Academia Nuts

Had I been bright enough, I would have liked a life as an academic. A pokey little office overflowing with books, periods of contact and periods of solitude, an acceptance of eccentric modes of dress (I'd go for tweeds, bow ties- maybe a beard- and other eccentrically dandyish touches), a reverence for knowledge and a dogged resistance to overrated concepts like progress, modernity and "the 21st century".

I know it's a romanticised distortion. I know that working among pseudo-intellectual timewasters with a relaxed approach to personal hygiene and a perverse devotion to Jesus sandals in any weather would drive me up the wall. But no more so than the shiny indentikit buzzword droids I worked alongside at the Bank or the lackadaisical middle-aged children who worked for me there.

Redbrick buildings with rabbit-warren corridors, musty wooden fistures, leather-bound books, winter fires, the Bursar, the Dean, the Senior Fellows- these are the things I conjure in my head. I would love that lifestyle. Thirty plagiarised essays on the requirement of malice aforethought clearly isn't part of that lifestyle. I should just work in Porterhouse College really.