There are many Cambridge traditions that I still haven’t mastered in the 18 months that I’ve been here.

Take the ubiquitous student bike for example – my dad bought one for me because he thought that Cambridge students were compelled to ride them to lectures. I have tried to make use of this conveyance, but so far without any success.

Last time I took the bastard out for a ride, I attempted that ‘one arm in air, other arm on bike’ indicating move that most students seem to pull off with relative ease and swerved into a car on the other side of the road.

Favouring life, I now opt to walk to my various appointments.

Walking around Cambridge is pleasant enough, but without a bike (and looking a bit older than most of my contemporaries) I am convinced that I am often mistaken for a tourist. This matters to me, although I am not sure why it should – besides being asked if I’d like to go for a punt every time I pass through town.

In any event, to avoid such confusion I make sure that I always scurry purposefully, head bowed, carrying a file and/or books in the manner of someone late for a lecture – and appearing to mull over some profound and obscure academic hypothesis of which only a Cambridge student is capable.

Then there’s the UL.  I am probably completely on my own here, but I cannot understand the appeal of the libraries. How can anyone conduct serious research in these God forsaken places?

Yes, I know that most students say things like – “I can’t work in my room” or “I’m too easily distracted anywhere else”, but please tell me what could be more distracting when composing an essay than a room full of complete strangers, routinely clearing their throats, sniffing and shuffling their books.

Moreover, in the unlikely event that you should find yourself sitting in view of someone attractive, you risk losing the whole day.

I have to confess as well that the sight of dozens of people appearing to be working hard and fully focussed makes me panic. At least at home, in my room, I can pretend that trying to beat my high score on Temple Run and taking sporadic afternoon dozes is the normative approach to attaining a respectable degree.

To me, attending the library is an ordeal. For about one hour, every week, it’s like participating in a game of Supermarket Sweep – rushing about the aisles, checking the spine to see if the book has the 10-digit code that’ll lead you onto the next one. Guerrilla warfare tactics typically ensue.

I have also had to hand over upwards of a hundred quid in fines since I started here, returning books late since it takes me a least a day to work out which chapter I’m supposed to be reading and longer still to read it through and take notes. By the time I leave this place, I shall probably have contributed in fines sufficient to fund the new Mitchell wing of the UL.

So there we have it – I don’t like bikes and I can’t stand libraries. Should I just leave now?

Every house has little niggles that give it character. For my flat in North-West Moscow, it’s the occasional appearance of phosphorescent paint on my bathroom walls, the low number of kitchen appliances that perform any useful function whatsoever and the fact that I have to sleep on my bed like a starfish.

Some niggles are more than niggles though, and can push you to the brink of moving out. For me, this isn’t the grunting and animal noises that come through the wall while I’m trying to sleep, and it’s not even the general experience of living with someone flirting so heavily with insanity I feel like a constant third wheel.

My landlord is one such huge niggle. Born and raised in the flat in which I currently reside, he has inherited it without any clear idea of how to manage it. This includes paying the utility bills, meaning that people come round knocking on the enormous leather bound door that separates us from the relative sanity of the outside so violently that it creaks on its hinges.  We then go into blackout mode, drawing the curtains and hiding out of sight, a bit like the time my sister asked me to watch Twilight with her.

It also means that the cold water is randomly turned off every month (not the hot water, that’s strangely fine), invariably when you’re in the shower, leaving you with no cold water to relieve the second degree burns you’ve just got from the sudden temperature explosion.

The problem is that he thinks it’s absolutely fine to rock up for a few nights occasionally, in the knowledge that he’s undercharging us and if we say no, he can threaten to raise the rent. This would be fine if he was cracking company and had great chat, but he is not cracking company and does not possess good chat. In fact, he’s a complete ass.

This is my landlord. He is based in Jerusalem where by day he works as a security guard, “so [his] life is one constant high” but by night transforms into a self-styled “hip-hop terrorist” called Sayaf and enters rap battle competitions where the only possible winner is Israel’s version of You’ve Been Framed.

