Oxford - heaven or hell?

I've been asked by a fellow, suffering Oxfordonian to express a few views on those negative aspects of Oxford that nobody really gets to know about until a few months too late (i.e. you're installed on course, signed away even your distant relation's bank accounts, and have finally worked out after many traumatic trying-on sessions how the damn gown is meant to be worn). If, dear reader, you do not frequent Oxford University then banish whatever myths you have heard about the place...

Everyone knows that Oxford represents academic excellence - which simultaneously means, academic hell. You may be the bright spark in your school, but the first conversation you have here is guaranteed to be with someone streets ahead of you intelligence wise, and you'll spend the subsequent few years battling to break into the middle of the pack. At the end of the year, you'll be shuffled into an exam hall with the other poor sods on your course and given three hour tests. Just to make the experience unique, Oxford requires that you wear full sub fusc - guys, yes, you will be sitting exams in a bow tie. In addition to trying to learn a few thousand (useless) facts, you'll be forced to devote a good portion of your precious time to learning how to tie the damn thing correctly to avoid additional exam-morning-stress.

If you do really well in the exams, perhaps you'll think of studying for a Phd. Correction: at Oxford, you will work towards a DPhil. There is no logic behind this slight tweaking of the issue other than Oxford likes to be Different For No Good Reason. Considering the laboratory facilities are archaic in comparison to what is on offer at other schools, and in many instances the lecture halls and accommodation are just plain impractical, being Different For No Good Reason is maintained by Oxford in order to ensure elite status of the university.

Oxford these days is even complete with groupies - or rather, anti-groupies. The Animal Liberation Front (think that is what ALF stands for) provides background noise for all in geography/zoology/biology lectures, a bunch of die-hard protestors who have achieved absolutely nothing other than quadrupling the cost of building a new lab. I too am against futile animal testing, but please, anyone who threatens me - a Women's Studies student who wouldn't be able to jab a needle into anything that was going to squeak back at me - well, they kind of annoy me.

At Oxford you are given three days to write an essay, and the end product is peeled apart word by word until you realise that only four of the three thousand words were in the right place and meant something. You are granted a place here on the basis that you are intelligent enough to be here, and the rest of your time will be spent listening to tutors who are intent on proving that you are worthless. You pay an extra two thousand odd pounds a year on top of tuition fees to be a member of a college, which gives you no extra priveleges whatsoever and means nothing to anybody outside the institute. You attempt to retreat into your chosen sport for a 'break from work' and find yourself in bi-weekly competition with other colleges, and those without a cut-throat attitude to winning will not make the team. You are poked and prodded and directed and, unless you're careful, left a mere shadow of your former self. The likes of Charles and Sebastian do not reside in Oxford - much as I like to see the ivy in the botanic gardens, there is the constant nagging thought I should be doing something Useful. Being surrounded by so much success, it is hard to avoid getting dragged into the challenge.

Up until now, I've been successful in avoiding certain aspects of Oxford. I haven't taken to drinking gallons of coffee so I can squeeze in an extra few hours work, I don't sprint towards the library at the end of a tutorial to get the books required for the following week before any of my fellow students can pantingly arrive in my glorious wake. And, for the sake of my sanity, I intend to keep it this way: drifting along on the fringes, nobody entirely sure if I'm a genius or a complete dunce. I'll take Oxford for what it is: a feature on my CV. A game I played for a year. I've had some unforgettable and unique experiences here, don't get me wrong, and I'm suitably grateful for the opportunity to be part of the academic glory.

But dear God, I can't wait to get the hell away from here.

On solving the economic crisis

I set someone the task yesterday of giving me a topic to rant about - 'baths versus showers' was the outcome of that conversation, and I tried valiantly to feel passionately about either but frankly failed. So I'm sorry, this is going to be on something totally different.

