Free toilet rolls, whooohooo!!!!!!!

Do bears **** in the business school? It's amazing enough discovering student bedrooms here at Warwick have a maid service (does anyone over 30 remember THAT being part of their undergrad experience?) Not to mention that being an MBA means never having to buy fruit.

But free toilet rolls? I shake my head in wonder at realising tonight why I never seem to run out. Even if the difficulty of midterms here would appear to suggest a need for the stuff!

Doing it by the numbers - NOT

OK, Mr Accounting Lecturer, I've got the measure of you now.

About a year ago, I was standing outside the walls of Cairo in the City of the Dead. Where graves are also beds open to the sky, where whole familes live on the dust of their ancestors. A place without hope, where all dreams are shattered and aspirations go to die.

That's approximately how I feel about Accounting right now.

I recall the lecturer saying a week ago about the Accounting midterm: "It's quite hard to fail." Obviously I didn't notice the evil glint in your eye, the suppressed cackle of maniacal laughter. I know you now.

You are Pure Evil.

The Accounting midterm was obscenely difficult. It's the difference between learning the theory of something and applying it in the real world; this exam was all about hunting down information and applying formulas while the clock was ticking, and it just ticked too fast. Even the professional accountants in the class were dumbfounded. Basically 100% of the cohort felt they'd screwed up. Me? I definitely failed, and think I'd be lucky if I've scored 30%.

This was an exam for mathematical prodigies, which nobody was expecting. I mean, where the fuck are we? Bloody Cranfield or something?!!!!

So I now know who we're dealing with. Beneath that mild-mannered, unassuming exterior beats the heart of a pure sadist.

No WONDER they set the test date for today; it's the same day the first 'big' tuition fee payment disappears from my bank account. A day earlier and I'd have been tempted to cancel and scarper!

Gay Fox Night

My Chinese corridormate asks seriously,

"Chris, can you tell me about Gay Fox Night?"

I'm a bit unnerved: either he's bicurious and has assumed I'm gay, or he's gay and thinks I'm 'scene'. I venture an answer:

"Gay Fox Night? Sorry, no, I've never heard of Gay Fox Night."

Disturbing images swirl around my mind: doglike urban critters wearing pink armbands and eating out of dustbins outside houses rocking to the sound of the Village People...

He continues earnestly, "You know, Gay Fox Night, with the fire..."

Oh.

Guy Fawkes Night.

What a relief!

Hallow'een on campus

In one of the better episodes of 'Buffy', she's expecting a busy night and wondering why it's quiet. Well, you would, right? Spike replies that real monsters tend to regard Hallow'een as a night off; too many wannabes on the streets.

That's a bit like me.

Ever since that Hallow'een when I lived in a reconditioned paint factory on the Isle of Dogs - and a vampire in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel complimented me on my outfit - I've avoided the streets in late October. (I wasn't wearing an outfit.) I understand my personal sartorial values of black coats and leather etc don't sync well with the everyday,

Which creates even more reason to stay at home tonight. I've just made a trip to CostGouger, and had to wait in line behind two wizards and a goblin. I was out of there like a flash and raced back to Lakeside.

I wasn't home and dry yet. Dodging a pair of vampires outside the Arts Centre (which, incidentally, is hosting 80s band 10CC tonight; that's surely scarier than any ghost or ghoul) I made it onto the shortcut towards WBS, forgetting that the route passes the Multifaith Centre (THE HORROR! THE HORROR!) which I find scarier than any undead creature.

I speed up. But I'm not home and dry; there's a mob of monsters coming up the back passage next to Ramphal (ooo-eeer, Missus.) Somehow I've stepped into a Michael Jackson video from the 1980s. (The scariest part is most of these people weren't even born when 'Thriller' came out.) Manage to survive the experience with only minor scars, which is more than you can say for Jacko himself.

Taking a swift detour into the WBS Teaching Centre grounds, I make it onto the Lakeside path, and I'm nearly home.

The only plus point is that I pass a naughty teenage nurse on the Lakeside footbridge, skirt better described as a belt and let's not go to the boob area lest I get arrested. Does your mother know you're out like that, young lady?!! Even if you do have fangs?!

Beach volleyball, sans sun, sand, and bikinis

Sorry Goose, it's time to buzz the tower!

