May's Ham
As evidenced by previous non-starters, weeks of contemplating the intrigues of ideal gases and frictionless slopes has nurtured a gentle fuzz on the apple that is my writing, though it is not as simple an affair to simply expunge such grime by excising its outer layers. That is not to say that the material was not enjoyable, but now that that dreadful yet indispensable blight upon the peach of fun is past, several amusement choices gleefully unfold before the eyes of the now unburdened and undoubtedly relieved student.
For it is now the 'May Week' (a platitude that so often surfaces in awkward conversations with people whom one is not exactly familiar with but is obliged to exchange a few meaningless utterances of small talk, and because the weather is such a pained cliché the ridiculous pathologically historical British quirks are now the preferred choice, such as how May week is actually in June but about 10000 years ago was actually in May only that people then didn't call it May because they hadn't invented the calendar) and a whole host of events are lined up as elegant excuses for getting absolutely drunk.
The garden party, long, lazy summer days, floaty dresses and dashing young men in cricket whites, pays homage to a more gracious, not to say indulgent, way of life. Such an Austenesque (so many of us understand what Austen is all about, yet so few have actually read her novels – she must be the author whose reputation preceeds her by a whole mile) affair does seem rather pretentious, and not by a very large stretch of the imagination one can envisage fluted tête-à-têtes about ponies and lawn tennis and the steam engine. Replacing that, in the present day, with heated discussions about football or human rights or Monty Python only heightens the asynchrony between form and function, but having large amounts of chocolate fingers and cheap red wine always helps soothe things.
But such occasions to enjoy the full extent of the sun (which can only ever be a bother to those from the tropics) are dwarfed in comparison with the swarming, seething mass of extravagance, excess and madness that are May Balls, where everyone pays a few hundred pounds, dresses to the nines and has a night that dissolves into too much whiskey and waking up beside unfamiliar people with your wallet missing. Quite like the typical evening out during the term, only much more expensive and with bow ties. These are massively popular among the student population that undoubtedly sees that into it the very essence of the good life itself is being distilled: ugly women, bad dancing and a distressing lack of sobriety and good sense. Immense effort is put into the organisation of such an orgy of intemperance, with hired gangs of workers carting volumes of alcohol enough to irrigate a smallholding, careful decoration and interior design and so forth, even more so than the recent council elections where ballots were printed on old Chinese newspaper and votes were probably counted by incontinent old women in windowless rooms that smelled of urine.
Tens of May Balls occur concurrently, and multiplying wanton alcohol consumption by ten leads to an unimaginably large scale upon which things happen. In the short space of a week the city temporarily becomes Europe's fifth larger importer of wines and spirits, with thousands of students playing party to it. Myself, I've never experienced extravagance at a magnitude greater than maybe sitting on a plush sofa and sipping good wine, so at this level it seems opaque and overwhelming. It's another of those things that one tut-tuts and shakes one's head about while thinking of the less fortunate and the poor and the oppressed working class.
Testing Times
Having recently concluded my round of examinations and finding them to be pleasantly similar to your common or garden variety of exams, I found myself afforded with vast tracts of time with which to think about any sort of nonsensical subject matter that struck my whim and fancy. Because when one is ploughing with gusto through the main course, the principal thing that is coursing through one's mind is what will be for dessert (this is another of those foul Western habits I've picked up – the necessity to have some sort of sweet or the other after a meal) it of course struck me, but without surprise, about how as good students who have followed most of the rules in the book to a T, have emerged as automatons of executing examinations, to eke out every single drop of marks available like a vendor would, running the dry, lifeless husks of sugarcane repeatedly through the churning presses. After all, its what we've been trained to do for nearly ten years, sneaking like invisible ninja assassins through the metropolis, snucking up behind exams and slitting their throats with a razor, without them giving even the slightest resistance or murmur. I think you even underestimate the stealthiness.
Though wracked with the image of a thousand ninjas slashing a thousand throats, I thought that this was the case in the exam hall where we sat our papers. Ever since we had to take our first exam, parents and teachers had gifted us the perennial analogy that an exam was like this dark, hairy, horrible monster not dissimilar to those that patronised the cupboards in our young dreams, and that given adequate preparation we too could defeat this beast. Fortified by such a potent metaphor, we set about the arduous training but more often than not ended up daydreaming about kicking things, high in the mountains, just like in your requisite B+ sword-fighting epic.
