghosts who come in the small hours. These are the only possible explanations for its eerie practise of leaving its lights on and its tables immaculately made up through the night. Who are they expecting would be disappointed by the alternative? The Queen passing through? Lynne Truss hoping for a midnight snack?

Onto this ill-informed pile I would also fling my general perception of Asian restaurants in Cambridge as specialising in piles of overpriced glutinous gloop. Teri-Aki and Aki-Teri, so bad that they named them twice and hoped that nobody would notice the difference because they’d be so unhappy about paying £10 for a bowl of rice. The Ugly Duckling, where nobody (least of all me) has ever eaten thanks to its proximity to St. John’s. The Flying Wok is good, but then it doesn’t physically exist except for when you mysteriously order it, so it’s kind of exempt from these other considerations.

And a special word on Wagamama. I admire the comic intent in warning your customers that the service will be terrible, I really do. ‘We bring our food in the order it’s ready,’ being their own way of announcing the fact, some might say obvious to even the budding chef, that different foods cook at different speeds. But it takes the fortune cookie when they start to draw on your table, as if to remind you what you’ve ordered in case you try to lie about it later, or perhaps in case the people you’ve never met but have been forced to pay to sit next to, like at the hairdressers, try to steal your chicken ramen, (£8).

You might well think, given Wagamama and Teri-Aki-Teri’s lead, that all Asian restaurants had sideways seating plans. Indeed I thought so too until I sat inside Dojo for the first time the other day, whereupon I discovered that the design in fact requires you to rub up, arse to arse, with a complete stranger, who in the case of the poor girl sat behind me involves gradually submitting your lumbar to overwhelming force. As if to emphasise the (admittedly humorous) consequences of this arrangement, once you are seated (if the term is appropriate), the restaurant plays a terrible joke on you. First it leads you into a false sense of security by charging half as much as Wagamama, and then it serves you double the amount of food. It sees your legitimate student need for a kilogram of MSG and raises you a much more philosophical enquiry about the nature of hunger and value. Though off-key, it slots neatly into a gap in the Cambridge market, and we would be thinner, but less wise, without it.

Ed at Large - D'Arry's

What isn’t there?

Go on – what’s not there?

For this column’s purposes I’m going to help you out of your misery; what’s not there is ‘I’. Although I’m personally here, obviously, despite missing my ‘A’. Sometimes what you can’t see will be ‘No’. Capiche? Good. What is there, on the other hand, is emphatically ‘’’.

The mighty apostrophe, as I need hardly remind you, has twin powers. It is there when other things aren’t (o) there, and it is there when you need something to command something. What I’ve cleverly done (ha) here is put an example of this in the third sentence so you can all read back. My favourite examples are the apostrophes that pop up just to remind you that they still have a right to be there, even when they’re not strictly wanted, like a parking warden at a wedding: ‘cello, for instance, or ‘phone. These are big, bad apostrophes, apostrophes that have come out of the closet and are now running around tickling people’s balls with challenging abandon.

You might well be wondering where this grammar lesson came from, since it’s very boring to read, but I have my reasons – in the first instance ‘D’Arry’s is unique in restaurants in that it has, built into its name, apostrophes of both possession and omission. It is the name which looked at restaurant names and decided they weren’t confusing enough, and came up with a name that instead asks question after question of its reader. Namely: who is D’Arry? Or perhaps, since the restaurant is ‘of him’ from the ‘D’, who is Arry? Yet if it’s ‘of him’, then why the need for the closing possessive? Has the restaurant left him since I began reading the word? Has he now got it back? (As I discovered, this question should be approached with a certain tactful delicacy when one is actually inside the restaurant, since it only recently burned to the ground) Is it even a he? It could be Arry as in Harriet, or Ariadne. Perhaps the second apostrophe is an omission too? It could be an abstract statement: ‘D’Arry is’. You see my difficulties.

But once you’ve (ha) gotten around to reading the name, and concluded that it sounds like a faux-sophisticate diner from a cartoon, you can relax for a bit, and concentrate on the things which were actually there. Or at least you might, were the place not so desperately keen to remind you of the things which aren’t (o).

The first thing which wasn’t (o) there was someone to answer the phone, and after that there was no way to make a reservation. When we arrived, things which weren’t (o) there were menus and staff, and when we got the menus what wasn’t (o) there was the specific menu advertising the otherwise rather fine 2 courses for £10 deal which we’d come in search of (ha).

