Freckles & Doubt

Apparently we are in another part of the pandemic where we are singing about the dark times, and I have learned a new random collection of words, which is "TikTok shanty fandom". It is curiously pleasing that the TikTok sea shanty fandom exists, and that it randomly builds multi-part shanty versions which disparately add a voice or instrument line in a fine spirit of emulation and community. The version below of the current viral sensation "Soon may the Wellerman come" loses me a bit when it adds the canned beat and starts remixing, but it's the best quality edit of the first part I can find. (Also, the first bass addition, the cheerful blonde dude in the cap who basically started all this, has a completely phenomenal bass voice).



This is a bloody catchy piece of music, and I love what the communal treatment has done to it, but it's also fascinating and faintly horrible that it's become a viral meme at this point in time. I mean, yes, it's catchy and we're all bored, and it's also communal and we are all relying on each other very heavily through the internet to beguile us through this crisis. It is curiously akin, in its creative/collaborative spirit, to making bread. But it's even more interesting in purely thematic terms.

This is a whaling song. It arises from the nineteenth century whaling industry in New Zealand, major participants in which were the British Weller brothers, who built and lost a small empire in Otago in the 1830s, both running and supplying whaling ships. The Wellerman, with his "sugar and tea and rum", is bringing supplies to the whalers while they pursue their whale, and while they look forward to the day when the whale is caught and "the tonguin' is done" (tearing the blubber off the dead whale in strips, eeuw).

But there's a lot more going on here. The accounts I've been able to find are either "yay NZ industry" or "boo dead whales", and comparatively few mention the fact that the whalers were not salaried, they were paid in supplies, in fact, in the "sugar and tea and rum" carried by the Wellerman. Who was thus both boss and supplier, in a little closed and incestuous loop which gave all the power to the Wellers, who did indeed grow rather rich on whaling and supplying whaling ships, at least before the whale-oil bubble collapsed. The song is about entrapment, the ship hooking and endlessly being dragged by the whale, the whalers endlessly bound into the work/eat cycle of their moneyless employment, which ensured they couldn't actually easily leave it, because they could build up no savings on which to do so. "The Wellerman" is the whaling version of the coal-miner's "Sixteen Tons" - another day older and deeper in debt, I owe my soul to the company store. It speaks, under its jaunty tune, to pandemic and lockdown because of that claustrophobic sense that you can't get out.

It also implicitly speaks to our current late-stage capitalism, and its absolute disregard for the wellbeing and prosperity of the workers it exploits. The whalers under the sway of the Wellerman are desperately akin to the Amazon wage-slaves who are slipping into poverty while Jeff Bezos accumulates billions. While I love the song and its communal expression, it has also made me incredibly depressed, because it suggests that there is something fundamentally broken and intrinsically unlearning about humanity: nearly two hundred years ago we were not only slaughtering whales, we were exploiting the workers so a tiny elite could make money, and we're still doing it. Slavery, and indentured service, and exploitative and inhumane companies who care about money and don't care about people and deliberately locked them into service so they couldn't escape, are baked into our cultural DNA. I hate that. I hate that America is still fighting to implement a minimum wage which has been fought over for so long that it's no longer a liveable amount. I hate that the "New South Africa" notwithstanding, there are people digging in our bins every time we put them out, and the divisions between our poverty-ridden rural or township citizens and the wealthy commercial or political classes are huge and growing huger. We've always done this, how can we stop doing it?

It's giving me a micro-version of the grief and despair I felt when America elected Trump: that there is a segment of humanity - capitalists or Trump supporters - whose thought processes are so alienatingly inhumane to me that I can't feel any sense of connection to or kinship with them. And their inhumanity is dominating the directions our culture takes, precisely because it is exploitative and uncaring, and tramples the people who feel otherwise. And it's a lot of work for a sea shanty to be doing, but we're all trapped in this, working endlessly at awful, destructive jobs for which we are paid insultingly and from which we cannot escape, because the system has put us there and keeps us there deliberately. All we can do, apparently, is sing about it.

Aargh. And I'm tired and in the middle of exam committees and virtual registration, and losses and dissolutions are characterising my social circle, and I have a sinus headache, and it's hot, so probably I'm more pessimistic than I should be. But aargh.