I can’t put my finger exactly on what it is he looks like, but my best estimation is the white Jewish lovechild of Mr Pepperami and Cyril Sneer from classic 80s TV show The Raccoons. He recently came back to Russia to record that notoriously difficult second studio album, so there are a lot of nervous Sayaf fans around hoping he doesn’t sell out.

I first encountered him when I was putting the finishing touches to my floor bed via the absurd number of sofa cushions that Olesya has managed to accumulate without accumulating a sofa. He strolled into the apartment with his album collaborators, Spliff Blazer and 2-Zap, who sound like a hilarious parody act but are in fact totally serious.

I mostly managed to steer clear of him by avoiding the flat at all costs in case he would try to tell me about his various women again, because the last time that happened I failed to suppress my snorts when he told me that he couldn’t be monogamous because he “just had too much love to give” and I didn’t know the Russian word for “perennial rhinitis”.

The strangest thing though was the debris that stayed when he left, and what he had taken from my room. Missing were the router for the house and the power lead to a charming novelty lamp. Found, however, were ten Toblerones, three solvent-free gluesticks, two size XL lingerie onesies draped over a broken bed spring, and his phone. Maybe he’s not so bad after all.

There we were; huddled like sleep deprived penguins waiting for hall to open for food, and then out of the queue sails the voice of a caffeine-mad vet and a concerned bystander:

“Are you ok?”

“I feel like my eyes are going to pop out. You know that can happen with dogs if you scruff them…”

“What do you mean scruff them?”

“Haul them up too tightly by the scruff of their necks – same thing can happen with cats.”

Oh dear, it’s the time of year where we all go mental, in a bad, sad, boozeless way. Each day I spend nearly an hour queuing for expensive and rubbish food in College, just so I feel like I haven’t spent the whole day alone or in a supervision. I use all my free texts (I’m not cool enough to have unlimited) on asking people if ‘they are coming to hall’ because that makes me sound fun.

The highlight and lowlight of my week was my bedder’s impersonation of the fat girl in her ballet class. Fang has limited English and decided ballet lessons might be a good way to learn more. I’m not sure she will keep it up though; I think she hates this girl too much, especially her “Laaazy face, full food”. Anyway, I was chuckling away merrily while she imitated this chunkster, pirouetting around my room with a very serious expression on her face, until I had a horrible vision of myself. Of how half an hour earlier I had been gobbling a pasty two hours after having eaten a fry up. Then I remembered my ballet lessons as a miserable chubby fourteen year-old. I felt sad and ate a packet of ginger nuts.

Last term I wrote that “a bagel has never saved me from feeling sad. A cookie has never made me feel as though I am loved. I am seriously bored of the idea that a bad day automatically has us females sitting in our pjs/ironic Christmas onesie and practically fellating anything with a high fat or sugar content.”

Well. Apparently that’s bullshit. I just underestimated exam stress. I’ve been eating chocolate like ‘fairtrade’ is a best before date. Bagels do actually make me happy. While my evil wisdom teeth mean I’m not keen to fellate anything just now, if I could I’d be all over those M&S yumyums. At this rate I’m going to have a ‘red wheel’ of fatty food shame on my coffin.

People who think comfort eating isn’t natural and right are either stupid or indecently happy. I don’t care for either group. They’re usually all evangelicals, or me at my worst. Admittedly, I do hate the mood-dictates-pj-wearing hallmark of modern femininity (almost as much as my inability to write without over-using hyphens), but I can’t deny that at the moment I eat to stay awake and to be joyful. In this happy place I look forward to each mealtime with indecent excitement: I can’t hold a book if I am using a knife and fork now can I? That would be disgusting.

This is my exam term. The gym days are over. Hot yoga makes me hate myself. Pass me some fat drenched carbs, coffee and a sense of underachievement. What do you mean that isn’t attractive?!

Here lies

The Poly-

Saturated-

middle-

class-

guilt-

ridden-

corpse

of the fat girl from ballet class.

