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| flashdance |
Odd-bob 13
Less of an odd event and more of an odd conversation. From one person having songs from Flashdance in his head
and giving an impromptu performance of Kevin Bacon's Footloose routines, to a guy who never seems to unzip his green parka
being accused of wearing a ladies camisole underneath, to yet another mention of the midget porn incident (highly untasteful),
on to inferring the nature of someone's personality with the use of an apparently harmless plastic tea stirrer. No,
it was not a stand-up impro show, it was just a coffee break.
These are just some of the moments that make college, and life interesting...
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| zzz...zzz... |
Odd-bob 12
Here's a little oddity for you: Having walked the long way home from college today; across the Knavesmire (The
lush green land around the York race course) and enjoyed the daisies blowing in the light breeze, and the hot sun shining
down on my back, I arrived home in need of refuelling.
After a sandwich, a cup of tea - that always sets the world to rights; there could be a nuclear diaster and my nanna
would probably hope to solve the fallout problem by offering everyone tea - I noticed a letter lying around that said
there was a blood donating session round the corner from my house.
I think my jaunt in the mid-afternoon sun must have worn me out because when I returned from giving blood (which
is quite easy, quick, and really doesn't hurt), I felt a bit like a nap. Come to think of it, I haven't had a lot
of sleep lately due to trying to squeeze an essay rewrite in around work and family committments. Historically blood
letting was advised on many occasions, often for people who were otherwise healthy, as something that was good for the
body. So, perhaps I am doing myself a favour as much as helping whoever ends up with my blood.
While chomping on the free biscuits, I chatted to a guy who turned out to be a history teacher at one of the local secondary
schools. It was great to hear some of his experience in going to Uni, and what made him choose history. He may
have inspired me to lean towards the subject myself.
Waking up at home later, feeling like I'd had the best nap in the world, I realised it was almost ten o'clock.
I had been asleep over two hours!
The irony was in what had been playing on classic fm at the time - 'The Sleeping Beauty Suite - Erkki Melartin' I had to smirk at that. Little coincidences like that just make me smirk, I can't help it. I'm a smirker.
May 2006
 odd-bob 11
Following on from my last odd-bob with another Wuthering Heights entry - we recently went to
Bronte country. We went to a little guest house where many of us tucked into tea and scones (not me, I'm not a scone
person), then headed up T'hill to a ruined old shepherd's house at Top Within.
We were greeted by some Yorkshire monkeys ("Baaah"), who proceeded to do their best to steal the
tea and sandwiches we had brought and were perservering with in the wet and wind of the moors in March.
When we finally arrived at what is purported to be the rough location Emily Bronte had in mind for
Wuthering Heights, our cheeks were wind-blown and our feet were soaked. We had trekked over a boggy section of marshland
and various unmentionable offerings left by the 'monkeys', and those of us bringing up the rear had decided that this must
have been what it felt like to scale Everest.
As we sat drinking from flasks and naming the wildlife, our tutor prompted us to read a passage from
the novel.
As she predicted based on past experience, almost as soon as we had begun to read the weather took
a turn. A mass of grey mist came sweeping over and threw down an unforgiving, pelting sheet of rain and hailstone.
As books became sodden and unreadable, and even the sheep ran for cover, we decided to head back to the town to find the Parsonage
museum...and the pub.
The trek back entailed trudging over the boggy marsh again and I gave up my attempts to stand on
raised clumps of heather, trying to avoid the wells of freezing cold water in the ground. We went to the Bronte parsonage
museum - which was fascinating, and I was the last one out. I must have been in there for nearly two hours staring at
all the things they had on display.
The rooms are made to look as they would have done when the Brontes were alive, and there are so
many of their personal possessions on display that i didn't want to miss any of them...spectacles, writing materials, dresses,
shoes, handwritten letters - loads of stuff!
I felt a peculiar mixture of happiness at getting to see everything, sadness to think that the sisters
were long gone, and above all else, a lingering dampness between my toes!
Odd-bob 10
We finished reading Wuthering Heights in class this week.
I hate it when I reach the end of a book. There's something satisfying about being in the middle of a story, something
akin to being three spoonfuls into the middle of a huge bowl of delicious ice-cream. You can savour the taste of it, feeling
the buzz of cravings being satisfied and the physical-chemical signals being sent from your tongue to your
brain - before the feeling of being too stuffed to move takes over. Freud might have a field day with me on this one,
but I feel sated somehow when the last page has been turned and the story is no more.
Another downside to finishing this particular book is that
the task of writing an essay on it has to begin. Being unable to forget how difficult it was to get into the
story in the first place, I am now finding it hard to get out of.