From then, every examination has brought with it such a connotation, that it was some sort of barrier to be surmounted, or destroyed, and failure to do so would only sound the death knell in the quest. The whole academic life cycle, it can be envisioned, may be described as a 110m hurdle race but the hurdles are all covered in razor-sharp, poison-tipped spikes and in the background there are as many fires of hell burning and brimstone spilling as you can care to imagine. For those safely out of the loop, being ushered into another of these races ("No my friend, those were only the heats") seems a little too much, but then you just put on your used, blood drenched number tag and off you go again. There is, of course, no escape.
Much as this image suggests only discomfort and itching, I've always tried to enjoy my exams, thinking of them as something else, as though I go into a large hall, air-conditioned, and sit down at a table and wait to be served. Only that I have no idea what it be, something like going to a restaurant for a beef dinner, where lurking under the flawless steel server could be a tender steak or a dismembered raw calf corpse. I have yet to be unpleasantly surprised though.
The Longest Day
I was joking with my brother about how our mendacious local newspaper had reported one shopper who, when questioned about the significance of 4th June, had hazarded the intelligent guess that it might be Father's Day, and my brother, in an indignant rage over this travesty of historical knowledge proceeded to shout blue murder about the pathetic state of historical awareness. He proceeded to ask what other fruitcakes of history might think 6th June was next.
While I waffle a little about the implications of callously and cold-bloodedly crushing unarmed students under tanks and shooting them randomly, 6th June is surely a day to remember, even if we were never part of that whole Western world debacle resulting in the deaths of millions and the suffering of hundreds of millions. For, on this day, six decades ago, tens of thousands of troops braced the swelling seas and landed on the beaches of Normandy, in a fashion that bears much similarity to the drama and action that is portrayed in the media productions based on this momentous event, Saving Private Ryan and more recently, Band of Brothers. While Saving Private Ryan caused more of a stir due to its unprecedented NC-16 rating and its supposed wanton brutality rather than because it was a reminder of the probable reason why we have a free world today instead of a ruined wasteland without Jews, it did somehow bring to many people's attention that D-Day had actually occurred, instead of being filmed in a sterile studio setting with artillery shells pencilled in by animators. The sheer magnitude and import of these landings still brings tears to the eyes of the people who participated in it as well as those who were infinitely grateful for its effect. It is quite reprehensible that many are still oblivious to it.
We may not be members of the Transatlantic partnership, but certainly heroism and the quest to eradicate evil is stateless, and I still stand in awe at the valour of those who played a role in this riskiest of gambles. It took great courage for them to volunteer for a vocation that they knew would almost certainly lead to a horrific and ignominious death, but they knew that they were taking part in a crusade to the blackest heart of man, and that they would be exchanging their lives for a chance to free the world. Such an attitude, on such a massive scale – half the world mobilising to fight the other half is surely humbling.
I normally harbour an odium for the US, but this week, with a nod to history, I feel respect for what the US had done for World War 2 and thereafter, and their selfless (though some may argue) contribution to ending the reign of terror and darkness of the Axis powers. This, coupled with the death of Ronald Reagan, means that my approval rating of the US this week is at its highest level ever, though it is more a culmination of reverence towards US actions and personalities in the past rather than any sort of approval.
This is why the latest gaffe of the US President, to compare his war on a noun to World War 2 like an oily salesman compares a Toyota to a Ford, is like a toddler drawing a shaky line across a drawing block with a red crayon, and it has drawn flak from almost everybody around, because there are (almost) no parallels, historical technicalities aside. One side you're fighting against the biggest evil in the world who threatens to enslave entire populations and exterminate the others, and the other you're fighting against people you armed and then cheesed off and whose innocent brethren you strip and beat. Somehow, people have let that pass, bowing to the well-established idiocy and callousness of the man.
Looking at archives of D-Day pictures only fortifies an urge to use the US Flag as my wallpaper or to play the Star-spangled Banner once or twice, though we may be reminded that the great transatlantic handshake with Britain also played a key role. Once, they linked hands and drove across Europe to liberate and unify it; now that Euroscepticism threatens to tear it asunder, the date serves to remind us what a pity that would be.