OK, like all the other dialogue in 'Top Gun', we know what Cruise is really saying by buzzing Goose's tower - but you can't play volleyball without a Top Gun reference, can you? Even when there are no bikinis, no sand, and the sun's gone away for the winter. (Actually, there was a precious shortage of volleys, too.)

It's only the third time I've made it down the gym, but I'm glad the gorgeous Maina pushed the class into it: an hour of thrashing and flailing on court was just what I needed to get my rapidly-becoming-butterlike ass back into the swing of things. And hey, discovering how to get the net up (30 mins) was almost as much fun as playing the game itself!

And it proved something else: the exchange crowd from Mannheim are proportionately more fun that the rest of the MBA cohort. Of the six players, five were Mannheimers. I've got to infuse this 'volleyball spirit' into the rest of the gang somehow.

Missing my city

It gets dark, out here in Warwickshire: it's not like doing your MBA at Cran "Muddy" field or anything, but it still gets dark once you get a klom or so away from the comforting buildings and streetlights. It gets really, REALLY dark.

Of course, you've got to take the lying-on-your back-beyond-campus part into account.

With so much that's entered my life in the last few weeks, I'm missing London tonight. Maybe because it represents the All. There was just so much there, and I drank so deeply of it.

The city, sprawling languid across the Thames valley. The City, ancient empire fingering clouds with new sixty-storey 'scrapers, brash and elegant at the same time and as acidly pleasurable as a stripper's tears. The Thames scorching a trail across this greatest of cities, cleaner and greener with each passing winter.

Selfridges lit up in a fuck-you to environmentalism. Monty Alexander playing jazz piano at Ronnie Scott's. The Christmas lights blazing Bond St in the December chill, lighting the harsh faces of Russian blondes fixated on Svarovski's window. Covent Garden playing on as opera slides down the cultural consciousness towards a single page in the Sunday Times. Trashy neons of Oxford St tempered with the subtle glows of Hoxton and the Island. There were plenty of times when I felt bad, but not a single moment when I felt bored.

London was a six-year orgy of soaring experience and plummeting bank balance, endless entertainments tempered by the crushing costs of living among them. I honestly believe it's necessary to earn £100K a year in London just to afford the basic necessities of life, and that's as a singleton. What on EARTH do couples do?

But it was all worth it. I think I'll make one more trip to London this year, taking someone special. (There are a few more of them since September.) It doesn't have to be a partner, perhaps not even female, but I need to see the lights of my City again before the year turns.

But you can't beat this feeling, out in a field in Warwickshire. Knowing that everything - just everything - is going to be ok now.

I stare into the abyss, and - well, you know

An icy finger touches my spine.

It's been a long week, and I'm cold, tired, tetchy, and so sexually frustrated I could hire myself out as a coatstand. I visit CostGouger, then pass the Multifaith Centre on the way home. (These events are not, by the way, connected.)

Inside are crowds of happy young people, sharing a free meal, laughing, having fun.

For a whole nanosecond I consider... going inside.

It'd be so easy. Forget what the world is really like. Just cocoon myself in a little bubble of faith, ignoring broader reality. Forget there's a universe out there that doesn't like me and owes me nothing. Forget that the human race, for all its accomplishments, means absolutely nothing measured against even the merest fraction of the universe.

And what's worse, they'd welcome me.

It'd be so easy, just forgetting that we are insignificant, believing that we mean something, instead of (the truth) that we're just chemical reactions clinging to a damp rock in infinite, endless dark. That's a hard truth. Correct, but hard.

Partying against the darkness. That's all religion is. Trying to deny... everything that really matters.

They are so happy, in their infinite denial. Yet I cannot deny.

Faiths work from the shadows, picking off the cold, hungry, tired and desperate. One by one at their most vulnerable moments. That's how religions work.

Shiver. Never again do I even glance into their windows of this place. Evil stalks campus, and it lives next to the Arts Centre and the pointy conical thing that's supposed to be sculpture.

From this day forward, this building is my enemy. I'm wise to you.

Facebook face-off: too little, too late

It's painful seeing a giant thrash in its sleep. Microsoft has been fitful for years, and it's obvious from its latest decision that it still can't agree internally what to do.