P.S. And she got a degree that rhymes with ‘bird’ because she spent too much time writing self- indulgent shite and poetry that would make Larkin vomit backwards. TTYL. Exam love, xoxo.

What the hell are you doing reading this? No seriously, go back to whatever you’re meant to be doing. I mean it.

Ok, you fresher historians and English students can stay. Everyone else bugger off.

Those of you who are left: let’s talk about procrastination. I think it might be sent by the devil. It’s everywhere, it’s ruining my degree and my life would be completely unworthwhile without it.

Without the kind of cold-sweat workload that necessitates constant and bizarre forms of procrastination, I would have nothing to do with my time. When I go more than a few weeks without a supervision (welcome to the rigours of a Cambridge Philosophy degree) I go a bit mental, lie in bed all day feeling sorry for myself and get up just in time to go to the pub. It’s a life which undermines my very humanity, but what it lacks in dignity it more than makes up for in vitamin D deprivation.

So in a sense – a very theoretical sense – I’m glad that I’m finally having to put some work in. Activities that once seemed utterly tedious, pointless or indicative of some kind of social anxiety disorder have suddenly regained their lustre. I can lock myself in my room for a whole day doing nothing but practicing ventriloquism with my bras and googling things that I don’t know are websites but which probably are and if so are probably quite funny (see thingsthatlooklikehitler.com for an extremely amusing fire alarm).

But I’m still trapped in a town where people shuffle like dementia patients to and from Sainsburys and don’t seem to speak above a whisper. It’s like the whole city thinks it’s the reading room of the UL (which incidentally, I visited for the first time this week and seems to be modelled on this video). The other day my friend had to go to London because he broke his tooth off on a malted milk biscuit, and I found myself feeling jealous of him.

Oddly enough, this wasn’t what made me realise that things had gone too far. It took internet prostitution to prompt that particular revelation.

Miss Travel is a website with a very simple premise: some girls don’t like taking money for sex, so let’s pay them in holidays instead. It has an alibi, of course – busy, successful men often go on exotic holidays, and those poor lonely souls who are unattached have no one with whom to travel. Unfortunately, the site’s labelling of their users’ profiles as ‘attractive female’ or ‘generous male’ rather undermine this justification.

So obviously, my friends and I gathered round the laptop to jeer at the paunchy middle-aged men and Snog Marry Avoid candidate bimbos. Unfortunately though, most of the users open to public scrutiny seemed unfeasibly perfect. I mean how many glamour model/PHD students can there actually be? We reluctantly created accounts to gain access to the munters.

For ego purposes, these accounts had to be borderline appealing. For procrastination purposes we had to keep tabs on whether anyone had viewed us, winked at us, or invited us to the Congo. And yes, a chubby 40 year old man with the numbers 007 in his username did indeed invite me to the Congo. Unfortunately I’m ethically opposed to warlord sex and had to respectfully decline.

Some of the men, though, weren’t that bad. It was this that made me realise that my pathological procrastination, coupled with my desperate desire to be anywhere but here, have melded to create some terrifying hybrid-mutant problem. I’ve had to go internet cold turkey.

Because really, however feminist I may be, if there actually is a hot 26-year-old out there desperately seeking a travel companion who’s not a gold digger, wants to explore the world and enjoys talking about the philosophy of physics, there’s very little I can do to prevent myself from screaming “DOES QUANTUM PHYSICS DISPROVE THE LAW OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE?!” while pouting and hurling my packed suitcase into his arms. And then what would happen to my degree?

Hello again, you.

In the end I was glad I was unable to defer entry to Queen Mary, because I later realised that I would only be happy studying in the bustling city of Nottingham, the East Midlands’ “best kept secret”. Nottingham would be a laugh, but only if they have double beds in their accommodation to fit me and my ex-girlfriend…

[The following are genuine exchanges.]

—————————-

Dear Nottingham University Accommodation,

I am very interested in applying to study Chemistry at Nottingham next year.