We are constantly informed in various television programmes that death is nigh for the majority of us. 'You are what you eat' exists to find clinically obese people to slim down with a diet of ghastly looking vegetable juices and nut roasts, while, 'Celebrity Fit Club' (can never remember if is 'Fit' or 'Fat' in there) rounds up a host of blubbery minor celebs to be put through an 'arduous' training regime to make them lose weight practically before our eyes. While I'm mentioning this programme, can I also mention the ridiculous nature of it: someone who is over twenty stone being set the task of losing three pounds in a week, it isn't exactly much to ask is it. (Another total aside: on 'You are what you eat' recently, a guy lost four stone in eight weeks. That equates to an average of seven pounds a week. If he'd been on 'Celebrity Fit Club' he'd have been told off for losing weight too fast. Huh). A recent episode of the Celebrity Blubber Fest saw one man being informed that he was so overweight, so lacking in nutrients, that the presenter's computer programme had worked out he was actually dead. Which goes to show a few things, including that those packages are totally pointless.

Anyway, this is my point. Every day on the news there is some ghastly story about the increasing rates of, oh I don't know, lesser-spotted cancer of the ear lobe, and how we should all be watching out for it. And yet today, the BBC reliably informs me that a recent study suggests we're all living so long that by the year 2050 retirement age will have to be set at 85years of age.

Yes - that's right. Take a step back and read it again. Your average university graduate (and since by 2050 the government will have worked it so that EVERYONE goes to university) will be working for 64 years. They'll then have two days to look heavenwards, say, phew! I need a rest after that - and promptly get whisked off to a Higher Place. (Anyone who doesn't get rewarded by going to Heaven after working that long, it seems to me the system is a bit screwed).

This is ridiculous. On the one hand, it is apparently a minor miracle any of us make it past forty, and on the other hand we're being punished for living too long. Someone is getting their facts mixed up...

I'd also like to point out a few further problems with people working until they are 85. For one, I would say the majority of new mothers rely on their own parents to help look after the newborn whippersnapper. This wont be possible under legislation to have both mother and grandmother slogging away full-time. Family bonds will break down even further as a result, and nobody will have any time to see the child. We'll breed a new generation of socially inept individuals (and men who will constantly be on the look-out for a 'mother figure' in their girlfriend. That just isn't healthy).

Another issue with this: you'll have a few 95year olds in residential care homes, being looked after by a gang of hip-replaced, incontinent workers who themselves need an afternoon nap just to get through the day.

Here is my solution to the problem. Get rid of all these 'labour-saving devices' that exist in all shops, factories and businesses these days - get everyone employed again. Those that genuinely can't work can of course get benefits, and once you hit 65, as is now, your pension starts popping through the door. If you want to carry on working, by all means go ahead - and no discrimination. This will all have a few effects: one, all those lazy sods who never intend getting a job but prefer to live off the government - well they wont be able to do that anymore and they wont be able to use the excuse there 'are no jobs'. (Maybe, just maybe, there will be an element of 'pride' and 'self respect' creeping back into the country as well). Two, everything will slow down a wee bit, this is true - but that is a good thing. (Refer to post of a few days ago where I asked, 'where did the time go to just stop and smell the flowers?'). Three, with everyone working and everyone paying some portion of tax, the government will have an awful lot of spare money kicking around. This can go towards a few useful things such as, heck, pensions for those over 65. Who on earth wants to spend their entire life on a treadmill?

The gap year 'traveller'

