Article for 2012 Nov 27

2012

2012 Nov

For 2012 Nov 17’s article, see the appendix later in the blog.

Nov 27 Tue

I’d quite like to go to uni. Thus I got up at five for a four-hour three-part coach-journey to one of the world’s top universities. I’m not actually predicting that I’ll be able to get into the University of Cambridge, but it’ll be quite nice, years in the future, to be able to say “I went to Cambridge... no, no, actually my degree’s from Leicester...”

I didn’t go to study, or self-enlighten, or protract my prospects (a geometric protractor can do that), but to have a look around that most mystical and mythical of ministries. And, if I’d got the chance to, to argue theology with the wildlife there: I’ve often wondered if there’s even a smidgen of religion in a Cantabrigian pigeon.

But before we got to Cambridge city, we had that four-hour three-part coach-journey. What a good time we had on that coach! In the first third, one of my pals had brought a £699 iPad on which was the £6·99 Scrabble app. I was playing Scrabble! How I’d hungered for that game! So I was playing Scrabble. My best play, the eight-letter OBLIGEES across two triple-word-scores, is not as good as that parenthesis suggests, as the GEES was already on the board, so I only got 33 points from putting OBLI- down, rather than 167 the full OBLIGEES would have earned. Oh well.

After that game had been ended and the iPad appended to the owner’s rucksack, we played a spoken game of Word Disassociation, where each word has to have no association with the last. I was outed when I said “shark” after “abbey”: I hadn’t realised that a shark is like a monkfish, and where do monks live? Another player said that that link was too tenuous, “as tenuous as the connection between the head and the body of an abbot attacked by a shark” I think was his wording. But I was already out. The shark had killed me.

I resurrected myself in the final length of the journey for a game of Travel Cluedo. I was the first to be eliminated in that game also, after I incorrectly suggested that the murder was of “Mr Duncan, in the abbey, with a shark”. You’d think I’d learn. You’d think I must be teachable, if I’m considering going to uni. Which reminds me: how far are we now from Cambridge, Mr Driver? We’ve arrived? Cool!

Walking round Cambridge in groups (Cambridge is now the third city I’ve walked around this year, after Paris and Chester), I had time to wander and wonder and ponder what I should have said in response to “abbey” in that game of Word Disassociation. Bicycle? No, you can ride a bicycle to an abbey. Flower? No, that’s pollinated by “a bee”. Westminster? How obvious canst thou get!

Then I thought up another reason why “shark” was a poor choice of word after “abbey”.
In the time of Noah, another group of zealots made a counterfeit copy of his Ark; when the rains came, the sharks in the floodwater had a choice for their dinner. The sharks could hunt fish as normal, using up energy swimming. Or they could wait under the two Arks, waiting for a keel to collapse and deposit the inhabitants of the Ark into the sharks’ maws of mauling. But which Ark to hide under? The Ark by Noah, the wise one instructed by God in shipbuilding? Or the counterfeit Ark, the ramshackle Ark, the shabby Ark? The sharks, being instructed by cunning Lucifer, went for the shabby Ark. But God saw them coming, and whipped up a wind to cast the sharks out of the water, into Noah’s Ark, where they promptly asphyxiated and were fed to the animals they had wanted to eat. Thus it is explained in the Bible why sharks nowadays do not plan to attack people on Arks.

But how does that story link carnivorous fish to abbeys, you may wonder. Ah, it doesn’t, but it includes a reference to a “shabby ark”, a phrase which can be spoonerised nicely.