Has the winter been bleak? The sky has darkened and lecture halls have grown empty. Apologetic emails are circulating more quickly than that cough going around. Trains are ever more delayed by “slippery rails” and “slick tracks”, tap-dancing on the line between erotic and exhausting. As deadline season approaches, so do the limits of many students’ sanity.
The Cheese Grater is able to report that this is not a sheer coincidence. No, every inconvenience is a direct attack on you in particular.
You may think that the clocks went back at 2am on Sunday 27 October. You couldn’t be faulted for that assumption: every day since, we have been plunged into darkness earlier and earlier still. However, I regret to inform you that this is part of a national effort to gaslight you. Like Greg Heffley in the opening scene of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010), you too have been pranked by a city full of Rodericks, turning the clocks ahead to a time of darkness. They may be laughing now, but they won’t when you burn all the clocks and chase down the sun, that miserly cheating bastard.
Another so-called common inconvenience is the arrival of emails into your student Microsoft Outlook inbox. This is categorically untrue. Everyone else receives their messages via fax or an actual box (named Clive). The need to “open your Outlook” is a psychic attack by the woke mob. As defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary, your outlook is your “way of understanding and thinking about something” – why does UCL want you to open your mind?? Who do they want you to let in??? Famously, university is a time to lock down your thoughts. Accordingly, you should never open your Outlook and risk letting in a rogue thought or a supposed piece of ‘electronic mail’. Close those borders, lock the doors.
It may also seem colder. There is a sharpness in the air. Your classmates, associates, friends and family could all mock you, bringing up this ‘change’ in temperature as faux-naif small talk. “A bit chilly, isn’t it” and “wrap up warm” are phrases echoing the halls of UCL, ricocheting into your cochleas each day. This is yet another contrived inconvenience. They have turned the thermostat down in a vain attempt to keep you in your bed, to keep you cozy and to keep you haggard as the winter break approaches. The Cheese Grater have been unable to locate this thermostat, but be assured that the coldness is a construct to be overcome.
At last you know the truth. The voices in your head weren’t wrong: every inconvenience is a planned attack on you. You can take some solace in this. Clearly, you are the protagonist of this university and you have overcome every obstacle designed to thwart you. Next time your train is cancelled or you walk home at the pitch dark hour of 4:30pm, smile – they haven’t cracked you yet.
This article appeared in CG89
