For those of you without your finger on the pulse of UCL affairs, rumours are abounding that Mully’s may soon be sold off by the Union.
The disposal of this institution, which has supported me from the start to the end of my undergraduate degree, is anathema. It represents either the first or the latest step in the Union’s campaign to rid UCL any ‘third’ spaces. Regardless of which step it is, for me this is the final straw, and I wish to publicly declare it here. If Mully’s goes, then I will follow.
Some of you may say that swearing to leave UCL after I’ve finished my degree is a rather empty threat, but we owe it to future generations to push the Union to be better than we found it, an axiom that Richard Mully understood well when his donation built our eponymous bar. Yet, while we have pulled the short straw of watching our beloved institution burn, the Union continues to put its excessively cumbersome and bureaucratic straw into the milkshake of student experience, slurping away and hoping we won’t notice its small stingy sips sapping us of our precious bodily minerals. Well, I say no more. This has gone too far and I’m not afraid anymore, I retract my straw from our milkshake, aim my barrel, and I spit its contents through the muzzle back at the Union.
I am not writing an obituary but allow me to be nostalgic about this panna cotta of student ailments. If I am to graduate in a couple weeks, I cannot do so in good faith knowing I did not fight for the students of the future, for in there would be some stooping. And I choose never to stoop.
To my dearest Mully’s, which I confess I have only been to five times in the last three years, you have supported me like only an old friend could. Mully’s quenched my thirst and fed me when the myth of ‘Arthur Lachlan’ was nothing but a dream. When I was no one, she took me into the bosom of her dark corners and gave me the protection I needed. Angel that she is, I can still see the flashing green light of hope (alongside a sequential yellow and red) through her slender windows when there was nothing but sadness in my life. If this is au revoir, then bisous Mully’s. God bless you for having loved me so dearly.
This article appeared in CG92
