If you are nasty about things for a living, from time to time people will suggest your antipathy springs from envy. You can’t make nice things yourself, so you make fun of those who can. This is not true in my case. I’d far rather spend my time taking cheap swipes at Melanie Griffith than directing or starring in films featuring her. Such hard, demanding work is best avoided.
Yet that argument does pinch a little whenever I consider how much I loathe bloody students. You hate them too. Look at the bearded, fag-smoking, baggy-hat wearing slugabeds. Watch how they lug conspicuously unread books by the likes of David Foster Wallace around pop-up shop-front bars decorated with old-lady furniture and table-tennis tables plucked from skips.
Hang on. I feel an "in my day" coming on. In my day, during the era of post-punk experimentation, we at least made an effort to dress for the future. What about this lot? The matted jumpers. The shag-pile hair. The endless, endless variations on mountaineers' beards. They look as if they're preparing to go mackerel fishing with the makers of Man of Aran.
Engaging the most confusing of cultural pirouettes, today’s trendier undergraduates dress like unfashionable, engineering students of the 1980s who, after lugging T-squares around campus for three years and failing to impress the self-elected cultural elites, went on to own islands and holiday with presidents. (I’m aware the focus is on the men here. But I’ve no idea what female students wear any more. Clogs and shawls, for all I know.)
Derision and irritation
There are, in life, few other examples of a condition that, once left behind, immediately becomes a subject of derision and irritation. Within minutes of completing one’s final exams, the vileness of the student state embeds itself in the (quite large) part of the human brain that controls irrational hatreds. Suddenly, they seem to be everywhere.
They’re pretending to know about Gramsci on buses. They’re exercising their rights to pay half-price for burritos.
Why can’t I get a cheap burrito? I actually contribute to society. It becomes very hard to reconcile the slovenly, pretentious layabout with the person you were only a few years, months or days ago.
Let us pretend no longer. The reason those of us who aren’t students hate students is because, consciously or not, we recognise those young people are enjoying the most delicious stage of the sorry sentence that is life. That dreadful school business (with its fierce hierarchies and endless hours on wet playing fields) is behind you and the even more appalling terrors of proper adulthood (from which death is the only escape) have still to be encountered.
There is a very good scene at the end of David Hare’s great play Plenty. Susan Traherne, who fought the Nazis bravely as a British agent, has lived through all the grubby compromises of the post-war consensus. The Suez crisis stripped away any remaining illusions.
After several failed relationships, she ends up miserable in a grim seaside boarding house. We drift back to memories of the war's last days. Looking out at an idyllic French vista, the younger Susan remarks: "There will be days and days and days like this."
Studying at university is not much like working for the Special Operations Executive. But you may end up viewing your last hours at college with the same baleful poignancy that attended Susan’s recollections of VE Day. There won’t be days like that. Life almost certainly won’t get any better than it is now, young person.
September spills out and the third-level students creep back to whatever they use instead of books these days. Obviously, The Irish Times recommends that you attend all your lectures, take copious notes, be sensible about drugs and buy this paper on newsprint.
But, for heaven's sake, remember – quoting Viv Savage in This is Spinal Tap – to have a good time all the time. Most importantly, do everything you can to remain there forever. Attack a pointless MA. Do further studies in macro-nonsensical this or that. It's horrible out here. You won't like it.
Worst of all, you may end up hating the person you are now.
Sexist slogan
The good people at
[ ConcernOpens in new window ]
are inviting supporters to walk a mile in high-heeled shoes (or their own shoes, if they can’t manage the balancing) today to raise money for victims of domestic and sexual violence. Fair enough.
Notwithstanding our issues with the whacky “good sport” approach to charity, we endorse this commendable project. It does, however, seem a shame Concern felt the need to promote the campaign with the unhelpful, sexist slogan: “Are you Man Enough?”
Isn’t this a manifestation of the attitude the charity is trying so hard to resist? Anyway, give them some money.