$240m, fair enough. That amount of cash might be considered a 'commitment'. But for just 1.5% of Facebook, valuing the social-networking site at $15bn? Too little, too late. As Murdoch demonstrated with MySpace - valued at less than a tenth of that last year, and practically nothing today - making a move on the wrong piece of ass doesn't get any better even when it's 3am and you're desperate.

Web 2.0 is a phenom not connected to any one company, and if you're paying a fortune for a tiny sliver of startup, you don't look smart. You just look scared.

Tie to die for

It's weird how I get comments every time I wear a particular green tie. I mean, all my ties are the same brand (Versace) but I've worn the red and yellow ones without comment. Obviously there's just something about the green one that just appeals to the MBA crowd. (McKinsey was making a presentation today; was the tie the reason he answered my question?

But while Versace's definitely my tie brand of choice, I'm starting to cool on Armani for other stuff; I'm starting to think it'll have to be tailormade or nothing in the shirt department. (I only have a couple of bespoke shirts, but they're brilliant.) Armani just seems too slim-cut these days, somehow. And it doesn't help that a month sitting in lectures instead of dashing around to the gym hasn't done a great deal for my physique...

How not to get a job in financial services

Look, I'm not easily offended, OK? I get flamed all the time, disregard opinions daily, and give the silent treatment to half a dozen people in any given week. (Why hit back at people when you can just write them off?) But if I'd been the Presenter at the Career Development sesh this afternoon, I'd have walked out in a huff after five minutes.

This afternoon was the first 'industry' session: How to Get a Job in Financial Services, presented by a real-live investment banker type. And frankly, I'm disappointed. Not at the Presenter - who was terrific, a typical hard-edged City bloke, toughened by decades in the Square Mile, who just told it like it is - but at the attitudes of my classmates towards him.

First things first. I hate lateness, and as class filed into the lecture theatre, a LOT of us are late. We're talking ten, fifteen minutes late: for a guy who probably makes job offers to 200-300 people like us a year and makes this presentation to thousands more. What, exactly, is the impression created if you're a quarter hour late and arrive in jeans and hoodie?

For most of the class, this session was a wake-up call. Not for me - I'm here for a different reason (getting inside the heads of the guys who fund my clients' companies) and investment banking comes slightly below astronaut on the list of careers I'm likely to pass an interview in. But a lot of the folk here think an MBA is a free pass into whatever high-paying career you want, so seeing their delusions shattered was undeniably enjoyable.

Worst part: the presenter's pronouncements - a guy with 30 years of City experience - get booed, questioned and discounted as if the real world followed the rules of MBAland. This is just plain disrespectful: the guy's here as an expert giving his informed opinion, NOT a sounding board for complaints.

And the questions! 50% are crass, irrelevant, or downright rude. Arguing with the presenter's definition of what an 'emotional support structure' is - not only offtopic, but insulting. Other questions were less about how to get a job, more about Why You Should Give Me a Job, self-justifying and arrogant. One question was even "The average MBA has two or three job offers... why should I want to join your investment bank?" (The banker's answer wasn't - quite - a two-word phrase starting with F, but his expression came pretty close.)

The (to my mind, ignorant) questions keep coming. A definition of 'Special Investment Vehicle' - what the FUCK???!!! Something you can get from two minutes of Googling, in a session with a specific topic and purpose? The problem with this crowd: they're just too nice, unfocussed, too warm and fuzzy, just not badass enough. They genuinely don't think this job is one they have to work for. Their sense of entitlement is awesome.

I keep wanting to jump up and scream: "THIS IS HOW IT IS, PEOPLE! These are the conditions you must work within if you want a career in the ridiculous business called Financial Services! You have to deal with the world AS IT IS, NOT HOW YOU MIGHT LIKE IT TO BE!!!"


Then we hit the numbers. The whole reason pay tends to be good in financial services is that the work is that killer combination of both difficult and dull. Which is why - according to our genial host - a ten-year stint in corporate finance will net you $10m, with the sky the limit.

A ex-military guy on the course can't quite get his head around this number. I hear his gasping exhortations: "TTT - Te - Ten - Mill - mill - mmmm....." When I turn round, his face has gained an incredulous starstruck expression that won't fade for hours. I'm pretty sure I actually saw his eyeballs rolling down the aisles and him chasing blindly after them to put them back in. This is the one moment of positive entertainment in the session.

