The truth about... the weather
Nobody ever mentions that the weather can make or break your day. But perhaps they should, because it really can. Oasis were wrong about many things. It’s not, for example, possible to walk slowly down the hall faster than a cannonball; souls don’t slide away; and no matter how much you like somebody, you should never describe them as a wonderwall – that’s just stupid.
On the weather front, however, the Gallagher brothers got it right. On hot days, such as the slice of blazing summer we recently experienced where spring was supposed to be, everything in the world is wonderful: the birds sing, people kiss your face all of the time, and frolicking in the park is a daily joy.
Minding the gaps
It is a well-known fact that the amount of academic effort a student puts into their undergraduate degree is inversely proportional to the amount of time they have spent on that degree. Or, in equation form, E = (t-N)/t. Where E is the effort put into the degree course, t is the time spent on that course in months, and N is time spent watching Neighbours. (The more astute among you will have noticed that this equation actually proves that Neighbours is good for the brain.)
By the end of the third year, most students have reached such a level of boredom with their chosen field that they can barely summon up the amount of effort they expended on their Year Nine SATS. This draining away of passion for the subject of study is inevitable, and cannot be rectified.
Griffin grinds some gears
Can you hear that? The crows and ravens carping malevolently in the wind? Listen. You hear? Just across the Bristol Channel in Bath, something wicked has been afoot. Something that, according to Ruqayyah Collector, the NUS Black Students Officer, could have caused students to study “in fear”.
What possible event could engender such dread? What could arouse this mood, so dark and doom-laden, that might cause students to wander nervously about their campus, eyes flicking intermittently toward the shadows behind the Music building?
The truth about... deadlines
Life at university is mostly spent doing two things: indulging in Fun Times instead of worrying about deadlines and inventing ways to justify indulging in Fun Times instead of worrying about deadlines.
The most brilliantly imaginative of students are able to deceive themselves to such a degree that they perilously risk their obtainment of one. These cheerfully cursed souls are talented enough to be utterly convinced that, though they have three essays to write in three days, there is time enough for a few pints and a trip to the park. And a quick bite to eat. And a pint for the road. And a kebab. And a lie-in … and a few pints.
The truth about... house parties
With the planet stumbling ever more feebly onwards toward a sweaty, messy denouement, it has never been so essential that people huddle together in groups to talk and laugh and drink and smile and do all the things that normal people do in order to distract themselves from the vast, cataclysmic indifference of the crumbling world in which they subsist.
The house party is the humble attempt by students to fill the void of fear and loneliness that festers away inside their hearts. It involves inviting many, many people who they barely know, round to their domicile and then drinking until they fall over. It is a fairly efficacious system.
Absent arguments
We’re all prone to the use of sweeping generalisations. They come in very handy when cutting down an essay after the word limit has loomed up and then flashed by. But it’s during debate that the sweeping generalisation really gets to stretch its legs. And, in particular, in internet debates.
Since the gair rhydd allowed comments to be made on all of its articles a few weeks ago, the debate online has been varied, vociferous and – if nothing else – entertaining. The anonymity of the internet frees people up to say what they really think – something that all too rarely happens nowadays – and, as such, the comments on our website run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous – sometimes encompassing both.
Smoking them out
Back when I was in secondary school, the cool kids used to smoke in the leisure centre car park every lunchtime, puffing diligently away outside the auspices of the college. Rebellious and rugged, they were an impressive crowd; they could really spit on the floor with authority and poise. For a while, I really wanted to be one of them.
But my parents (aided by my early adoption of atheism and a concomitant terror of human mortality) had done a good job. With sonorous tones and sad eyes my mother and father had skilfully implied that if I ever started smoking they would be disappointed. They would be very, very disappointed.
The truth about... laughing
Laughing is a lot of fun. It’s certainly one of the more pleasant ways to spend the brief period of time granted to us between the messy poles of birth and death. In the hierarchy of the body’s natural processes it beats hiccuping and yawning, but places just below sleeping.
However, the laugh is one of the human’s most manipulative faculties, used almost exclusively in social situations. Nobody ever laughs when they are on their own. Try it. Isolate yourself in your room and watch your favourite sitcom. You won’t laugh. It’s still funny, but you won’t laugh, because there is nobody to laugh with. The laugh, then, far from being an innocuous outburst of happiness, is in fact a very shady little enterprise indeed.
The Climate Continuum
I said to myself I wouldn’t write any more columns on the subject of climate change. I’m a humanities student, not a scientist, and am well aware that my views on the matter, like everyone else – apart from Mad Mel Phillips at the Daily Mail, who seems to be getting her information from Tom Cruise – are entirely dependent upon the studies of eminent scientists. I have very little to contribute in the way of incisive comment or empirical evidence, so I stay quiet. I hold my breath as the politicians talk us all the way to a sweltering doom.
But, at the very least, I want our friends in government to make a bit of an effort to at least pretend they are going to take action. Unlike Rhodri Morgan, Wales’s First Minister, who last week provided us all with his charmingly quixotic take on the problem of climate change. Reacting to reports that by 2050 Wales could have a similar climate to Spain, the First Minster said, “If that is the kind of climate shift we cannot avoid having by 2050, it is hardly going to be unhelpful to Wales’s competitive position.”
The truth about... Balloons
I notice out of the corner of my caustically squinted eye that Valentine’s Day has swung past again, distributing a sickly saccharine dose to the veins and with invisible pink hands coercing all those with lover-friends to buy cards and eat meals and smile and have a face.
Valentine’s Day is a hideous occasion for many reasons, but, mostly, it is a hideous occasion because it is a prime contributor to the problem that is The Balloon. It isn’t pointed out enough – at all, in fact – just how rubbish balloons are. So I’m going to say it again, because repetition works. Balloons are rubbish. They are utterly, utterly rubbish. As I’m sitting here, typing this, I can feel myself getting angry about just how rubbish balloons are; and even more angry about the fact that nobody realises it.
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