The greatest email I’ve ever read was about my penis. The first line asked if I was sick of girls saying ‘Oh! What a tiny penis!’
To me, this seemed odd as, depending on the viewer, this would either be serious professional misconduct or just needlessly tactless.
Apparently if I took some pills, women would then say, ‘Gosh, what a large penis!’ and then they’d want to sleep with me.
Which would again be odd; if a woman is to see my penis at all, she’s generally quite far through the decision-making process. I’m not just going to whip it out on the offchance, am I? Think it through, spammers.
My cock aside, the greatest email I’ve ever read was from the Proctors. Their latest one tells us that they’re not keen on trashings involving food.
So not keen, in fact, that they’re even willing to explain to us what ‘food’ is (apparently it includes flour, eggs and beans), just in case any of us had in fact spent the last two decades being nurtured in a sealed dungeon, fed intravenously.
Just in case we’d been in Oxford for at least six months, but still felt the need to ask, ‘Food? What’s that? I’m confused. Give me some examples. Do eggs count?’
Instead of buying this food, they say, we could all give ten quid to an Oxford charity, thus doing our bit to turn the city into a grins-and-candyfloss nirvana.
Traditions like trashing smack of privilege, you see, and in a city where hundreds ‘know you don’t want the Big Issue, but…’, we might as well all be pelting them with gold nuggets tied to bits of string, before pulling the gold back from their grasping, huddled masses like the dickheads we are.
Now, I love charity; I’ll get drunk to protest against even a mediocre genocide, and if a Big Issue does look good, I’ll download it.
My problem’s this: if there’s a list of people who can legitimately ask for cash to avoid looking privileged, officials of Oxford University will only be on it when we’re all surfing icebergs in hell.
In less than a month, the University is to ask donors for over a billion pounds. I’ll stick my neck out, and guess it’s not going on a soup kitchen.
The trashing rules generally make sense – but asking for our money? Who the blithering heck do they think they are?
Talking of wasteful traditions: if 3,000 of us gave the cash spent on subfusc to charity, we’d have ninety grand right there, minimum, and a better image to boot.
If they actually cared about inequality beyond as a tool to guilt-trip students, maybe they’d ask.
Let’s give some money, but not because they say so. Do it because we say so.
Because we do care, see?
