A Personal Press Release

23.4.2011

Absolute inertia has well and truly set in and I have currently been sat at my desk for five and a half hours and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Internal consensus is starting to make clear that I am almost disarmingly workshy and my inability to structure my time is becoming painfully apparent. The dissertation draft is due in in three days, meaning much work needs be done - this fact stands in brazen opposition to my mental state, which is veering sporadically between pining desperately for emotional stimulation - seeking respite in the horrible sage of the chimp eating a lady's face on Youtube - and satisfying physiological needs my stuffing my head with Fox's Jam 'n [sic] Cream.

For one of my papers, in which I will be examined in just under 5 weeks. I have attended only seven lectures and read precisely nothing. For another, I have developed a raging indifference to the discipline itself, best expressed by the other half of my brain here. For the final paper, Sociology of Education, I fucking love it but have not given it any thought for about two months.

To rapidly taxonomise everything else in my life, the awareness that I will be teaching my own class in under half a year is as exciting as it is surreal and frightening. Graduation will be a jolly old hoot. And to end on a cheery note, if I fail to get a 2.1, I actually fear for myself.

Until next time.

Psychological Decline - Cambridge Tab

I am feeling unapologetically morbid right now. Rather than allow this feeling to fester until week 5 and synchronise to everyone else’s grim misery, I will – to use the only new word I have learnt since I matriculated – ‘expunge’ my bleakness now, and make this my ‘psychological decline’ column.

I like to think of myself as being pretty outgoing, but lately I’m finding it ever more difficult to convince myself of this. You see, outgoing presupposes going out. The melody and pizzazz of my speech only really translates into a character-forming trait if I speak among other people. And, at the moment I’m forcing myself to realise that no matter how much satisfaction I get from interacting with the mirror in my bathroom, it should be no substitute for, you know, genuine, human interaction.

I first realised I had a problem when I was late for lectures last week, because I was trying to teach myself ventriloquism. I don’t think I’m being too much of a hypochondriac when I question whether this was symptomatic of something. Or, maybe everyone in this little cobbled asylum we call home has got these disconcerting habits when forced into solitude? The only difference is that you are all wise enough not to broadcast your habits on an Internet tabloid. You, unlike me, will be able to find employment in the next decade.

I spent this evening watching Shameless on 4od. Shameless makes me jealous. Maybe this is some side effect of my current flux and confused sense of place within the class structure, but for a few minutes, every part of me wanted achingly to be living on the Chatsworth Estate. Sure, they might not have much money, or jobs, and they might be a little lacking in charm or morals or sanity, but I don’t think people in Cambridge have these things either. The difference is the Gallaghers and the Maguires are happy.

I look at the sour panoply of sullen faces among fellow finalists, and I certainly don’t feel like we’re drifting freely through a bastion of privilege. I sit in seminars alongside Masters students, and I see the uneasy way they carry themselves: the way they look to be detached from any semblance of care for their body, which has become a mere vehicle to transport their pulsating mind between lecture hall and library. I stare at these breathing cadavers as they note-take impulsively, and I think: ‘I’ll probably end up like that.’

Things could be different. My school friends are now getting paired up, getting engaged and eying up their first homes – they are settling into being functional grown-ups… in relationships. The only thing that wraps its arms around me at night and whispers in my ear is the sense of encroaching sorrow as the inexorable sands of time flitter down my pillow, making little gritty embankments in the fabric streams of my now stagnant tears. Some of these old school friends get woken in the night by the sound of their children calling them – presently, some high-heeled skank is stood outside my window in Homerton yelling drunken obscenities in RP at some unseen other who will inevitably look exactly the same, preventing me from entering the land of Nod.

So, this is my cheery week 3 update for you: my life is, at present, a cold-scarred wilderness, barren of smiles, in which I sit transcribing children’s voices for my dissertation, eat Go Ahead wafers and wait eagerly for some neighbour to make the mistake of knocking on my door, thus providing me with an opportunity to regale them, face to face, with all of the above.

If you are reading this, neighbours, tiptoe down to 215 – if I’m not at my desk, I will either be at the bathroom mirror fashioning a hoody as a puppet for Stage 2 of the ventriloquism education, or my head will be planted deep in the salty tear-grooves of my pillow.

Cafe Culture - Cambridge Tab

For the next eight weeks, I am a columnist with Cambridge Tab (www.cambridgetab.co.uk) and I will reproduce these columns on here. They're not explicitly sociology, but nor is most of the blog. Happy days.