I tried to begin reading before we started it in class, but
I found the first couple of chapters confusing and before my cousin (a former Huddersfield Uni' Literature student) set me
straight, I was reading mainly in anticipation of one particular scene. It involved a man and a woman having a barney
at the front door and the man saying, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!"
Once I found out I was confusing Emily Bronte's efforts with
hollywood's and could concentrate on the book more, I could begin to care about what was actually happening.
Some characters are easier to grow fond of than others in
the book, but I began to care what would happen next to all of them. A good book should be one that makes you care,
in my opinion. A good book leaves me with a sense of elation at finishing a long journey, nostalgia for
all the things the characters and I have experienced and the feeling that somehow, I am leaving a group of old friends behind.
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| aaayyy... |
Odd-bob 9
Something that has caught my attention recently has been the blatant overuse of long words.
Student A* has a great love of such words. This week some of my favourites were "insepid",
"altruistic", and the wonderful "machismo" - which I thought I would only ever hear Brian Sewell say.
Student A* strikes me as one of those guys that all the other guys wanted to be and all the lasses
had a crush on at school. He's very opinionated and obviously intelligent, wears cool t-shirts and has a general air
of cool-ness about him - a la the Fonz. Listening to Student A* is a bit like reading a heavy reference book, or a sophisticated
novel. You come across lots of words that seem very grown up and you have to go and get a dictionary at the end of each
page. It would be quite easy to fill a new page with a Student A*'s words of the week' feature.
Sometimes I find it difficult to follow what he's saying, because my brain gets stuck on the first
long word and is still trying to decipher it three sentences later. Behind that cool 'Fonz' exterior, I can't help feeling
that he is like a book with the wrong dust jacket on. Not false in terms of his personality, but the inward intelligence
and the outward appearance don't fit somehow. Like the character of Dom Jolly's scary looking punk who speaks very posh
English and politely asks the directions to the Tate Gallery.
I always imagined that University would have the effect of making me use more sophisticated words,
and it makes me wonder if anyone will be able to understand Student A* at all once he has spent a couple of years in
one. I think he will end up as a politician, or an Oxford don. Mind you, he'll probably have to get rid of the
dark hoody, spiky hair and frayed jeans!
*Names changed to protect the guilty!
Since writing this blog entry I have come across a wonderful word to describe Student A*, courtesy
of an interview with actor Hugh Dancy at (of all places) the Vanity Fair website - reached indirectly via www.mckellen.com.
He was asked to name his favourite words, one of which was Sesquepadalian -
meaning the unnecessary use of long words.
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| Henri Rousseau - The Dream |
Odd-bob 8
The stress of exams and the balancing act of work and college crept out of my subconscious mind last
night; I had a strange dream. Admittedly, the whisky and soda might have had something to do with it, but
I'm not going into that...let's just say that my imagination tends to work overtime when it is 'lubricated'.
Kids, just say no! Don't touch a drop! ...especially not when you've already had
three.
So there I was, in the very same classroom where the mock comprehension exam was held in
last Friday's literature class.
The exam began and I was already onto my third page of writing at only ten minutes into the allotted
time - my pen was on fire!
The tutor (who was keeping a watchful eye on us) popped into the room next door for a moment and
to my dread almost everyone else in the class began chatting, sitting on their desks, passing sweets around and generally
acting as if there was no exam taking place at all.
The tutor came storming back into the room and people quickly tried, in vain, to return to their
places and carry on writing their exam answers. Unsatisified with this, the tutor practically flew around the room
gathering up the half-finished answers and crumpling the collected question papers in her hands.
After leaving for another moment (during which time everyone seemed to sit quietly, like naughty
children in a corner) she returned with a new batch of exam papers and set everyone to work again - but this exam had to be
done in what was left of the original time frame.
The question papers seemed to be a muddled collection of different subjects and, while others took
these events in their stride and simply began writing again with fervour, I discovered to my horror that the paper I had been
given was something to do with Ancient Egypt. Not only that, but there were three different sets of questions.
I panicked, having no idea which set of questions to answer and not knowing anything about the Sphinx
or any of the hieroglyphics whatsoever.
I raised my hand and was told in an agitated manner which questions I should be answering, but the
explanation sounded as if it was spoken in Egyptian.
Before I could even begin to try and write anything down, a middle-aged man I know from work; ex-army,
londoner, no-nonsense and a very direct kind of fellow, announced loudly that the time was up, and told us to "move it or
lose it, you 'orrible lot!"