After this glut of absences (what’s (i) the collective noun for absence? vacuum? disappointment?) came the things which were actually there: a Caesar salad starter, for instance, followed by fish and chips. The fish was excellent – light batter and moist haddock. The chips tasted a bit dusty to me, but that might have just been childhood-throwback synaesthesia on my part caused by an old fondess for Jenga blocks. The salad also promised ‘anchovies’, yet proffered but a single anchovy, filleted cruelly lengthways to craft the semblance of plurality.

The staff, once they had stopped being notable for their absence, were intimidating by being universally male, good-looking and baldly muscular in a way usually expected of backing dancers and gigolos. Given that my companions were two rather drunk and ugly men we were slightly hoping that we might be served by a small Australian girl who we could tip heavily by way of apology, rather than by way of swinging allegiance in future bar fights. The point is you never feel quite in control, and if you can’t feel like that when you’re paying for it (a) then you might as well leave it out altogether.

If you fancy going ‘At-Large’ with Ed (and maybe getting a free meal) please write to large@varsity.co.uk with your name, college, year and suggestion.

Ed at Large - the Maypole

What’s in a name? When I was younger my friend Adolf and I used to lie awake at night and wonder what our lives might have been like had we been named differently. I was always drawn to ‘Ulysses’, little Fuhro (as we called him) being more taken with ‘Rosie’, thanks in no small measure to his infant(and, indeed, maturing) fondness for Jim.

What’s important is not the names themselves, but rather their associations: Ulysses conjures images of great warriors and literature. Rosie, on the other hand, conjures images of being a girl and a puppet. As ever, one only need think of television: why else would a bank spend so much on an advert to announce ‘we’re changing’? Because whilst ‘Aviva’ is a terrible name for a company, ‘Norwich Union’ sounds like a recipe for a kid with eleven toes and one leg shorter than the other, which is worse.

All of which leads us in a roundabout way (and for the aforementioned infant one imagines there are few alternative ways) to this week’s venue. I need hardly tell you that ‘The Maypole’, as a name, summons both images of springtime optimism and a long and distinguished association with sinister (roundabout) skipping. Yet the venue itself is quite different, and should be renamed.

In the first place it’s very surprising that the place is a pub at all. If you simply go to the address, at the arse end of Portugal Place, you come across a 1970s red brick outhouse, which you are forgiven for thinking is somehow associated with the multi-storey car-park next door, perhaps in a rest-room or long-term storage capacity. Separating these two architectural features is an alleyway of the sort suitable for the murder of prostitutes and the purchasing of second-hand firearms.

With the help of a well-trained guide, you will eventually learn that this alley is in fact the ‘outdoor heated seating area’ and the outhouse is, in fact, the Maypole, a place unique in Europe and possibly the world for its ability to operate outside of all economic convention and yet still retain business. It is the pub that the free market forgot, and to spend an afternoon there is to feel your jaw gradually slacken as you pour your student-loan into the pockets of a team of men whose cheerful nonchalance belies hearts of steel. As the plaque by the bar warns you, these men are the offspring of Mario.

His name makes you think of bouncing plumbers and magic mushrooms, but he runs the business with the chuckling resolve of a man who has thought long and hard on the subject of money and, after careful deliberation, concluded that his is much more important than anyone else’s. Lasagne and chips? £8.50. A burger? £6. A pint – who knows? Rows of bank cards sit in little glasses behind the bar like Mayan heads on spikes. There’s a fun game you can play when you order a round literally anywhere else where you guess what the same round would have cost in the Maypole. The correct comic answer to this question is to shut your eyes, whimper like a kitten and hand over your wallet and car keys.

There are other comic touches. A note on the wall says it prides itself on serving ‘the best cocktails in Cambridge’, which rather than an advertisement is in fact a hilarious self-referential gag since, to my knowledge, nobody has ever ordered one. Although if they did, they would be served with a chuckle and a thrusting of the PIN machine, and then order would return to the universe. It is the Asterix village of the recession: a corner of Cambridge which is forever a mafiaesque Italian bank.

I should say that I write all this with a weary heart, as I know I’ll be back there, probably tomorrow, as I am a creature of habits (some more destructive than others) and it shows the football. But something should be done. This aggression will not stand. To this end I have begun an online petition to have the Maypole’s name changed to ‘The Chuckling Profiteer’. For any others of you inspired by this week’s resurgence in gypsy activism (have these people not degrees?), but looking for a cause you can believe in, this is the one. We will camp there. No doubt we will be welcomed with open arms. But there won’t be any heating, and we’ll probably be charged for rent.