While the atmosphere has improved over the afternoon - possibly because my classmates have been dosed with Reality Check - I feel it's hardly been a good session for the presenter, and since top business schools like WBS depend on attracting such guys to make their curricula look good, the MBA programme participants just didn't do their job here. Hey, it's our school too, folks, and we didn't do its name justice. If I'd been in his shoes - let's call him Mr WhyHeWent - I'd have been pretty angry at my class's attitude.

Actually, I'm pretty worked up even being AMONG my class, and NOT because I actually bothered putting on a suit and tie. WAKE UP AND SMELL SHAKESPEARE COUNTRY, PEOPLE! This - is - NOT - some - piece-of-shit B-school in Ohmigodwhatanassend-oda-nation, KY that's proud to be in the second-from-bottom 1000, damnit! This is WARWICK BUSINESS SCHOOL, in the top 1% of world MBA programmes INCLUDING the ones in the USA. I know it's costing us £25K (plus about four times that in lost earnings if you're ME) but anyone who works hard here is, indeed, likely to get a couple of excellent job offers to show for it next year. Show a little PRIDE.

Oh shit. I'm becoming a swot.

How MBAs do lunch

My Chinese corridor companions (I mean they're Chinese, not the corridor) are enjoying their usual leisurely social lunch, perhaps of steaming noodles combined with beef in ginger and black bean sauce...

...peace which is then RUDELY SHATTERED by the arrival of three MBAs, fresh from a lecture and ALL wanting the incredible luxury of being ACTUALLY ABLE TO EAT SOMETHING in the break between morning and afternoon.

My goal is ambitious enough, given the average MBA's 90 minute break includes 87 minutes of homework and email: toast. Nothing fancy, just SOMETHING hot to relieve the endless procession of cereal bars.

Minute 6: I enter the kitchen. Gained 30 seconds on the walk back to Lakeside by maintaining a fast clip. Into room, check email, while it's downloading I head for the kitchen. Hi to Hu, Hi to Ho (like many Chinese, they prefer being addressed by their family names - let's call them H1 and H2), adjust trajectory to zero in on toaster.

Minute 9: bread's into the toaster. M's already in there (the kitchen, not the toaster) bent double inside the fridge teasing out a bag of oven chips.

The toaster warms, far too slowly. C'mon, damnable appliance, I'm an MBA candidate! Got places to go! People to see!

Minute 13. "WHAT???" hollers M. "I THOUGHT THESE CHIPS WERE ALREADY COOKED YOU KNOW! TWENTY FIVE MINUTES??? IS THAT WHAT THEY CALL 'CUSTOMER FOCUSSED'???"

I deliberately avoid her gaze: I KNOW it's a reasonable assumption, that the sole British resident of the corridor would know something about oven chips, but the fact is I don't. No WAY can I get tied down in the minutiae of rectangular sliced frozen potatoes. We're up to Minute 16, damnit!

E comes in, another of the friendly, approachable Nigerians that permeate the UK's higher educational establishments. E seems unsure of lunch. What, didn't she have ANY kind of plan? Get a grip, girl!

"I AM NEVER BUYING THESE CHIPS AGAIN!!!!" repeats M. The Chinese guys, being the helpful sort, dash into the kitchen to survey her eloquently stated frozen-potato visual anomaly. There are now five people in the little room and EVERYONE, BUT EVERYONE, IS IN SOMEONE ELSE'S FUCKING WAY. Minute 18.

"They have clamped several of the cars outside..." begins H1, but stops, giggling at the now-familiar chaos of MBAs on a break. Listen bud, they even clamp the TOASTERS in this joint (ours is firmly fixed to the steel worksurface); they're definitely going to clamp cars.

Toaster buzzes. Minute 19. Ah, the climactic moan of release. H2 is in the f**king way YET AGAIN. In scenes reminiscent of the film 'Empire of the Sun', Asian people go flying as I lunge for my warmed-over Hovis.

"It is overburnt", remarks the prone H1. Butter and bread come together in an orgy of reconstituted animal fats and reprocessed wholegrain. All I need now is to balance my cup of tea on the plate, and I'm ready to carry the ensemble out of the kitchen zone and back to my room, my laptop, and freedom.