I had not written a word and felt absolutely dumbstruck over the whole experience. Before anything
else could happen I awoke with a start and realised that I had already woken up once, turned off the annoying beep of the
alarm on my phone and gone back to sleep again.
The panic and distress at the events of the dream quickly transferred to the real world as I realised
I was going to be late to college and that once again, Time was catching up with me faster than I could get out of bed.
December 2005
Odd-bob 7
Our first real attempts at essays were given back to us today, which was a nervous event for many
of us. The comments on your writing assignments are to a large extent even more useful than the grades they earn,
in my opinion, especially at this early stage when we need all the advice and feedback we can get.
Some of the more entertaining responses that the tutor had were unfortunately more to do with the
errors in our work than the actual writing style.
You have to be able to laugh at yourself ( in life and literature apparently ) - especially
if, like John, you manage to write a 1000 word essay in which you spell the name of your subject incorrectly; in this case
Shelley was lacking a vowel.
If we thought mis-spelling a name made our tutor cringe, with an expression like someone asked to
rip dry cotton buds in half with their teeth, then that wasn't a patch on her reaction to some of the other innocent blunders.
The revelation within one essay that the poet Keats had died of Turbulance, and not Tuberculosis
was a real eye-opener for us all and of course resulted in fits of laughter.
But that was nothing compared to the slip-up by one student (thankfully not in our class), who wrote
an essay on the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in which they referred to one of his most famous works, 'The Rhyme of The Ancient
Mariner'. In Coleridge's version, the Mariner provokes bad fortune when he slays an albatross - a traditional 'lucky
charm' for sailing folk.
In the student's version, the albatross instead finds itself being spayed.
The unnamed student's typo had the unhappy effect of changing the meaning of, and therefore ruining
the experience of the poem for the tutor, "forever."
Which was probably not the best way to go about getting a good mark. Mind you, it was very
funny!
November 2005
| odd-bob 6 |
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| jacques le coq in 'flow' |
Odd-bob 6
Maths was once again an odd experience in the week before half-term, as our tutor was struck down
by a bout of illness that had been circulating round the college pupils since the start of term.
Though she appeared to have no symptoms other than those of a common cold, the most striking effect
was the almost complete loss of her voice.
The result was that she spent the major part of the lesson trying to make us understand what we were
doing with our fractions and ratios through the use of mime.
Even Jacques Le Coq or old Marcel might have had a bit of trouble with that one!
November 2005
| odd-bob 5 |
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| hmmm...the one on the left, or the one on the right...? |
Odd-bob 5
Maths is always an interesting lesson. Our tutor, Sue has an acquired sense of humour to say
the least. Illustrating a sum by decapitating three of the students (figuratively of course), was a memorable moment
in my first lesson.
Since then, I have taken some reassurance from the fact that she is a closet Trekkie. As a
rule, Trekkies generally tend to be fairly nice, if often a little warped* people. Sue is no exception to that rule.
*Pardon the pun!
I suppose it has something to do with one of the fundamental principles of 24th Century society,
important in particular in Vulcan society; IDIC. It is the belief that in the universe exists Infinite Diversity in
Infinite Combinations, and that all peoples should come to understand and appreciate this as a fact of life and one that should
encourage us to see how we might benefit from our differences rather than be afraid of them. Within this ideology there
is room for people of all types; all genders, beliefs, appearances, motivations.
Although it would be nice if we could all love each other and live in peace, man, there are other
ideologies, there are other ideas of how we should live and what our place is in the universe.
Sue may be a Trekkie, but she may favour a more Klingon perspective as opposed to a Vulcan one.
Klingons like fighting, drinking, arguing, and conquering. Their world revolves around honour, being proud
warriors and winning mighty battles. The 'decapitation incident' as it will come to be known makes me inclined to think
that Sue may infact be Klingon.
October 2005
| odd-bob 4 |
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| students are not reknowned for their healthy menu choices |
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Odd-bob 4
One of the great things about being back in college, is the fact that the food in the canteen is
like school dinners - I don't mean lumpy custard and mash potato that could pass for polyfilla, but really great lunches that
remind me of the fantastic food that used to be on offer at the primary school I used to go to in Sheffield.
One of the problems with this is that I want to eat one of everything in there. This proved
to be my undoing on Tuesday, when I decided to have the coconut sponge. That thing sat in my belly like a housebrick
ALL afternoon! Sitting in sociology, I did could hardly concentrate on all the talk of the significance of gender, or
the discussion of sub-cultures in the world - at least not while I had a new lifeform all of my own sitting in my stomach,
growling and gurgling.