 

Ed at Large - the Bun Shop

I’d like to begin, like the dyslexic arriving spelunker that I am, with a cry of ‘caveat!’: I am writing this very shortly after watching President Obama’s inauguration, and so am filled with ideas of renewal and regeneration, not to mention the thought that were I to swear a very short, simple oath to become leader of the free world in front of an television audience of two billion, I might make the time to learn the words off by heart. Or at least have a quick run-through with the accompanist beforehand. I recall that even in my Grade 3 violin exam I had a quick run-through with my accompanist beforehand, and that was only in front of one person, and not to become leader of the free world, (and as it turned out not even to pass my Grade 3 violin exam).

Anyway. Back to the piece. In life, as in certain sexual diseases, things recur (you see?). They go away and come back again. A few of these are Good Things: the sunrise, for instance, and Marcus Trescothick. But they blanche in comparison to the returns which, like taking your trousers off on the train, seem like a good idea at the time but really end up being a bit sad and disappointing for everyone involved. Take That, Halley’s Comet and May Week all spring to mind in this regard.

And as is so often the case (not to mention very conveniently), inner-Cambridge public houses, it turns out, are great reflections of life. So as it is with the phoenix and Keith Richards, so it is with the Bun Shop: it is back from the dead. That once-great dolmen of Cambridge underlife, after its tragic closure (due in part to the fact that the Cambridge underlife are many things but not particularly big spenders), has risen majestically from the ashes.

This is all the more ironic since it has been hauled from these metaphorical ashes by D’Arry’s, the restaurant opposite which has recently hoisted itself from much more literal ashes, ashes caused by a fire, the flames of which are advertised, with a self-deprecating hubris largely unfamiliar to Cambridgeshire diners, on its outer wall in a manner which slightly conjures the image of a new Titanic being launched with a gigantic drawing of an iceberg on its side. It is the restaurant artwork which dares to say ‘whoops, we never learn!’, and should be commended all the more for it.

But enough about D’Arry’s. In the olden days the Bun Shop was frequented by unpleasant old men and herd-like groups of sluts and yobbos stumbling around under the inaccurate banner of ‘formal swaps’, which despite their name offer little in the way of officiated exchange but a significant amount of legitimised date-rape and recherché misogyny. It was a thoroughly unpleasant place, to my mind, and I can’t have been the only one to let out a little cheer every time I heard of a student being thrown through its window by his society tie.

I’m not one to let prior incarnations spoil my judgment, however, so deciding to give the Bun Shop’s new incarnation the benefit of the doubt, I arranged to meet a floozy for a drink. I hoped this might lead to the doing of snogs on her, and it started brightly. I found a pleasing mixture of odd-looking single people, a token old bloke and a young couple engaged in sparkling, flirtatious conversation. The interior is a mishmash of modern efficiency and pleasing old-pub touches: a bar billiards table, a sawdusted floor and a jukebox all score highly in my pub aesthetic handbook, although the jukebox was let down by the propensity of its users to select the recent Kings of Leon hit ‘Sex on Fire’, which for a man on a date somewhere whose sister business recently burned to a crisp sets an uncomfortably alarmist tone.

Anyway, after a few minutes it occurred to me that the flirty young couple was my floozy sitting with the manager, a smooth young man named Jamie, who had already sorted her out for drinks and who if I’m honest seemed a bit put out by my arrival.

‘I’m from Varsity’, I mentioned innocuously.

‘Here’s the wine menu’, he offered immediately.

Then there was the sound of Merlot splashing in glass, and then it happened again, and then I was asked for my PIN number. I don’t recall much of what happened after that. But I do know I’ll go back there, and I would do it all again.

