Tonight:
4°c
Did you get into university yesterday? If so, congratulations.
Whether a fluke vacancy via the clearing scheme means you are off to Sunderland School of Pottery and Performing Arts, or you're sailing off to Cambridge with eight As, you can now be very proud. You are about to become a student. Relish the weight of history upon you.
Universities have been a vital part of western European culture since the law school at Bologna was granted the right to self-government in 1158. You are about to receive a mandate from nearly a millennium of human tradition to indulge in as much buggery, gluttony and idleness as you can cram into three hedonistic years.
The historian Ben Wilson has recorded the typical life of a student in the early 19th century. It is a model you may emulate. This student — you — will “wake at 9.30 with a headache”, spend the morning “trying not to vomit”, then flounce about town all afternoon, eating pastries. After dinner you will “go to a wine party and get hellishly cut' as a prelude to roaming the streets looking for trouble with the locals”.
Forget work. A-levels were the tough stuff. Your degree, now as then, can probably be obtained merely by sticking out nine terms spending someone else's money and inventing new ways to torment the public. Thus far you may only have tormented your teachers and your parents. All your hard work earning UCAS points is about to broaden your horizons. New student, I salute and envy you.
If, however, you are stuck at clearing, I have some words of comfort. Some of the cleverest and richest people in the world never went to university. Richard Branson, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and Coco Chanel all did it their way.
Rather than saddling yourself with £30k-worth of debt and an extra stone in weight from eating cheeseburgers every midnight, you are now free to redefine yourself as a young, hungry entrepreneur.
The job market, if that's what you had in mind, is bleak. But it will not always be bleak. And in three years, when your pals glut the market with the biggest class of graduates in living memory, you will have three years' far-more-valuable working experience under your belt.
But if it's the aforementioned hedonism that you are sore at missing out on, then I have a very simple answer. There's another place where you can go to have drunken sex with strangers, read crap French literature and band together with other students to make a public nuisance. It's called Thailand — and the last time I checked you didn't need any A-levels to get in.
This is Battersea, not Baltimore
Four middle-aged men in two plain black Volvos parked outside my house on Wednesday lunchtime. They sauntered over to my neighbour's door, kicked it down, and ran inside ellowing: “Police!”
My neighbour certainly gives a good impression of being a drug dealer, so this was what they call a fair cop. And it was a decent hullabaloo. But the door-smashing was where the excitement ended. No arrests, no gunshots, no sirens and no chase through the streets. No wisecracks from the police. No menacing hoodlums standing around watching. Just me, in my shorts, Twittering about it while pretending to deadhead the geraniums.
I know Battersea is not Baltimore but I've watched enough episodes of The Wire to expect a little more from a drugs raid. Two lessons.
First: good police work is boring police work. And second: contrary to everything one reads in the Guardian, The Wire is actually completely unrealistic.
Cheats aren't what they used to be
Why is it that some sportsmen feel it necessary to wink when they have just got away with acts of skulduggery?
Had the “injured” Harlequins rugby player Tom Williams not winked at the bench when trotting off the field last season, he would have got away with “Bloodgate”. Cristiano Ronaldo would not have been dubbed a “Portuguese winker” — a poor pun but a useful euphemism for “onanist” in tabloid display copy — had he not winked following Wayne Rooney's dismissal during the 2006 World Cup.
Are sportsmen so egomaniacal now that they cannot resist celebrating every single victory within a game, whether fair or foul? I don't remember much winking going on when Maradona scored the Hand of God goal, or when the late Hansie Cronje was fiddling Test results on behalf of the South African cricket team.
Alas! In the olden days gentlemen cheated like gentlemen, and everyone knew where they stood.
My Saturday nights are sacrosanct — I'm seeing Cheryl Cole...
Although we are barely out of the dog days, I can feel autumn on its way, settling about my shoulders like a rough, smoky blanket. It's not just that we are lighting the chimenea alongside our evening barbecues, or that the leaves on the tomato plants are browning at their edges as their crimson fruits ripen. No, it's that The X Factor starts again on Saturday.
Holy hell, I love that show. It is by turns manipulative and naive, cruel and camp. It is better edited than anything else on TV. And it is simple. Forget the gimmicks of Big Brother, or the desperate jungle mugging of I'm a Celebrity … The X Factor is the real deal.
Most people think they can sing. Most people believe they would enjoy fame. Almost all of them are wrong. It is beyond brilliant watching them find out the hard way. I refuse to go out on a Saturday night between now and Christmas.
Reader views (5)
And how many young people will have the entrepreneurial nouse of Branson et al? A handful at best.
The job market may be tough but it'll be a lot tougher if you don't have a degree.
- Dave Williams, London, 24/08/2009 12:05
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This is true story:
I asked a friend with a First in computing about an a problem I had with my computer. She said, and I quote, "go to Computer World", and with no sense of irony.
- Mark, Venice, Italy, 22/08/2009 22:59
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Dan,
Did you actually watch The Wire? When Avon and Stringer are finally arrested in the first series they wait calmly in their room.
Too many people are using The Wire as a symbol for all police drama. It's not. It's wholly different.
- Brendan Staunton, London, UK, 22/08/2009 11:09
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Lol I actually need a degree for what I want to be. It's a really competitive industry. Besides, whatever you say about Uni pretty much a waste of time, that's not how employers will see it!
- Charlie K, Abingdon, UK, 21/08/2009 23:04
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what rubbish. a uni degree will always help. forget this tosh!
- Josh Aldarav, london, uk, 21/08/2009 09:53
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