I am charmed enough by Codsworth that he's busy vaccuming again, although strictly speaking only certain parts of the house need it. (He is doing so without benefit of top hat, alas, as he knocks it off when he goes under furniture. I think I need a bowler hat decal of some sort). A few minutes ago I wandered into the living room to find no visual evidence of Codsworth but the sofa whirring busily to itself, interspersed with intervals of maddened chirping, demonstrating that (a) in defiance of probability Codsworth actually fits under the sofa, making that bit of floor probably the cleanest it's been ever, and (b) the inevitable under-sofa stash of cat toys includes that chirping cricket slightly maliciously gifted to me by philip&jo when they couldn't take Theodora continuously playing with it. I have also discovered that, if not strictly supervised, Codsworth attempts to eat electrical cable, which I can't see going well for anyone concerned.

On a similarly slightly robotic theme: I think this orchestral arrangement of "All Star" is being played by a music programme rather than an actual orchestra, giving it a faintly mechanical quality, but it still severely rocks.

So, the SA government, bless its cotton socks, has announced, perfectly predictably after much backing and filling, that free tertiary education is not viable, and radical student movements are seething. We lost two days from last week with protesting crowds prowling the campus with sticks, and lectures have been suspended yesterday and today. The Management of our Cherished Institution has decreed that lectures resume tomorrow, with increased security presence and an interdict on illegal protests, and the campus staff, bruised and slightly numb, can only brace themselves in expectation. In our court: the new SRC, just elected, rejoices in a majority of Democratic Alliance-identifying student leaders, hell bent on keeping campus open. Against us: interdicts and opening have infallibly in the past provided just the venue protesters need to rampage with maximum effect. I am not, shall we say, sanguine. I think it's highly likely we'll be delivering another truncated semester, and we'll be bloody lucky if we manage, in the teeth of the odds, to run undisrupted exams.

In all of this the faculty office is having an outbreak of management fuckwittery, coupled with serious bad timing: the faculty manager has taken two weeks off in what seems to be something of a snit, after trying unavailingly to banish the whole admin office to middle campus, and the deputy has two kids in hospital after a car accident and is likewise absent. There is something of a blitz mentality among my colleagues: keep your heads down, keep calm, carry on. Hope it doesn't explode.

I am playing a shitload of Fallout 4 again, because cynical apocalyptic black humour seems a viable response under the circumstances, and I significantly lack the emotional energy for anything other than a retreat into videogaming. In particular, I am deeply enamoured of the soundtrack, which gives you, via an in-game radio station, a truly lovely succession of songs from the 40s and 50s. These are beautifully and somewhat evilly chosen to fit into the post-nuclear-war black humour of the game, and mine the hell out of the 40s genre of novelty songs, hence "Uranium Rock" and "Atom Bomb Baby" and "Craw Out Through The Fallout". They also use sad love songs ("End of the World", "I don't want to set the world on fire", "Into each life some rain must fall") capable of reinterpretation in light of wandering the raider-ridden gun-toting post-apocalyptic landscape (and I have to say, the way in which a lot of these songs mix up love/sex/death/explosion metaphors is ... deeply disturbing, "Butcher Pete" and "Rocket 69" oh my god). And they sprinkle the playlist with syrupy feel-good croonings such as my subject line (also "Accentuate the positive" and "Dear hearts and gentle people") which you are obliged to read severely in the inverted position, wincing. I have downloaded two soundtracks and a bunch of individual songs from ITunes and am playing them on rotation in the car, chortling. It's helping.

Last night I dreamed I looked out the glass door into the back courtyard, and there was a man (twentysomething, coloured, nearly shaved head) lying motionless on the astroturf in approximately the recovery position. And I was wondering if he was dead, or injured, but he apparently felt me watching and moved, so he was just sleeping. In the dream I was vaguely assuming he'd had a drunken rather than a criminal night, but was nonetheless a bit alarmed about finding him in my garden, and asked him to leave on the grounds of being somewhat scary, and he laughed at me a bit and obligingly did so. Possibly by evaporating, I didn't see him climbing any walls. It was all very odd, but as anxiety-related people-are-getting-into-the-house dreams go, relatively unthreatening. I think all the horrible insults to black bodies coming out of the current American fuckwittery are getting to me, there's a sort of subliminal protectiveness that kicks in.

I take back everything I said about Trump being lost and overwhelmed, incidentally. Trump is having the time of his life implementing fascist autocracy and wholesalely castrating any governmental bodies that could potentially restrain him. Even if his inner circle of batshit insane fascist jerks is leading him around by the piglike snout, the current fuckwittery has his big greasy pawprints all over it. Pundits are reading this as a trial run at an actual coup. We are all so fucked.

