dom.blog

The title of this post was developed in conjunction with Sophie Rodger, who’s hip to the blogging beat.

Like so many others, back in the days of my childhood – young enough to do roly-polys without a second thought, say – I used to come home and be asked what I’d learnt that day at school. OK, well in reality I was picked up from the playground and asked what I’d learnt that day at school, and incidentally apparently roly-poly doesn’t pass muster as a word anymore – gambol indeed?! – but anyway: no matter how many times you patiently explained that education was really a cyclical process which considered largely of reinforcing existing knowledge (what, you didn’t?) the question still served perfectly well as a conversation starter, and as such I intend to employ it now in order to speed through a week’s worth of blogging material. (Phew, a sentence with 92 words – that’s almost Archbishop of Canterbury standard!) So, what did I learn on…

Tuesday? That UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, is very good at keeping almost all signs of bubbling boiling anger tucked underneath his suit. In fact, during his appearance at Peterhouse’s Politics Society (cheers Andrew, btw) he maintained a thoroughly respectable demeanour and spoke rationally and – dare I say – convincingly. Almost. Just once or twice, at the suggestion that we’d have to drive on the right-hand side of the road, for example, you could hear the real UKIP – the brotherhood of flags UKIP – bursting to get out. “Why shouldn’t we drive on the right-hand side of the road?” asked someone cautiously in response. Nigel paused, squeezed the devil inside once more, and said something about the cost of changing road signs.

Wednesday? That MI6 actually planned the murder of Diana for hundreds, nay, thousands of years before the event, carefully setting up all the components – including the invention of the motorcar, say, or alcohol – just to facilitate her grizzly death. No, not really. Not really because Sir Richard Dearlove, who was speaking at the Union, thankfully refused to take any questions on the persistent princess, choosing instead to cover such mundane topics like, ur, terrorism. I won’t bother you with any further trifles of detail. Twas good, though.

Thursday? That if you go out for a pub ‘trip’ – not a crawl, mind, more of a gentle stroll to the alehouse and back – you have a really nice time, talk about Carol Ann Duffy and don’t wake up with a hangover either. Photos of me looking distinctly creepy are on my Facebook. I urge you to ignore them and look instead at the photos of Michael actually smiling.

Friday? That the night Lucy comes to visit is the night when Cambridge turns itself into something out of gothic horror, with blustering winds and grey storm clouds thundering over the darkened figure of King’s college looming up from the mist. I think we all felt a little Dracula. Some more than others.

Saturday? There’s only one answer if a stranger knocks on your door and asks you if you’d like to take part in a pheromone test: yes, please. In servicing the questions of science (science and progress, speaking as loud as my androstadienone…) I dutifully smelled an array of, um, little bits of white cloth doused in various chemicals from clear-plastic bags and pronounced my preferences. He asked if I found any of them particularly unpleasant. I found none of them particularly unpleasant. Open mind? Or just a blocked nose?

Sunday? As I got down to actually writing an essay, I learnt a glittering gem of a historical anecdote: Protestant midwives in the German lands during the sixteenth century were instructed to report all illegitimate births, and furthermore find out – by hook or by crook – who the father was. (No immaculate conceptions, then?) How exactly would they go about doing this? The authorities helpfully suggesting posing the question at the point of the greatest labour pains. Y’know, when the women would presumably be keen for a chat on patriarchy. I can see this idea being adopted in the modern era, actually… Pardon me ma’am, but it seems like you’re in labour. Have you ever considered combining your gas and electricity bills into a single supplier? Could save you enough to buy an epidural!

Monday? I get on with my mother wonderfully well, but especially so when she buys me dinner. Thanks! Especially since it was Mother’s Day+1. Also, and finally, I learnt where I’ll be living next year. Good to clear that up, really.

This post, with the aid of the simple functional device of moving from the past to the present to the future, will describe events in a wholly narrative manner, lacking in-depth analysis, moving emotion or skillful prose. (As ever, you say…)

Yesterday, I made a gigantic leap forward in the pursuit of knowledge: I now know what Gordon Brown meant by post neo-classical endogenous growth theory. Aside from my tendency to want to substitute in erogenous for endogenous – which, to be fair, would be far, far more interesting – I feel this is a substantive achievement. Free free to grow now, post neo-classical economy. I give you my blessing. The other, rather disturbing feature of yesterday was the following exchange over dinner:

“Did you make it to the party in the end, then?” asks a stranger to my right. I look blank, and confused. “Eh? Party?” (The concept of parties is a difficult one to slot into the weekly essay cycle at the best of time, let alone parties I didn’t know I ever knew about.) “You know, for CUCA…” he says helpfully. CUCA, incidentally, is pronounced as in coo-ca. It’s a soothing sound, but it doesn’t help. “I’m sorry… CUCA? ” I ask, confusion mounting in a little pile in my brain. The stranger next to me seems to realise the chance of an intelligent conversation is fast fading. “…the Cambridge University Conservative Association?”

