VOTE: What’s the worst thing about UCL?

‘Tis the winter of my discontent, hours of meandering revision has blackened my soul, petrified my heart and sunken me into a deep, hateful inertia. Birdsong sounds like screaming guillotine victims, and ice cream turns to ash in my mouth. I need to vent, for I am full with loathsome wind.

With that in mind, what is the worst thing about UCL?

High rent

Spent hours making this look nice

My hateful abode last year cost £712 a month. Now, we did a quick number crunch, and according to our calculations that could’ve provided me with 2848 Freddos a month, assuming a Freddo is, on average, 25p (although they’ve probably risen since I wrote this). That’s 94.93 (recurring) Freddos a day, and you know what they say; the recurring Freddos taste the sweetest. And yes, that’s not necessarily a practical alternative use for that money, but the use of Freddos here really brings to light, in a way we can all quite viscerally relate, the unforgivably high London rents.

Rent strikes

Arguably more annoying than our really, really, really high rent, but if we get compensation in the long run, are they really that bad?

Phineas Bar

The banter never really arrived that night

In Dante’s Inferno, there’s one circle of hell that, strictly speaking, isn’t an official part of the main franchise. It lingers by the entrance to hell, a kind of foyer for the damned, like Sports Night. Bound to eternally suffer in this place are those who Dante calls the “listless”: a bumbling, weak-minded multitude of souls so putridly apathetic that even hell itself refuses to admit them into its wretched ranks. Here they endlessly shuffle in pursuit of a blank banner, symbolic of their shallow self interest. Meanwhile their feet are bitten by snakes and their faces are stung by hornets, who feast on their worthless blood and tears. It’s grim. But at least, unlike in Phineas, the snakebites don’t come with a 15p charge when you use a debit card.

Tourists

They take pictures of everything and ask for directions and stand on the wrong side of the escalatora, but what else are they supposed to do? Just hole up, with their families, in a grey South London squat for a week doing heroin, before getting evicted by the government like the rest of us? Someone’s got to enjoy London, as it sure as hell isn’t going to be the people who live there.

London

Rapture on the riverbank

There’s nothing that can coherently be said about London that hasn’t already been said by Samuel Johnson or isn’t just a reiteration of everything Vice writes about. No-one actually knows why London is what it is, and any attempt to figure out why will probably just result in shit poetry.

Eduroam

Ed’s bread and butter

Did you know they have eduroam everywhere, even in Italy? And although they don’t know what it means, by god do they know what it feels like: WiFi this bad makes WiFi redundant, like if trains were slower than walking, or hand jobs were worse than…oh wait.

Printing

Printing is how he expresses himself

Standing in line for the printer at UCL is what queuing for a merry-go-round in the Soviet Union was probably like: a slow, grey march to death (and paperwork).

The Tube

When bae realises he forgot to record Countryfile

Let’s call these stations what they are, shall we? They’re not stations, they’re holes. Big, miserable holes. Tottenham Court Hole. Tufnell Park Hole. Euston Ditch. Hamsptead Void. And connecting all these holes are tubes: THE Tube. But it’s not a tube, is it? It’s a complex subterranean tunnel and rail system. Let’s start using words properly, shall we, folks? Also, GOD isn’t it awkward on the trains how nobody makes eye contact?

Library gridlock

Pretty epic for something as rubbish as books

There is nothing good about a library, ever. The stench of all those old books, the stifling judgemental silence, the doomed romances, and all of that musty academic crap, suspended forever in a perpetual dust-specked twilight, is only made worse by the fact the creep licking his lips while reading the graphic novel edition of Lolita just stole my seat. Stay at home, folks.

UCLU

Isn’t one useless, out of touch government enough? UCLU is a nothing more than an opportunity for wannabe MPs to hone their craft in mismanaging complex political bodies, a mere rung in the career ladder.

Stuffed Bentham

The sombrero conceals his horns

What’s dead, is trapped in a box and tweets regularly? No, not Kanye West’s brain. Jeremy Bentham, everybody’s favourite taxidermy philosopher, who now tweets hourly photos of a corridor. What takes the photos? Fuck knows. Probably his eyes, though, isn’t it. Check out @PanoptiStream if you want to be both deeply terrified and bored at the same time. Of course corpses tweet now, we should’ve seen it coming when Philip Seymour Hoffman appeared in about fifty films two years after he died. Death, in 2016, is nothing more than losing administrative control of your Instagram account.

Meat Free Mondays

Shouldn’t the pictures be of vegetables?

If you’re a meat fan, Meat Free Monday is the nail in the coffin of freedom of eating. First they came for the people who like to have a chicken burger on a monday, and UCLU did nothing. Who will they come for next? Everyone who voted conservative? People with snapbacks? Anyone wearing shoelaces weaved from rare beaver fur? This has to stop, for preservation of liberal society.