ed cumming's incidental

Response to 'Whipping Boy'

2010-02-19T18:09:00.005Z

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

The original can be found here

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

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

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

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

End of Cambridge

2009-06-29T11:46:00.001+01:00

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

2009-06-23T18:46:00.003+01:00

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

2009-06-01T17:34:00.004+01:00

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.

2009-05-28T17:47:00.003+01:00

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

2009-05-23T15:29:00.001+01:00

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

2009-05-16T17:21:00.001+01:00

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

2009-05-15T18:53:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-16T14:00:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-16T13:59:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-16T13:59:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-16T13:58:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-16T13:57:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-16T13:57:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-16T13:56:00.000+01:00

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

2009-02-01T17:47:00.000Z

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.

Cumming On Politics

2008-04-25T12:56:00.000+01:00

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

2008-03-13T12:14:00.000Z

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

2008-02-27T21:33:00.000Z

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

2008-02-25T16:22:00.000Z

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

2008-02-16T20:13:00.000Z

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

2008-02-16T20:08:00.000Z

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

2008-02-10T21:55:00.000Z

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

2008-02-10T21:46:00.000Z

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

2008-02-10T21:42:00.000Z

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

2008-02-10T21:41:00.000Z

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.