I must admit, this threw me, and I may have slightly choked on my drink. Hopefully not rudely. The Conservative Association? How?! Either I have a Tory twin, or I have a rare variant of sleepwalking which also involves night-time political conversions. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

If I was a frequent attendant of the Conservative Association’s parties, of course, I might have been more comfortable with the task that befell me today: buying a bow-tie from Marks and Spencer. Let’s get this straight – I’m not a tie person. The only possible purpose of wearing a suit and a tie, to my mind, is to manoeuvre yourself to a position of power and wealth where you can return to jeans and t-shirts with impunity. Nevertheless, if the History Society dinner on Friday night requires a bow-tie of all things, I will accede. Just. Don’t push this.

Tomorrow’s Utopian Writing class won’t require ties, but I am rather apprehensive about the task as soon as I saw an e-mail with the phrase “two large pieces of coloured cardboard and a couple of large markers”. You just know what’s coming with that, don’t you? Presentations. Visual aids. Group work. All of the things you do in school to make essay-writing seems not so bad after all. You never know, though. It could be great, and the people themselves should be lovely. It just remains to be seen whether we’ll pull together to make good use of cardboard, markers and all the assorted paraphernalia. Maybe we should just wear ties.

Supervision soon! Last week’s essay was on the prosecution of witchcraft, which was fascinating and really good fun to do. To research and write about, that is. It wasn’t much fun to actually be a witch, but then, you already knew that, didn’t you?

Stephen Green is a very hard man to character assassinate: merely opening his mouth is practically equivalent to a character kamikaze already. Suffice to say, he was the main speaker in opposition to the motion that we should ‘separate God from the state’ at the Union last night, and he was on fine form in his self-appointed role as the human embodiment of the Daily Mail on steroids.

It’s slightly pointless to repeat his argument, but essentially:

1) Our society needs a god: either ‘God’, the Christian version, or some kind of man-made god-surrogate, or Allah, the god of Islam. (No, I’m not sure why it can’t be Zeus either.)

2) It’s silly to point out all the bad things in the Old Testament – sure, stoning women who are found not to be virgins on their wedding night might seem a bit harsh – but our society is full of nasty things too, like divorce and abortion.

3) In fact, more than silly, it’s downright dangerous to criticise the Old Testament because ‘it leads to the persecution of the Jews’.

4) We may be laughing at him now, but we won’t be laughing in 20-30 years time “when Islam takes over”. I have to agree that, yes indeed, when fundamentalist Islam takes over our country and re-creates the Taliban in Cambridgeshire, I for one will feel downright stupid for having opposed a religious state.

It goes on in this fashion, interspersed with Bible quotes, warnings about Islam and a very long list of exciting plans for the country, including: the death penalty, the criminalisation of homosexuality, the criminalisation of sex before marriage, repeal of the Human Rights Act, withdrawal from all UN charters, enforcement of blasphemy laws, the banning of abortion… etc.

I sense we might have actually won this debate

The ’emergency debate’ was actually more interesting in a sense, on whether or not we should abolish inheritance tax. I started talking about this slightly too loudly beforehand, attracting the attention of a guy who promptly came and sat next to me and complained that tax rates were too high. (Even though he’s ‘an American for tax purposes’. Somehow, we ended up talking about unemployment benefit.) Anyway, once the debate started it turned out that after we’ve abolished one of the most conceptually positive taxes there is, we could either make up the money by ‘eliminating waste’ (as always) or ‘increasing taxes on cigarettes and alcohol’. Oh, so you’d replace a tax on the wealthy with a tax paid equally by everyone and especially burdensome on the very poor? After some enthusiastic shouting the noes won, thankfully.

Don’t stress, she is actually hungry for online fame

(Afterwards, we made up and recorded our own Dale-inspired dance effort, complete with a suit. This won’t be shown )