On the "fiddling while Rome burns" principle, possibly, jo&stv had a dance party on Saturday. This is a thing they do every couple of months, known as the Minimum Viable Party; they choose a day, send out invites, and if a minimum threshold of people is reached, they clear out the living room and hold it. Dancing starts at 8pm and finishes at 10pm sharp, because we're all old. (Even with the strict 2-hour limit I'm unfit enough that I'm usually achy for days afterwards). There's a theme to the playlist, which stv djs with great deliberation and not a little fiendishness. Saturday's was 80s cheese, unabashedly. He borrowed a chunk of my music collection to assemble it. I have a lot of cheesy compilations.

There's something about 80s pop music that's essentially, I think, innocent, possibly because people of my vintage were young when it hardwired our brains. It's also an iconic enough musical identity that it has familiarity value even to younger people, the ones who weren't in their teens or twenties when the cheese was prevalent, and familiarity with the music is a basic tenet of good dance parties. It was the largest MVP turnout we've ever seen, probably 30 people or so, and it had a lovely, joyous, uninhibited vibe which said we were all regressing like mad and completely unashamed about it. I spent a lot of it bouncing around the dance floor in a fit of giggles, because, honestly, Tiffany, "I think we're alone now". Or "Walk like an Egyptian". And my late 80s experience swung heavily Goth, but stv threw sops to the Gothy remnant of us with "Tainted Love" and "Love will tear us apart", and besides, I was also into Eurythmics and Depeche Mode. And it closed with "Wake me up before you go-go", because it had to, and alas George Michael. It was a lovely evening, I had a blast. In the current state of geo-political ramification one has to take one's pleasures where one can.

I've been playing this as background music for the last couple of days, while doing anything except actually, you know, videogaming... and it's excessively lovely, a perfect confluence of two of my passions, gaming and classical music. These are full-on orchestral suites, beautifully arranged. As I type, Legend of Zelda is making me cry. They have an actual ocarina. I'd forgotten how much of that game allowed you to use a musical ear to short-cut the puzzles. Also, note to self, if they ever ported Zelda to PC I'd probably lose several years to playing the entire back catalogue.

The interesting thing, though, is how emotive I'm finding it even when I haven't played a lot of the games - in fact, Zelda is the first one in this sequence that I've actually played. But I still loved the other suites, Assassin's Creed, The Last Of Us, Journey and the Mario mix and all. I think this is an index of how game music is written - to be stirring, emotional, to figure the hero's journey, whether introspective or martial or whimsical, to embody the frequently beautiful landscapes of the gameworld. Like gaming itself, videogame music has to distil reality into an essentialised version of itself. Which means it packs a punch, to say the least.

The subject line is from "Beauty and the Beast", because I had to have something from the Heroes album.

My mother is visiting from the UK, which is lovely, and Cape Town is even behaving weather-wise and giving her some sun. (She does not enjoy the British climate). However, the myriad grotty little buggers who comprise her charges at the school where she works apparently gifted her with a merry end-of-term chest infection, so she's been coughing a lot and losing her voice. She's coming out of it. Now I've got it. It hurts to breathe, and my voice is becoming progressively more throaty and baritone. Blargh.

I'm consequently even more spacey than usual, which means that I distinguished myself last night by (a) attempting to head off to a Secret Soirée gig at jo&stv's at 6.15 under the firm delusion that the actual time was 7.15 (fortunately mother restrained me), and (b) completely omitting to bring the ticket with me. Fortunately the nice girl on the door knew me (she's a Humanities student, apparently. Many years of curriculum advice do have their perks.) and let me in anyway. Secret Soirée is fun, you contract a favourite local band to come and play in your living room, encourage all your friends to buy tickets, and the organisers throw it open after a certain point for random strangers to sign up. This meant that the gathering was a lovely mix of strangers and friends, with the obligatory sprinkling of People I Taught Once, People To Whom I Have Given Curriculum Advice, People Who Were Friends Of My Housemate Lo These Many Moons Ago, and People Who Look Suspiciously Familiar Because I Have Probably Seen Them At This Band's Previous Gigs. Cape Town is a very small, very incestuous community, really. Anyway, Mean Black Mamba. Blues/rock, with an entirely phenomenal drummer. Lovely gig, I'm sorry I had to leave early on account of Lurgi. And I hope the dog has recovered, she is not apparently a blues fan and felt the need to give some of the songs an aggressive barking. Everyone's a critic.