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Published on Cambridge Tab - http://cambridgetab.co.uk/columnists/jonny-walker

Waking up on a typical weekday, I open my wardrobe and look for something to wear. I look for something that suggests I’m intelligent, in an effortless way, with a smidgeon of eccentricity if I’m feeling bold. I walk around town with pomp – the only form of elitist posturing I can just about pull off, since I’ve not got the right body or face for flounce, dandy or rugbyboy. Thankfully, I am not rich enough to be an authentic twat by Cambridge standards. Rather, I fit into that ‘happy medium’ margin, and lie somewhere between being a bland, inoffensive, background character and an egocentric joke who considers himself Messianic.

I’d like to say I spend my typical afternoon as a sort of 1920’s Parisian intellectual, in smoke filled cafés. I’d like to say that I am often surrounded by similarly minded others, and we often throw down our copies of Le Figaro and get angry; lambasting the system. In reality, I spend my typical afternoon flitting between Starbucks and Nero like a moth drawn to two overpriced flames, and reading social theory at 15-minute intervals. This week, as I sat alone drinking a tepid £3.40 beverage and attempting to absorb some Habermas, a couple of girls on the table next to me advised each other how best to tame their overflowing groin fringe. I wanted to learn about the public sphere, but all I got was the pubic triangle.

Why waste my time and money drinking bad tea to the soundtrack of feminine grooming? The answer is simple. More than family, more than Doncastrian friends, more than having a self-replenishing food supply, the thing I miss most about home during term time is a comfortable chair. I really am a man of simple pleasures, and the jaunty swivel desk chair upon which I am now perched emphatically does not satisfy them. This problem can’t be solved by reclining on my bed and working, as any cant of more than 30° tells my body that it’s naptime, which inevitably lasts a solid five hours.

The library isn’t an option. The library is full of books, which intimidates me. The library is off limits. So, in this vainglorious quest for lumbar support, I find myself hovering in the queue for Nero CostaBucks, with its faux-leather sofa-chairs, with my despicably well-used loyalty card resting exhausted in my palm, begging for mercy as the stamp batters it yet again.

When I went home at Christmas, I realised that my twattish pursuit of the café culture had left my bank balance unhealthily overdrawn, and I had nothing to show for it. It felt like emerging from a heavy drinking session, and feeling slightly uncomfortable about how stupid your vodkalogic was. Why did I ever justify indulging in a cardboard beaker of hot froth on a daily basis?

In this spirit of reflection and revaluation, I tumbled into the abyss and began to question how and why I even ended up in this strange little city. What led me towards this idle pursuit of padded furniture when everyone else is pursuing training contracts and grad schemes?

As a teenager, I played a lot of basketball. But, when I reached the end of my GCSEs, I had got bored of having to train every day. This put me in a difficult situation, because my entire friendship group was founded upon our retrospectively amusing Americophilia, and our liking for DMX and Fubu. I had a lot of respect for the coach, so felt I wanted to let him know that I was quitting.

“Why, Walker, why?” he plead.

What could I say? “Thanks for the free sessions every day for three years. Thanks for employing me as a coach on £20 per hour aged 14 (which remains the best job I’ve had). Thanks for everything. Unfortunately, I’m so lazy that I’d rather be friendless and watching Beauty and the Geek repeats than do anything that involves kinesis.” I didn’t actually say that. I said: “I’m going to try and get into Cambridge.” That was the seed, a mendacious impulse.

Cambridge was never actually an intention. Truthfully, I never really thought about university at all. But, Cambridge being Cambridge, it was the perfect get out – it made me look ambitious, intelligent and was the perfect alibi for non-committal responses: “I would wash the pots but I’m revising for a chance to climb the slippery pole of social mobility.”

Given time, I actually started to believe my own protestations and considered applying. Cambridge was the place to learn. And I guess it is, but from week 1, term 1, year 1, I found myself becoming more inclined to just mope about doing fuck all – stalking my friends’ family members on Facebook, watching ‘Baby Monkey riding backwards on a Pig’ on YouTube and establishing my previously mentioned quest for the perfect chair. ‘You’d only fall asleep if you went to the lecture’ became the mantra tattooed all over my every waking thought.

That slippery slope of demotivated indifference is what ultimately led me towards the coffee shops. If it looks like I’m intellectual, maybe that will spur me on to work – that was the theory. But in practice, no – it’s just me, a Frappucino and vaginal topiary.