 

Ed at Large - Strada

People tend to be suspicious when offered things they obviously really enjoy. So just as the WI would be suspicious if you offered them a barrel of cock, or Barack Obama would be suspicious if you offered him a barrel of coke, I had immediate reservations when offered the Varsity restaurant reviewing gig.
‘What would it involve?’ I asked like a complete tard after they approached me in a moment of weakness outside Ta Bouche, where I was enjoying a mid-afternoon Harlem Mugger (and boy did I misunderstand the origins of that name).
‘Reviewing restaurants’, the editors replied, all slither and guile like a younger, gayer Draco and Crabbe.
‘Would it be free?’
‘Sure’.
‘Could I take girls?’
‘Sure?’ the taller one said. The taller one is a little more refined but somewhat simpler than the short one, who has quick fingers.
I was quite overcome by a vision of myself in the shire’s finest eateries, with some of the drunkest freshers in the whole country laughing across the table and then not snogging me. But, and here was the important part, strangers would briefly think I was going out with them. In an era where impressions are everything, this could only be good news for me.
It was a gift horse, I concluded. And I’ve never been one for looking in their mouths. I mounted it with the customary rigeur of the man about to get drunk for free.
But by Tuesday I was having reservations. Although not making any, despite my pleading phonecalls. So perceptively low is the standing of this organ amongst the patrons of Cambridge that nowhere I rang would give me anything for free. They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch (and many of them did), but surely elevenses wouldn’t have been too much to ask for (as I suggested in return)?
I became increasingly anxious. Was I to have to pay my own way?
It didn’t bear thinking about, particularly after I’d told everyone at the Varsity beginning-of-term dinner in Café Rouge that I was earning £50 a week for the column, making me the only member of the Varsity team to be paid for their contributions. This isn’t true. It is also one of the saddest lies ever told, and even on the night was at least as sad as the squabble between the rather glamorous French waitress and the editors over the definition of ‘optional’ in the service charge, which was very sad indeed.
As it turned out I shouldn’t have worried, because it also emerged that I was lied to by the editors, a duo I now realised was comprised of a charlatan and a blithering (if doe-eyed) goatwrench, whose poverty of wit was matched only by the stench of their ambition.
Instead I had to describe my week, ‘to make other people feel better about their own’, a role which makes me feel a bit like a fluffer for the features section. I keep the interest up, but I have no say in the outcome.
Unluckily for them, and what they didn’t expect me to write when they threatened me with the sack, the only things I’ve done this week are eating and lechery (nothing else holds me unfashionable), and I’ve got a note from the police about writing about lechery, so instead I’m going to have to write about food.
Which is convenient, because in the first place I was so cross about being lied to about the nature of my column that I immediately wanted to eat lots and pay for it. Unfortunately my dilemma coincided with some issues with the mobile phone services, and none of the first twenty people I called were able to pick up.
Instead I asked the long-suffering Ginger Roommate if I could have supper with her. ‘Please?’ I said, ‘It’ll be really nice.’
‘Alright’, she replied gingerly, for with her there is no other way, after pausing to reflect that she wasn’t going to have any fun. ‘We’re going to Strada. But I was supposed to be on a date’.
‘Who with?’ I asked, amazed. Nobody has ever, to my knowledge, offered to take the Ginger Roommate on a date.
‘Your Obnoxious Large Friend’, she replied. This was slightly less amazing.
‘Fine’, I said, ‘I’ll wingman you’.
‘Please don’t’, she whimpered, gingerly.
In the end (I suspect for fear of what might happen should I ‘wingman’ the Ginger Roommate) the OLF brought his own roommate, who is much more civilised. What none of us counted on was a large group of banshee women, apparently on some sort of care in the community outreach wine-tasting, occupying the entire mezzanine floor.
‘I’m sorry about the noise’, our waitress said rather sweetly. Or at least that’s what I now think she said, which makes far more sense. Initially I read her lips and thought she said ‘I so wanna wee on the nose’. Whose nose? My nose?
‘It’s ok, don’t worry about it. I like wee.’
‘I’m sorry?’ she asked anxiously.
‘You shouldn’t be. But this restaurant is a bit noisy.’ She smiled nervously and went to fetch my ‘cotto’ pizza. This is quite a boring meal, easy to prepare and serve.
‘Is your pizza ok?’ She asked, a few minutes after I’d received it.
‘Yes’, I said hastily, ‘of course’, because as everyone knows pizzas are like blowjobs, in that it’s very hard to admit at the time that you’re not enjoying yourself.
After I’d eaten it the OLF began to shout ‘You all met in an abortion clinic’, at the banshees, a significant step-up in brinkmanship from my muffled ‘You’re not supposed to drink at a tasting!’, which I had been following with a snorting guffaw.
To cap it all off, when we got home the Ginger Roommate refused to give me a massage because I ‘smelt bad’, despite having taunted me with her fragrant oils for a whole week. I went to sleep dreaming of my childhood attic, and wondering whether I should have stayed there all along.