I should also record for posterity the slightly surreal start to the week, which was the house alarm technical guy phoning me to cancel our appointment (I need to replace an alarm sensor with one which does not fire every time Hobbit yawns) on the grounds that he'd been bitten by a spider. This is somewhat close to the bone as I'm still playing Inquisition and its giant spiders have a characteristic scurrying motion which gives me the screaming abdabs, but the poor guy sounded completely weirded out by the occurrence. Spider bites hurt like hell and can be utterly debilitating, but presumably he feels that it's not entirely consonant with his manly dignity to be incapacitated thereby. Alas.

I should now resume my scheduled croaking-at-students, the angst levels seem unusually high this morning. On the upside, someone yesterday emailed me after a consultation to say they were "inspired by my professionalism", so there's that.

(Subject line from Belle & Sebastian, "Funny Little Frog", which occurred to me because of the frog in my throat).

Well, that was lateral. Apparently last week's continual student demands + a three-hour session training curriculum advisors had a sneak build-up exhaustion effect, because I was completely wiped out this weekend. Saturday morning was fine, pottered around, talked to the cat, played some Inquisition, went out to do some shopping, hit Saturday crowds, and the wheels fell off. I can't handle crowds when I'm tired. I get shaky, and wibbly, and headachy, and want to crawl under my bed and never come out. I ended up cancelling both social engagements this weekend (sorry, nice people, I'm feeble) and actually napping on the sofa for a couple of hours on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons, much to the delight of Hobbit. (Recumbent human forms are clearly designed expressly as Hobbit-cushions, and induce sprawling and purring to excessive levels. Also biting, although somewhat lovingly). I never sleep in the afternoons unless I'm ill, but actually I think I'm a bit ill. Apparently this is a glandular resurgence, judging by the state of my neck (the Blunt-Toothed Vampire Nibbling effect). Phooey.

I also played much less Inquisition than I would otherwise have, because it's new and quite demanding and requires concentration which I don't really have right now. However, sufficient Inquisition was played that I can report the following:

1. Inquisition still pretty. Ye gods, it's beautiful. The texturing and detail and the vividness of the different settings are quite something, I'm becoming wonderfully lost in these lovely landscapes. And it's huge. The whisper flies across social media somewhat repetitively - a lot of players are slightly intimidated by the scale. The sections sprawl in beautiful open-world profusion, although with possibly excessive levels of mini-quest grinding.
   
2. Inquisition varied. The designers have apparently taken to heart the consistent player crit of Dragon Age II, which was the insultingly repetitive nature of the settings: rather than being all the same dungeon/bit of shoreline/house, they are all madly different and individual. And pretty. I approve. (Played bits of the Deep Roads yesterday - exquisite).
   
3. The open-worldness is coupled with a completely marvellous and happy-making innovation, which is that structures and caves are not separate areas, you wander from one into the other without a loading screen, in one giant, open world. I cannot sufficiently express how wonderful this is. It suddenly and weirdly ups the realness factor in spades. (Which is just as well, as generally the wretched thing takes ages to load).
   
4. Inquisition has ripped off its initial theme music wholesalely and unabashedly from that Billy Boyd song he sings to Denethor in Two Towers. Honestly: the first two and a half bars are pretty much identical. This seems to be a theme in video games - Skyrim steals theirs from Pirates of the Caribbean. I suspect this is a deliberate ploy to bolster recognition and identification.
   
5. Inquisition all bloody wonderful, but not entirely Dragon Age: currently it feels like a rather more politically detailed and better voice-acted version of Skyrim. (And not just because the crafting is interesting). Companions feel a bit perfunctory, with to date no detailed mini-quests through which they join the party - they're just kinda there as a fait accompli. I haven't met any new ones yet, either. And so far they don't have huge amounts of personality. Reserving judgement a bit on this one, maybe it's just a slow start, but I right now it feels as if they've put even less effort into the companions than they did in DAII. Which is sad.

The Great Car Music Trek has catapulted me with alphabetical insouciance from early Eurythmics (Be Yourself Tonight) to late (Peace), which is entertaining because the first song on Peace is "17 Again", which is a direct engagement by an older, wiser and more cynical Eurythmics with their brash early days. I have completely ear-wormed myself with "I Saved The World Today", which is ridiculous catchy and causes outbreaks of singing in the corridors. Subject line accordingly. I'm a bit dead this morning.