Last year, something terrible happened. I had been going out with my girlfriend, Louise, for 3 years. She was beautiful (blonde hair, blue eyes, you know the type), charming, lovely, sweet, clever – everything you could ask for in a girl. We’d do everything together, from bike rides at sunset to going for Sunday brunch at Nando’s. I know that at just 17 years old I’m a bit young to say I was in love, but I really think I was. When I wasn’t with her I wished I was, and when I was with her I never wanted to leave her.

However, tragically, Louise died when she was on holiday in Iceland last year. I think it was something to do with food poisoning. Anyway, since then, as a way of trying to cope, I’ve made a soft doll of Louise which I sleep with at night so it’s almost as though she’s there with me. The doll is life-size, so I need a double bed. Are there double beds in any of your accommodation?

Yes,

Thomas x

—————————-

Dear Thomas

I’m afraid that we don’t have any double beds in our accommodation. Yet our large single rooms contain three quarter size beds that you may be interested in.

Kind regards,

Sam Ellis

—————————-

Dear Dr Ellis,

Many, many, many thanks for your pronto reply. A three quarter size bed may be appropriate for my circumstances. The life-sized ‘Louise’ doll measures 5″7′ and is roughly a girl’s clothes size 10 (so quite slim). Her width is approximately 30cm. I’m a fairly large guy (clothes size L). Do you think the two of us will fit comfortably in a three quarter size bed?

Thanks again, Sam.

Hi,

Thomas xxx

—————————-

Dear Thomas,

Thanks for your quick response.

I believe a large single study would be suitable. If you have any concerns though you could come along to our open day on either September 10th or 11th. Tours of the accommodation are available and you could see a typical large single study room in person, if you wish to bring the Louise doll along then feel free. Either way though we’re fairly confident that the room will meet your requirements.

Please, just call me Sam, I’m not a doctor.

Kind regards,

Sam Ellis

—————————-

Dear Professor Ellis, (only joking!) Dear Sam,

Your idea of me coming along to an open day is brilliant, inspired. I will do just that – probably both 10th and 11th September so then I will get a feel for what it is like to be there two days in a row. Louise can’t wait either – she’s already started preparing a packed lunch to bring along on the day. We live in Manchester so it’ll be quite a day out for the two of us.

She’s hoping to meet some new friends there as well – we hear the people of Nottingham are very friendly. Thanks again for all your help, we’ll be sure to put in a good word for Sam Ellis when we attend both open days!

Yours forever,

Thomas xxx

—————————-

Louise and I had a fantastic time at Nottingham’s open days, but it turned out the bed was not big enough for the two of us. At least there were still plenty of other universities to consider…

Judging by some of the feedback on my article last week, it seems that I may not have made it clear that I’m an older undergrad.

I have in fact spent nearly three years as an undergraduate, having completed a year reading Logic and Scientific method at the LSE, the best part of a year at Cambridge reading Farsi and Arabic, and am now looking to complete the first of a three year undergraduate degree course reading History.

That, I think makes me a bit of an expert on a number of things. Clearly I have mastered the art of failure. I have also developed a pretty good interview technique.

However, one of the disadvantages has been an increasing sense of detachment and isolation when it comes to Cambridge nightlife. I am sure that a few years ago, going clubbing was something I did without much thought. I went along, I drank, I made some effort to dance without feeling too self-conscious and I went home (invariably alone).

In a previous life – when I was attempting degree number one at the LSE – I was continually dragged around town and persuaded to paint the town red (fittingly, as most of my LSE chums were Marxists). It was relentless: every night was club night. I was not even spared on a Tuesday.

When I look round a packed nightclub now, I feel that everyone has read their script and is fully engaged. They don’t look awkward, and the fact that nobody can hear a word that anyone is saying doesn’t appear to matter.

They are obviously communicating, possibly through the medium of dance and movement, and thereby making arrangements for bad post-club shagging as the night wears on. I have tried, but I have the same difficulty mastering the language of dance and mime as I did last year learning Farsi. It’s a foreign language and quite impenetrable.

