Jamie Ross: The five worst things this week

A problem with writing for a student publication is that, every year, a quarter of your hard-earned readership graduates is supplanted by a group of teenagers who could not give a single fuck what you have to say.

I predict that one third of first years will get as far as looking at my picture, which looms over this column like the smuggest stormcloud ever recorded, and decide that they’d rather go and be young than waste their time on a man who has never learned how to smile. Another third will read a few paragraphs, find an archaic word which I’ve used and quickly scroll down to the comments section to laugh at me and call me Grandpa. A final third might soldier on, either because they are bored or because I said fuck in the first line like a rap singer.

To bring us all up to speed, then, last year a man called Nic Carter described this column as a “self-absorbed, falsely-self-deprecating exercise in mental masturbation, nicely packaged with strings of obscenities.” After picking up the shattered remnants of my self- esteem, I realised that this was actually fairly spot-on. So thank you, Nic. I might even put that on the cover of my first book.

Anyway, never one to fail to meet expectations, this week I am going to write exclusively about me and the worst things about my week, using words so obscene that Nic Carter will gasp until he swallows his own tongue. I might do this on a weekly basis depending on the reaction it gets or if my life suddenly becomes good, so let me know if you like it, prefer my older things or would rather that my hands fell off so I can never type another word.

1) Freshers’ Fayre

I have a job. I won’t reveal where as I’m concerned that Nic Carter might write a letter to my manager revealing that I moonlight as a digital arsehole. I will say, however, that part of my duty is to attend various promotional events when the members of staff who are less nervous and unapproachable are busy. One such event was last Sunday’s Freshers’ Fayre; the annual conference where first years go to make friends, join societies and flaunt their vitality right in my haggard, crumpled face. As we all know, it is basically a furnace heated by the exertions of one thousand people trying to get as many free pens as they can. However, one change I noticed now that I’m in fourth year was that, no longer are people trying to recruit me to their fun drinking societies, I am now specifically targeted by internship companies capitalising on the sheer panic in my eyes.

2) Tinchy Stryder

The technical difficulties at Tinchy Stryder have been widely-covered. Arguably more embarrassing, however, was the unedifying spectacle of some of the richest teenagers in Britain trying to react appropriately to gangster rap. I observed, in preference to enjoying myself, that the default response is to do a kind of one-armed dance which is basically what a Nazi salute would look like if it was performed on a bouncy castle. I also got caught up in no less than two crowd-fights and was just drunk enough to overestimate my physical prowess and be knocked to the floor.

3) Wind

Over the summer, in a move which may well turn out to be the precursor to a full-on midlife crisis, I decided to style my hair into a quiff. This was all fine and well back at home in the countryside where it caught the attention of many a young milkmaid. However, back in our perpetual hurricane, this saucy new addition to my head basically acts as a sail which propels me to class and makes me arrive looking like a dishevelled battery hen.

4) Fine Wine & Cheese

This week, in a horrifying twist of fate, I was made to work in the same room as a Fine Wine & Cheese Society Social. The exact people – the red trouserfolk – I’ve so often dedicated this column to battling against, all within a twenty metre radius of me. I felt like Frodo in Mordor. Delightfully, they turned out to be just as terrible as my blind prejudices had imagined, proving once and for all that sweeping discrimination isn’t always a bad thing.

5) Moving Into DRA

Due to an estate agent dispute over the summer (if you’re reading this, Inchdairnie Properties, I will forever haunt your nightmares), I now find myself spending my last year in St Andrews at David Russell Apartments: the exact same halls where I lived during my first year. Back at square one, I now consider myself a grim metaphor for the utter pointlessness of university education.

Enjoy, freshers.