Nutrition is important, because the right food can literally act as fuel for your braincells.
Drinking the right quantity of water throughout the day can heighten and prolong concentration levels, and improve the
efficiency of the brain by up to 30% alone, according to some article that was in the New Scientist a while ago.
While that may be so, and I would certainly agree that there can be all sorts of physical and mental
benefits gained from getting plenty of fluids and eating the right foods, I would have to say that coconut sponge is not one
of those foods.
October 2005
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| possibly a different KIND of culture... |
Odd-bob No. 3
Sociology. We discussed what the heck we thought cultures and sub-cultures were.
Little cultures existing within cultures, groups within groups.
Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, like the circles that you find, in
the windmills of your mind....<Ahem>
As we were sitting in the college cafeteria, trying to be heard over the noise of the teeny-boppers
packed in like tiny little tinned fish, something occurred to me - I might actually have learnt something!
I realised that there were literally tens of different sub-cultures just sitting around in the canteen.
They strolled lazily past us (one thing they had in common with each other), in their little groups
all through lunch.
First you had the Goths; they weren't very hard to identify as they all wore mainly black, lots of
dark eyeshadow and had faces like they'd drunk a mouthful of off-milk.
Then you have the girly-girls; hair just so, tons of make-up, nails done, dangly jewellery, lots
of perfume.
Next we have the less effeminate blokey-girls; tracksuit tops (with hoods more often than not), mucky
trainers, little or no make-up, kind of ordinary.
They were followed by the boho-crowd; floaty skirts, corduroy jackets, crochet cardigans and an array
of slightly hippy 1960s style accessories.
Not forgetting the boy-band lads, who hang around in jeans, t-shirts with sarcastic slogans and logos/characters
from the 1980s and various bits of bling-bling on their wrists, fingers and round their necks.
It's funny how we all try to be so original and consider individuality to be so important, when infact
we are all part of one collective or another, whether we're aware of it or not.
September 2005
Odd-bob No. 2
Maybe its a 'friday feeling' that's causing all the odd-bobs to happen on the same day. We
were discussing the power of words and the power of the meaning that we place on words. advertisers in particular love
to use short, snappy little phrases that can cleverly hold an entirely different meaning depending on the reader's point of
view, but which draw your attention sharply to their products. 'Eye-catchers'.
"Take the fashionable clothes store FCUK." Our lecturer suggested in her crisp Canadian accent,
"Now it's just four letters stuck together, and it doesn't really spell anything, but can anybody tell me what it is that
we all see when we look at this?"
At that point the majority of the class waited for someone else to say out loud what had crossed
their minds - but she beat us to it. "We all know that the letters are FCUK, but we know that what we are actually
seeing is fuck. You see this on all different kinds of people now; women, men, even innocent little babies
have these four letters on the fronts of their babygrows. Of course, it stands for 'French Connection UK', but we all
know what we actually see."
Hang on a minute. I'm sitting in a classroom and the woman just said the word fuck!
Woah! But it's an illustration of a point in this case, and one that we all instantly devoted our attention to because
of it.
It's not as if I don't swear - because I f***in do! But it is annoying when a curse is used
every other word, not to mention the fact that it takes the power away from the word, and that's sort of the point here; the
over-use diminishing our awareness of the meaning.We become blind to the power the word should have.
I've seen the billboards, I've walked right past the shop a hundred times on the high street.
I've even seen those innocent little kids in their little babygrows that have the "FCUK me" slogan on them - how could people
not realise how sick and wrong that is?! Doesn't it say something about the morality of our world -
something disturbing about the tightness of the grip of consumerism? Doesn't it say something disturbing about our blissful
ignorance of the effect these morally questionable symbols we wear with pride have on our society?
Are we so wrapped up in the stuff we buy that we forget to actually take notice of what
it says - explicitly or implicitly?
September 2005
| odd-bob 1 |
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| 'I wanna be different..' |
Odd-bob No. 1
At the end of the first week of college I decided to go over the road and get some lunch at the local
supermarket.
As a fellow 'mature student' and I left the college gateway we saw quite a lot of others milling
around.
Two young ladies in particular caught our eye and stopped the conversation short "like
a fine china plate hurtling into a brick wall".*
One of the hip young gals was wearing a very large dog collar round her neck. The other one
was holding onto, and occassionally tugging at, a lead which was attached it.
Now I know I'm not sixteen anymore - when I was I wasn't part of the 'in-crowd', but I suddenly
felt...extremely out of touch.
September 2005
*a brilliant expression not coined by me - but I love it!
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