Worse: I feel that everyone can sense my discomfort. It’s as if a Monty Python arrow was pointing at me with the label ‘loser’.

My technique to deal with this in the past was simple. I started to smuggle a book into the club with me. Once inside I’d play the part of someone with lots of people to see then pop off to the loo for a leisurely read.

After an hour or so, I would return to the dance floor with what I hoped was a smug look, suggesting that I had been getting off with at least one and quite possibly a number of desirable women.

I like to think that I won a reputation for being quite the lady magnet, despite the fact that nobody ever saw any of my ‘conquests’. I carried it off because I had even convinced myself that it was true – until, that is, a bouncer outside Soul Tree (RIP) stopped me on the way in one evening and demanded to know what the bulge in my trousers was.

After a few ill-judged jokes, I was made to reveal my copy of Roald Dahl’s Short Stories. My subterfuge was ended and my reputation as a lothario lay in tatters.

So, if you happen to see me tonight in some crowded, noisy, sweaty, venue looking awkward (or possibly pretending earnestly to talk to someone on my mobile) and feel overcome with sympathy, how about sneaking out with me and finding a local tea dance? Or bingo hall?

Bring a book though, just in case.

As I enter the flat to look round for the first time, the first thing I hear is “I feel a positive energy!” I turn round to see a tall, dark-haired but very Russian-looking girl with high cheekbones that lend a cheerful edge to her face bound towards me, dressed in a cow-themed onesie, complete with tail.

She somehow envelops me in a side hug and I awkwardly reciprocate, loosely wrapping my arm round one of her arms from underneath. So far, so unexpected, and so great. She momentarily disappears to put on a green wig “to balance the zen” and then proceeds to show me the flat. There’s UV paint everywhere and it smells like a glue factory. “Don’t worry, the bath won’t be full of tomato puree if you move in!”

Everyone, meet my flat mate, Olesya.

She’s an artist and photographer and does some weird, artistic photos with girls in woods that I don’t really understand and spends a genuinely surprising amount of time waiting for no-show clients who later turn out to be in jail. I know Olesya because I’m mates with her boyfriend. He doesn’t live with her because he has no job to pay his half of the rent. He instead settles for his university accommodation which, whilst free, involves a serious cockroach infestation, no running water and a roommate who plays World of Warcraft non-stop shouting “This is for 1941, you Nazi scum” at online Germans.

Of course the downside of living with your mate’s girlfriend is that when he comes over, which he regularly does, and they have noisy sex about six inches away from your face through a thin but stylishly wallpapered wall, you can’t help but picture it pretty vividly.  Then you find it weird to look either of them in the eye in the morning because all you have in your head is questions about why they were making cat and monkey noises mid-coitus.

The other downside is constantly having your mate strut around the house in his Y-fronts, evidently the underwear of choice amongst young Russian men about town, whistling Akon’s seminal classic I Just Had Sex.

But in the main, life in my leafy, family-friendly Moscow suburb is great. Sure, Olesya takes a few too many magic mushrooms (her current vKontakte (Russian Facebook) status is “FUCK I LOVE MUSHROOMS!”) and once painted every surface in the bathroom phosphorescent orange, but she makes life interesting and unfailingly cheerful.

I’ve got used to the fact that the bathroom has no light, just a lamp with a tendency to make bulbs explode. The sudden plunge into darkness when you’re in the shower is so total that when you pour drain unblocker into your hair, you think for the first time that the“new formula” on a shampoo bottle means they’ve actually done something. Before it feels like your hair is being ironed by Satan and your skull is about to be unblocked of brain, that is.

It’s stopped bothering me that only one out of four hobs on my stove is working, because my planning skills have increased immeasurably and because I’m just forced to save the best till last.

I’ve even come to terms with the fact that my “bed” (it’s more of a fold-out sofa) has an unreasonably hard wooden shaft right down the centre, because if I sleep in the shape of a starfish it slots nicely into the groove of my spine. This rather compliments my sleeping experience until I roll over and I get cracked in the spleen by my own bed.