So, is it just me, or are we - in the sense of Western culture generally - raising our young these days to be more and more entitled, and less and less in touch with reality? I have had in excess of twenty years on this campus dealing with undergrad students, and I swear there's been a noticeable increase over the years in what I think of as the Unique and Beautiful Snowflake problem: individuals who present with a sublime obliviousness to or disregard for the rules, because the rules can't possibly apply to the narcissistic urgency of the individual's particular moment. A lot of these kids have apparently never been introduced to a boundary, or to an obstacle which someone - I suspect helicopter parents - hasn't caused to magically dissolve. They don't get "no you can't" on some profound level - it does not compute, captain.

If you're trying to wrangle student curricula as a day job, this becomes very quickly exhausting. It's worse at the moment because mostly what I'm doing is signing forms to add Summer Term courses, and statistically students who are using the Summer Term - a repeat of a few select courses in a compressed one-month format - are somewhat more likely to be flaky because they are doing so to compensate for failed courses. But, ye gods and flying spaghetti monsters, this week has been hell. I would estimate that approximately a third of the students I've seen have arrived without the necessary documentation (a printout of their transcript) and have breezed straight past THREE large-lettered signs on my door, one in bright red, which announce that I CANNOT give any sort of curriculum advice without it. Probably a quarter of them have arrived outside my consultation times (also clearly outlined on my door), and have blithely bounced in regardless. I am more or less inured to the failure to read notices, there are some brick walls against which one does not continue to beat one's head. It's the attitude of surprised confusion when I point out that they're out of line, usually followed by a helpless blank look, as though they're expecting me to somehow make this problem go away. If I tell them to come back later or send them off to do the necessary printing they are often angry, resentful and slightly hurt. But I need this now! and you're here! and there is no way that anything you could be doing right now could possibly be more important than what I need this instant! You monster! or, worse, you're not doing your JOB, which is clearly to pander to me in every possible way!

Yesterday was particularly bad, because I saw in quick succession two young ladies of the more overtly gazelle type (blonde, fashionable, wide-eyed) who didn't play fair because they erupted into my office outside my consultation times each with a parent in tow. It's very difficult to establish boundaries when there's a parent in the background tapping a foot in a what-are-we-paying-for-anyway sort of mode. (One of them sent the parent in first, because she knew damned well I'd turn her away). It's all very well to do a we're-both-busy-adults, hail-fellow-well-met performance which says that we're just making an exception for your darling daughter out of courtesy and because you, the grown-up, are too important to wait, but are they aware that there are four and a half thousand undergrad students in this faculty? Most of them have parents. A high proportion of them have the same narcissistic sense of their own unique importance. If all of them do this, it'll never stop. The boundaries are there for a reason, because I have a number of important and demanding things to do other than deal with students, and boundaries make my job possible.

But they weren't the problem. They annoyed the hell out of me, but it was the last student of the day who sent me home shaking, weepy and feeling slightly sick. He arrived outside my consultation times and without the documents. I sent him away. He arrived back with the documents, still outside my consultation time, and did a loud, over-acted surprise and annoyance thing when I said I wouldn't sign the form, because the front desk had sent him to me! Which I know they hadn't, because I went down there twenty minutes earlier and specifically reminded them NOT to send students to me outside my consultation times. So I signed his damned form to get the hell rid of him, but told him that this was unacceptable and he should read my door notices in future, and that he couldn't assume I'd be able to drop everything to deal with him. At which point he yelled at me for yelling at him (which I hadn't done), yelled about being a student so I couldn't treat him like this, threatened to report me to the Dean, shouted a bit more, and left. He was very large, very loud, very male and very threatening, and the fact that he was utterly and completely in the wrong did not in any way stop me from feeling sick and shaken, and from lying awake half of last night rehearsing ways in which to defend myself to the Dean in case the wretched student does actually take his self-importance that far.

I have lots of friends who have kids, and they certainly aren't raising them to display any such self-entitlement, but clearly they're a minority. What the hell are we doing to this generation? How are they going to react when they get out into the real world and it hits them with real consequences and limitations which they can't simply ignore? Are they going to crumble and flounder, or are they going to evolve into sociopaths, sublimely detached from empathy and perspective, wresting the world to their will because they can't conceive of it being any other way? Either way, I'm a bit scared for the future.