(Went out for the first time ever with hair down on Friday evening. Comments on 'new look' required).
So yes, the gap year 'traveller'. Traveller comes complete with inverted commas because of the changing definition of the word that I think no longer applies to the mass tourism created by the cursed travel Industry. It used to be considered exciting and adventurous to launch yourself half way around the world and see Christ looking out over Rio, now it is part of the average twenty-somethings photo album next to their 'drunken night on Fraser Island' and 'me trashed in Cambodia' snaps. If your student room isn't complete with a miniature Buddha, a boomerang and a bong, you just wont fit in.
I've never been into this idea of seeing places for the sake of seeing them. Yes, some of what I've seen has been on what is now the standardised Tourist Trail, but this is in spite of everything rather than because of. I loathe those people who make comments such as, 'Peru! Yeah, I've been there!' as they rattle off the inevitable list: a day in Lima, day in Cusco, the Inca Trail, Lake Titicaca, Arequipa, back to Lima. Peru in a week. They then try to compare our experiences of Peru, a futile attempt to find 'something in common' which is impossible, and dear Lord if we did have something in common I'd probably throw myself from the nearest building.
What happened to individuality? Oh hang on, I know - commercialisation coupled with its inevitable counterpart, capitalism. (Ah, the wonder that is alliteration...). The majority of tourists love the fact that they can eat MacDonalds in any country (I personally appreciate the presence of such places purely for their bathroom facilities), buy Gap jeans at discount prices in certain parts of the world, and if all goes wrong then daddy's Amex card will solve the problem. Every time I go away I put myself in increasingly tough positions with greater challenges, only to have them revealed as mole-hills rather than mountains. To anyone who hasn't been to the Amazon, perhaps travelling by boat up the river for four days into the heart of the jungle sounds exciting, original, fraught with danger. Trust me, it isn't. And look at it this way - hundreds of Peruvians do this every day, and being as both Peruvians and I are mere mortals it is hardly surprising that it is highly feasible. It is amazingly annoying to go to somewhere you perceive as the middle of nowhere to bump into another blasted English person who insists on talking to you for hours purely because you were produced in the same ghastly country.
The typical gap year traveller then comes back loaded with 'experiences' of daring-do that are in reality on a par with getting the tube in London or, for those slightly more adventurous ones, standing on a Bradford street corner at 3am. Much as I like to mock them, though, I will applaud the healthy dose of cynicism that they also return with. After 'seeing the world, man, seeing how like the Other Half live' (i.e. realising that poverty doesn't mean eating a pot noodle for three dinners a week while ensconsed in your small but comfortable student room), the traveller genuinely wants to make a difference. Either that, or they want to give everything up and open a hostel on a remote Honduran beach. I can't wait to see what effect this has on the economy of countries such as the UK, who export vast quantities of these 'gappers' every year. What happens when students don't want to become accountants, but journalists? Not IT geeks, but travel writers? I love how most of the third world would love to have the chance to live in England, and all we want to do is escape it...

On waking up in a foreign land...

I don't need to look at the clock to confirm that once more I've overslept - the sunshine is scything through the slats in the shutters, slicing through the dusty air. I ease my bare legs into shorts, walk slowly to the balcony and refuge of waiting chair while pulling a tshirt roughly onto me. I decide, or it is has been decided, that I'll stay here a while, body warmed by the sun and supported gently by the aged foam of the cushions. From far below, the idle chaos of the city drifts towards me: the sound of buses wheezing up the cobbled street; children's feet slapping wildly on the pavement as they pursue an errant football; the ever-present rhymthic creak of a swing in the park.

After a while, I'll jerk myself back to reality under a cold shower. A clean tshirt will be selected for my venture into the outside world. Each morning I saunter to the bar on the corner, blissfully unaware of the surroundings, pull a book at random from the shelf under the window and, after a brief delay, will be presented ceremoniously with chocolate con churros. The waiter likes to place each item with a flourish, sweeping the cups and plates high before bringing them sharply down onto the table - the chocolate inevitably spills, giving him an excuse to fuss over me some more. Two people are arguing outside the window, poring over a map and exclaiming with grand gesticulations; the woman finally throws her half of the city plan to the man, she storms off and he has no choice but to follow, muttering. Ingleses? asks my waiter. Claro, I respond with a suitably wry smile and raised eyebrows, drawling the word, savouring the emphasis that can be placed on the finale of the first syllable. The waiter throws back his head and laughs, returns to his bar stool and watches the world moving by outside.

After my morning ritual has taken place, I'll probably wander over to a park somewhere. Lie on the grass beneath the trees, head resting on hands and body flat against the cool shade. Maybe today I will take a train, venture towards the area somewhat optimistically referred to as the 'lagoon'. I can take a boat then to an island. Hear nothing but lapping water. At night, I return to the plaza where the bar is. I can stay at the little round metal table until sunrise, drinking wine as I watch the city sleep and wake. See the elderly couple dance together under the lamplight, his arm tight around her waist, her head on his shoulder and eyes closed to the rest of the world. The raucous party of backpackers will leave by two in the morning, heading off to whichever pounding club they have to be seen at that night. I'll talk to my friends if they come by: the woman who sells her carved wooden angels, the man who hands out his stories to passers by. We'll share the wine, he'll walk me home, entreat me with whispered amor amor to let him come up with me. Its a game we play - I walk off with my fingers pressed to my lips, sending him a kiss as I approach the stairwell, he'll stand with hand on heart before grinning, waving, thrusting hands into pockets and leaving.