But really, all of this is what makes my corner of an enormous Stalinist monolith a home, and I’ll miss it when I’m gone.

The expression “mature student” is one of those contradictory phrases – like “Microsoft Works”, soy milk or Liberal Democrat – which is bound to lead to confusion and disappointment.

When I first turned up to interview at one of the more established colleges just under two years ago, there were no discernible age differences between the other candidates and myself. I probably even looked younger than a fair few of them.

Unfortunately, the tree trunk of my soul exposed me for the twenty-something that I was, flagging up my 80s birth certificate and poor life choices. I was swiftly dubbed far too mature to cohort with the younger, fresh-faced undergrads and sent to interview at one of the less prestigious colleges – whether it was the tweed jacket or the pipe that gave me away, I’ll never know.

The staff at Wolfson College were sympathetic, and were quick to give me a guided tour of the facilities and supply me with some useful literature. In hindsight, it was a bit like being shown round a retirement home. It is perhaps a testament to just how irrelevant Wolfson is regarded, that we are mocked less than, say, Lucy Cavendish or Homerton.

Thankfully, it is a prerequisite of most jibes that some recognition of the subject is needed. It has (literally) paid dividends for Wolfson to escape the public consciousness in other ways as well. I was watching the day-time TV show “Pointless” a few months back (in which the aim is to come up with an answer no one else has thought or heard of), and the category for the jackpot was “Cambridge Colleges”.

In that instance, Wolfson would have landed the contestants twenty-odd grand. Unfortunately for them, they hadn’t heard of us either. Cabbies still insist on pronouncing the college “Wolfston”, although they seem to have no trouble finding it – presumably because we’re all a bunch of geriatrics who lack sufficient stamina to make the short trip back from town.

When I first arrived at Cambridge, the senior tutor at Wolfson sat us all down and presented us with a surprising statistic – that mature undergraduates are less likely to attain a “good degree” than our younger, more dutiful peers. Perhaps it’s because our small dose of life experience has rendered us immune to the criticism and disapproval of our supervisors (many of whom are around our age, or even younger) so that the threat of deadlines and sanctions is treated with a casual disregard.

Or, perhaps more likely, because the same habitual laziness that made us apply to university five or more years later than everyone else has made it difficult to keep up with the mean work rate. But to characterize all mature undergrads as such obscures the truth. Some have quite incredible and even humbling life stories, and have fought against the odds to win their place here.

But it does make it harder to bond with some of the younger undergraduates. My friendship circle is not based on the people who live on my corridor or sit on my course. Rather, the people closest to me make up a cocktail of PhD, MPhil and Masters’ students – with a few fellow undergraduates thrown in for good measure. So the purpose of this column is to attempt to show Cambridge from the perspective of the older student. Over a third of all Cambridge students are postgrads or mature, so it seems appropriate to readdress the journalistic balance.

I hope you can forgive the intrusion – we’re not dead yet!

The first thing everyone notices when they arrive in Russia is that no one smiles in the street. Everyone on the metro looks like they’re in a protracted game of poker with themselves, until someone mental comes along and rides a fire extinguisher down your train, defying the laws of Russia and physics in a Youtube-friendly double blow.

It’s this combination of the super-serious and the super-mental co-existing that makes this place so different and interesting. As we Year Abroaders leave for the land of ice, snow and the world’s most sexually devastating leader, we have no idea what to expect.

Of course, I do ‘The Year Abroad Thing’ and religiously imitate the Russian hatred of smiling, obstinately refusing to beam, smirk or even grin in any public situation. This obviously at least doubles the difficulty of meeting new people. It’s hard enough, because my banter in Russian is as floppy as a limp gherkin, partially because my vocabulary leaves absolutely everything to be desired, and partially because a lot of Russian banter does initially seem to revolve around “what, you gay or something?”. I also can’t drink enough Red Bull in one day to do this, which seems to work.

