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.