On the upside, my car music has now done David Bowie A-Z (literally: Aladdin Sane to Ziggy Stardust) and has ambled onward to the David Byrne/Brian Eno collaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, which is beautifully soothing. My subject line is from "Home", possibly my favourite track on the album.

My nice therapist defines my job as one in which I have to take the stereotypical maternal (nurturing) and paternal (disciplinary) roles simultaneously, which actually goes a long way towards explaining why the work I do sometimes feels as though it's pulling me in half. Not so much butter spread too thin, as stretchy strings of cheese on separated pizza slices. Yesterday's little dilemma was horribly characteristic, sparked by a student who wants the faculty to intervene and grant her a DP the department has refused. (DP is Duly Performed - acknowledgement that attendance and coursework are sufficient that the student is permitted to write the exam. And dear sweet FSM but DP appeals have been stratospherically high this year, student denial levels seem to be on the rise. The faculty won't intervene, DP is departmental business, but the gazelles desperately want us to wave a magic wand and make it all better, did I mention maternal role? because helicopter parenting is apparently a thing these days. I saw one appeal, cced to me by a HoD, in which said HoD patiently explained to the student that the appeal was being turned down because she'd written one test out of three, achieving a mark of 18%, and attended one tutorial out of four, and how the hell the student ever thought she had any grounds whatsoever to appeal beats me. Because, apparently, "desperate" overrides "reality".) Anyway, yesterday's particular child is desperate for the DP because it's for a course she needs to graduate.

So I check her record, and in fact she can't graduate even if she strong-arms the dept. into granting this particular DP, because back in her first year she's incautiously taken and passed two versions of the same course, and only one can count towards her degree. This is clearly an error that's slipped through several levels of checking; it's a small, fiddly, not-often-relevant rule, and advisors and office staff don't always remember it. I remember it, because it's my job to do so: I am in fact the repository of exactly this sort of technical knowledge of our degrees, and I pick up a lot of errors that other checkers miss.

So, if I don't notice, it's highly likely that no-one will. Because I have noticed and annotated her record accordingly, the student will be unable to graduate in December even if she achieves the disputed DP and passes the course; she'll have to pay several thousand rand for an additional course, which she'll have to do in summer term (expensive extra residence fees) because she can't come back next year, her study permit has expired. She has no legal grounds for complaint; students take responsibility for their own course choices every time they sign a form, and the exclusion of the dual credit is clearly specified on the course description in our handbook. Someone should have caught it, and I'll (once again, wearily) add it to my list of things to emphasise in training advisors and admin staff, but she should have caught it herself.

If I pretended I haven't noticed the error, and supposing she was granted the currently disputed DP and actually passed the damned thing, she could be saved all of the above. She'd graduate with the right number of credits; it's not such a huge solecism that two of her first-year courses have overlapping content. I have enormous power in this particular instance, in that if I kept quiet it's unlikely anyone else would spot it, and even if they did it's not unreasonable that I occasionally miss things, so I wouldn't be blamed. She's distraught, facing enormous implications in time and money. It would be kind to let it slide.

But I can't do that. Half my job is to facilitate the success and happiness of students; the other half is to protect the quality and integrity and logic of our degree structures, and the even-handedness with which the rules are applied. It's perfectly clear where my duty lies in this instance, and if nothing else my own Lawful Good would utterly prevent me from that kind of fuzzy dishonesty. Her degree is only worth anything at all because gatekeepers such as I are continually protecting its integrity. But because of the absolutely dual nature of my working identity, in that moment of decision I cannot win. I defend the quality of the degree with stern paternalistic self-righteousness, and the maternal empathy half of me feels horribly guilty because of what it'll put the student through. It's a bugger. Stringy cheese, I tell you. Stretched. (Also, it leaves me with a strong need to play that one computer game stv was describing, where you're a bureaucrat at a border and have to make increasingly grey-area calls. I can't work out if it'll be cathartic or redundant. It has to be tried.)

At any rate, student angst levels are materially assisted by my current ongoing alphabetical trek, by album title, through the endless vistas of David Bowie. Right now we're into late middle-period, which is the much-decried 80s pop outbreak, by virtue of Labyrinth (hence my subject line) and Let's Dance in quick succession. You can say what you like about 80s pop, my cheesy metaphor from earlier may well be relevant, but I was a teenager in the 80s and can't help responding. That shit is hard-wired.