As time has passed, I’ve come to realise that the reason I’ve been ‘trying to fit in’ is because I’m shy. I’m living in a foreign country, and if people come up to me and blabber consonants I generally don’t understand what they’re on about. So I started to hide away in plain sight, in my Russian-style leather jacket, with my Russian-style poker face, pretending that I was just another unfriendly-looking Russian on the metro.

I tried telling myself that I was getting into the Year Abroad Spirit, feeling the “Russian soul” or whatever, but what I was really doing was not helping my Russian, being counter-productive and wasting my time.

I discovered pretty quickly that the easiest way to meet people is to make it known that you’re foreign, and that you speak Russian (however bad it may be). Then, all of a sudden, everyone wants to hang out with you in their own Russian way (read: get really, really smashed with you).

It’s the little quirks that I have as an Englishman that interest them: my comparative politeness, or my constant apologies. I can be completely and brutally honest about myself all of the time, because it won’t matter. I’ll still be kinda cool to them.

And when I realised this, I was shocked. It took an excessive amount of grimacing and leather jacket-wearing for me to realise that I’d actually spent a lot of my life couching my tastes, opinions and desires just because I was afraid of being uncomfortable. I might be here to learn Russian, but what I’m really learning is how I act out of my comfort zone in a profoundly alien place, and then in a very familiar one. This is where it begins.

What a week: infected wisdom teeth and Samantha Brick. She has a lot in common with my dentist; she doesn’t care how much she hurts me.

There I was revising my way to a healthy 2:2, necking painkillers post-op trying to pretend my teeth don’t exist. Then I see SamBrick has been at it again. She switched on my Brick-response mode of deep sadness and rage at humanity. God Samantha, what you do to me.

She’d have you believe she’s an idiot, and that’s the biggest problem. She is wrong, obnoxious and, if I had my way, she’d be kept in Guantanamo, to be periodically brought out to destroy the mental capacity of the inmates with her repartee. But she’d probably end up siding with the prisoners anyway.

SamBrick is a judgement sent down upon us from the almighty god of bullshit morality, and possibly the Daily Mail. We’re splitting hairs: they’re the same thing. Her recent article ‘Sorry, some women ARE too ugly for TV’ saw her jump onto the Gill vs. Beard bandwagon with vulgar alacrity. Let’s look:

‘While there is no denying that Ms (um, you mean professor) Beard is supremely intelligent…’

Well good start Sam, sensible tack here, you probably can’t beat Mary in the grey-matter war.  Sadly this was then followed by, ‘there is absolutely no chance of her becoming a successful broadcaster in prime-time slots on flagship channels.’

Whoopsie-poo Sam! She already has many times over.

Call me naïve or stupid (many of you will), but it took me a while to appreciate that every sentence of her article on Prof Beard or in the one about being too fit for her friends was more than just annoying. Each has been crafted to sinister perfection in order to provoke. It’s vile, but how often do people do it this well?

This is the awful problem with Ms Brick: that she is good at what she does (I only call her Ms ‘cos I know it would get on her ‘I’m so above feminism’ tits). I can’t stop reading her articles, I can’t stop getting outraged. And short of giving up the internet for life, I can’t avoid seeing her smug image.

What really disturbs me is that my post-Brick and post-dentist behaviour is exactly the same: I beg for a quick extraction to end the pain. Neither will free me from my suffering. So has she won? Are we beaten? Should we give up, as from here on in we either read her writing or end up writing about it? If so, there aren’t enough painkillers in the world for my teeth or her pen.

NO! We must slay the Brick Beast! Or rather time will do it for us; she’s damn annoying, there is no question. Clever too, but she isn’t original. There is only so much to say about being attractive, or un, and very few people can be impressively irritating for long.  And teeth-wise, I’ll just use a vegetable knife and a pair of pliers.

Or maybe the pain is that deep down I just want to be her? After all she’d make the perfect Tab columnist. That’s what she’d say after reading this anyway.