For now, though, that reality is far below me. I'm in my chair - the one where the dull yellow tufts of foam fight their way through the worn red velvet - and I'm alone. I am at once separated from and connected to the world. I choose my presence or absence, my action or idleness. Nobody need know if I spend the entire day here, just listening to that creaking swing. I have nobody to justify myself to, nobody to interrupt and drag me into reality before I am ready. To be totally isolated in a city of millions of people: surely there is no greater felicity in the world.

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And people wonder why I want to go back to Buenos Aires?? That is my best explanation. Unless you've lived it, you can't know. Everyone is so intent on going places, doing things, having grand 'experiences.' What happened to taking the time to stop and smell the flowers?

On solving the Education Crisis

Years ago when submitting a thesis, my mother proposed the idea that the best teachers should be placed with the youngest children. And what a damn good idea that is. Instill the blighters with some enthusiasm for - well - ANYTHING, and then post them off to secondary schools with a desire to learn, rather than a desire to terrorise the hell out of anyone who wears glasses, or whose skirt is too long, hair too short.
The problem in England is that the majority of new teachers are basically really rather useless. They are the ones who didn't quite make the grade in university, can't work out what to do with themselves, and are drawn in by the offer of £6000 just to complete a teacher's course. We thus end up with people entering the classroom who never enjoyed work themselves, never tried particularly hard, and even if they did, didn't really get very far at all. What use is that to a budding Einstein?? Teachers are basically so darn thick these days that the government has had to come up with grand new methods of teaching - so that the TEACHER can understand what is going on, never mind the kid. Additionally, there is no space for any flair or originality that a teacher might possibly have had a hope in hell of bringing to a classroom, as every hour of every day is carefully planned by some idiot in Whitehall who clearly hasn't a clue. I bet Waterstones and Co. love it: they can just order the syllabus and then stock their shelves with the relevant guides as parents, in last minute essay-panics (yes - parents, kids rarely do their own work these days), charge around for some additional info.
And now everybody is up in arms about 'selection' by some schools. Here is what should happen: every child should take an exam at eleven years old, and the best ones get grouped together in one school, and the worst ones in another. This is not to say that the 'thick kids' are lumped up - it just means some of them take longer to learn than the brighter ones who did better in the exams. It is totally unfair to force the bright sparks to work at the pace of the slow ones, as all that can possibly be created is a bunch of mediocre students. Any enthusiasm the intelligent children had at the beginning of their academic career is knocked out of them by endless repetition and extreme boredom being forced upon them. This is the fault of the teachers, the schools, and that damn curriculum.
What should happen is: teaching should be made a prestigious profession. It should be an honour, not a last resort, to become a 'facilitator of learning' (as the government now likes to call them). The students who graduate with the best marks from university should have the option of signing up to be a teacher for a maximum of, let's say, four years. With decent pay, and none of this training rubbish. This way, there is a constant influx of fresh ideas being brought into schools by the most intelligent people - dear lord, if that doesn't inspire children then nothing will. Throw out the curriculum but set loose goals. Children should be able to read and write and perform such and such mathematical manouveres by a certain age, and beyond that, a little bit of freedom for the teacher. Why force all history teachers to plod through the same period time and time again - as long as the child knows something about history and is interested, well, isn't that preferable? And while we're at it, throw out this obsession with 'make learning fun'. I am by no means advocating that angle. It is patronising and pointless. My niece recently experienced 'Africa Week' that included her having to purchase one of those Make Poverty History wrist-bands, and tour the supermarket looking for Fair Trade Food. Additionally, they sat in a straw hut for a day at school. If you can't see how wrong that is, there is no way I can explain it to you...

Well, there we go. I think I solved the crisis. The children who have parents who are rich enough to afford to send them to private school? So what, send them. I have the government cutting out all that pointless spending on endless text books that are never read, chairs and tables that are damaged, fancy 'interactive white-boards' or whatever they have these days. Pen, paper, and inspiration. The savings can go on sports facilities and better libraries, which means the private schools wont have that many advantages anyway.

Dear me, perhaps I should send my blog address to Mr Blair himself.

