People Who Boast About Not Revising Should Be Burnt With Fire

One would be unequivocally hard pushed to walk anywhere, live anywhere or dine anywhere, and not hear the same dull, drab and quite unremarkable remark “phh I haven’t revised at all“. To those of us who do in fact work, as we cannot find it in our evidently intellectually inferior hearts to squander the delightful and “logical” tuition fees that are forced upon us, it does seem infuriating to be forced to succumb to these arrogant little charlatans.

I want to make a few points about this, to see if we can find ways of dealing with these awful people. There has never been a belle époque of pre-exam psyche; a time when certain students did not feel the need to share their stupidity with the rest of us; that one day we will reach an epoch where people will not feel the need to widely espouse their I-cannot-be-fucked attitude to work.

Your correspondent is a diligent worker.

There is no question about the nature of this pomposity. It stems from the hugely competitive world of upper class life, a generally bourgeois attitude that permeates into every private schooled pupil. Seeing as Bristol has an abnormally large posh politic (of which I am part of), the niggling sensation to claim to one’s peers of your lack of work for a particular paper or exam is paramount to your success. For some reason unbeknownst to me, one is more successful socially and intellectually if one does well with little preparation. For example what is ‘cooler’ to you:

“I got a First, but I had to work really hard to get it.”

OR

“I got a First, but I barely worked.”

The real world is not filled with people who haven’t worked hard albeit tried at all to get where they are. Please, for the love of the lack of God, stop lying to us, yourselves or simply stop talking.

A window into the mind of the non-reviser

Now, in essence whether you revised or not is both a trivial and a personal matter; University is not a competition, and you do not get marks for shouting about your lack of holiday work. Either you did prepare, coffee in hand and cigarettes in the ashtray. Or you didn’t prepare: sitting in the silence of your country house, the nature so pure and still that you can even hear yourself wastefully falling into further debt. Personally, I do not feel that is something to boast about.

These annoying mammals cannot be tamed out of their boastful superiority, like everyone they are slaves to their own pretences. I say we have two potential methods of ‘dealing with them’: burn them with fire, or burn them with fire.*

*Metaphorical fire of course.