My Dinner with Gavin

Yes that's right, the other day, I had my dinner with Gavin.

Well, it wasn't really a dinner. And it wasn't really mine, and I didn't have it, but if I were to accomodate all these factors into the title of this post, I wouldn't be able to include an obscure literary and/or film reference into the title, and that would be a far worse crime against humanity than taking a little poetic license. The fact is that this post is going to be, as usual, unutterably boring and pointless, so I must make the title as unfathomably amusing as possible in order to keep you reading. I hope I have managed that.

Anyway, the point to this post, which is sort of paradoxical since it really is very pointless and yet has a point *brief pause while Sam's rectum prolapses in utter confusion at this overwhelmingly self-contradictory statement*, is that the other day, Bec and I were walking along the campus of our delightful university for some reason that unfortunately now eludes me but as I was writing the word 'elude' suddenly no longer eluded me, we were on our way to our English tutorial from Fisher Library... Anyway, we decided to take the 'scenic architectural' route through the quad, which involves cutting across that delightfully colourfully blooming courtyard which my parents always seem to have stories about to which I never listen...

I hate to admit I've been sidetracked twice in the last paragraph already and have begun the next ramble with 'anyway' and I was so very close to doing it again with this paragraph... But yes, as we were walking through that courtyard, on one of the side benches was seated our delightful ocularly-misaligned vice chancellor Gavin Brown, who I don't think I've ever actually seen in person, or at least not since I've known who he is, and definitely not up that close (So lifelike, ooooh). Anyway, what was he doing but sitting, chatting to another old and important-looking individual in a similarly old and important-looking suit, and smoking a cigar. Pardon me for scoffing at the tragic destruction of another man's lungs, but what the fuck? We're talking 3 in the afternoon, and he's smoking a cigar? Where does he think he is, in 19th-century Suffolk? Cuba during the revolution? George S. Patton's general staff?

I don't think I'm the one who's totally out of touch, but honestly, who smokes cigars anywhere outside a poker night any more? And in public? It just seems funny to me, that while we're bombarded with casual socialists with Che on their t-shirts, emphatic feminists with 'I am part of the liberation movement' on theirs, or SUTECH members with green velvet jackets (You all know whom I mean), and yet at the top of the administrative pile there really exist these living, breathing anachronisms.

I'm not sure if my question is, what is our quaint, old-fashioned university coming to? Or, what the fuck is Gavin doing smoking a cigar instead of rolling up weed and singing "Give Peace a Chance"? (I think I may be slipping back a few years myself there, but I've already broken the artistic license barrier once in this post, so I think I'm entitled to a second slice from the artistic-license-barrier-breaking icecream cake)

But either way, it was quite a shock to my beliefs as a VSU-hating, tapas-eating, fouton-sleeping, mushroom-smoking arts student. I wonder what the vice-chancellor will be like fifty years from now... If he'll be sitting in the courtyard smoking pot and students walking past will say things like "Oh my God that's so gauche, why isn't he licking hallucinogenic toad poison?" Well you never know, que sera, sera etc.