Coffee Queues, and a brief pre-Valentine's warm-up rant

I met a friend for coffee this afternoon, and I jest not when I say that it took considerably longer to acquire the brewed beans than it did to consume them. Blackwells (to name and shame) has contained within a notoriously busy coffee shop, and you'd have thought that on a Sunday they would manage to have more than two members of staff available, one whose mastery of the English language was so appalling she eventually quit taking orders and resorted to being in charge of Emptying The Dish Washer. This whole 'coffee culture' we have going on, apparently something to assist in making the average human being more sociable but, in my view, achieving the opposite effect. Whereas in previous days a woman would wander around to her friend's house to have a cosy chat in the parlour over a pot of tea, where one's intimate thoughts can be discussed in such a safe haven, we now launch ourselves into the bustle of a cafe where we can be overheard, 'checked out', and generally be 'moved on' if we spend too long clogging up the place. How is this positive? How? I'm not personally a coffee-drinker, but I understand from those better informed that the genuine Coffee Appreciator would never set foot in the likes of Starbucks unless dragged kicking and screaming. So why do we do it? Because we're expected to? It gets us through the day? Honestly, it is a ghastly, impersonal experience that seems wholly unnecessary to me.
Moving onto my first rant of the season regarding Valentine's Day (I predict many more to come). I detest the fact that virtually every shop I enter right now immediately welcomes me with some suitably hideous display of hearts, roses and - inexplicably - teddy bears, all with ridiculously unnecessary price tags just to crank my blood pressure that little bit higher. Valentine's Day is commercialised hell, as good a marketing scam as the 'coffee catch-up chat' now I come to think about it. Yes, I know what you're all thinking: bitter Jane, disliking Valentine's because once more the day looms large ahead of her without a hope in hell of being, oh I don't know, whisked off to Paris. It isn't that (and nor is it that I'm generally a practical sort of lass on occasions like this, and mid-week dashes at ridiculously over-inflated prices don't fit in with work schedules anyway), it is just that I hate the way it is thrust in my face. Catch 22 situation: if you don't have a Valentine, then for an entire day you are basically a social pariah, and if you do then you are forced by the cursed media to remortgage your house in order to afford an appropriate volume of gifts.
Seriously, the wrapping paper from the Christmas presents is still in the bin...
The one positive: at least I can be fairly sure to get rapid service in a coffee shop on Valentine's Day, as everybody will be focussing on Getting Ready To Go To Dinner. That is, assuming that the girl serving me doesn't have her mind equally as distracted and does manage to acknowledge my existence.

A possible return to Buenos Aires?

(Photo: Opera Bay (club), Buenos Aires). Yes, I'm all fired up with enthusiasm for my latest slightly demented scheme. A few months ago, I read somewhere that properties in Bulgaria are remarkably cheap, and subsequently spent an afternoon happily hopping about the internet in pursuit of the idyllic abode. Indeed, for a mere fifteen thousand pounds, one can have a home in the mountains that is not unlike pictures frequently seen on the front of chocolate boxes (albeit with a decided lack of functioning bathroom, but all fixable). In one of my inspirational flashes yesterday, I suddenly realised that hang on - I don't actually have to get a job when I finish university in June, nor do I need to scrabble around applying for funded Phd placements. I could invest my time, brains and energies in a far more worthwhile and productive project: buy a property in Bulgaria, sit around in it for a few years, and then sell it at a profit. Flawless.
This plan obviously rapidly developed to me living in a suitably sumptuous villa on Capri, but I managed to reign myself in and think logically about this. I don't want a job - not your ordinary 9 til 5 office-oriented job, nor can I see myself working as a 'landscape gardener', joyfully embracing the outdoors and associated elements. Neither am I desperate to launch myself into the loving arms of academia, where I will shuffle dejectedly from conference hall to conference hall, raising my head briefly to try to inspire a group of undergrads who care even less about Chaucer and Chekhov than I do. Obviously, I need to find a third alternative (a realistic one - I'm guessing that 'winning the lottery' and 'marrying rich' aren't really that likely). Investing my money - and a portion of some of my relatives' bank accounts - in an apartment in Buenos Aires is absolutely the best idea to date. I get to live in what is simply the most awesome city in the world, surrounded by delectable people, and an entire continent begging for me to explore further.
And before you start to turn your nose up, dear reader, and complain about such and such - remember this, you could get free accommodation out of me. So be nice. Trust me on this one, Buenos Aires is absolutely worth it.