Damn, forgot to boil the kettle.

Diversity counts, as long as you're not British

It's the rankings time of year in the MBA world, and course administrators are emailing us for various biodata. Here's something that stands out: anxious to appeal to the 'diversity police', one of the main rankers (which shall remain nameless, but think pink broadsheet) has placed 'number of foreign students' as a prime criterion. I quote: "the more international students we have, the more points we get."

Now rankings in the league that matters (the top bit) are ridiculous at this level; the difference in quality between the top 50 MBA programmes in the world is a hairsbreadth and an attitude. But what the pink paper is implying here really grates: the fewer British students you have, the better your school is.

Is this really what Britain's come to? So ashamed of its own heritage that even great media institutions have internalised the leftie dogma than any culture in the world is valid and wonderful, except the British?

These people will doubtless proudly chestbeat their Diversity Credentials, probably illustrated with the committee-approved photo of a female black person, female white person, and male Asian person laughing together against a sunlit sky. And of course, they'll fail to realise that - like most politically-correct happytalkers - they themselves exemplify the very essence of racism: singling someone out as different because of their passport.

Fools.

All I wanted was a cup of...

Reprising this blog: of course, when you work 7 days a week it's easy to forget little things like the Arts Centre coffee shop being closed on Sundays.

Well, sod it. I came out for a cup of coffee, and I'm not going home without one.

It's a chill day but sunny, and the University Square (actually an excitingly non-squarish sort of rhomboid between Union and Rootes, full of nice contoured and stepped slopes that'd've had MC Escher drooling) has benches. So I buy a large latte from CostGouger**, select a bench, fold up my jacket as a pillow, and whip out my iPod and magazine. The complete 'Starbucks third place' experience. But much cheaper, and I get to lie down too.

It's actually rather pleasant, watching the world go by above the fold of my magazine. Sleepy students, bemused parents, leather-elbowed lecturers with their minds on their next citation.

And all too soon, I'm at the bottom of the cup.

Oh well, time to head back and hit my airport retail project. Who knows, maybe I'll get some entertainment from dropkicking geese into the lake on the way.

** "CostCutter" is so misleading a description of the campus supermarket it should carry a government warning.

Working like a dog. And not a cute fuzzy friendly one.

I'm not sure I'm into this thing called 'work'.

I mean, I'm a copywriter. And if a copywriter tells you he's 'working really hard', ask closely about what the job really entails: lounging around with a huge pad and Magic Markers dreaming up witty headlines and sketching the odd picture of a fish riding a bicycle. And in advertising, for Darwin's sake - okay, I haven't written campaigns for a while, but even 'CRM strategies' and 'information architecture' don't exactly compare with, say, a 16-hour shift in a Chinese garment factory.

The trouble with studying for an MBA is that you can't 'wing it'. There's real volume and depth to be chewed through and committed to memory. (Except for the Organisational Behaviour module, where it's so easy to bullshit you can wing it. And by golly I'm going to. Hey, I can write impenetrable sixty-word sentences too, three-metre-tall lecturer guy!)

Look at my bloody calendar. Monday to Friday, two 3.5hr lectures a day except Mon and Wed, where the gaps are filled by team meetings that always go on far longer than expected. Evenings are filled with assignments and revision. Frequently we have early meetings before class and two hour catch-ups afterwards. Yesterday, a Saturday, was taken up with a 13-hour daytrip down south for Operations Management. It's rare I get to bed before 1am, and I've been to the gym precisely once in my four weeks here.

The Sunday Times (last week's) is virtually untouched on the easy chair, with - horrors - the previous Sunday's still largely intact underneath it. And that's DESPITE a particularly alluring picture of Michelle Pfeiffer on the cover (whoa, she looks great for 30, let alone the 50 years she actually is.)

"Time off" - whatever that is - fits into a neat three-hour slot between waking and noon on a Sunday. "Waking" being a flexible concept, time off this week amounts to the next 45 minutes. Into which I'm determined to squeeze a £1.25 coffee at the Arts Centre.

Between the sheets

Doing laundry on a Sunday is poor time management, since about 600 teenagers will be queueing with their heaped baskets redolent of lentils and Union sweat. Not to mention that laundry is £3, so you want to wait until you can cram the drum to bursting first.

(Yes, now the billable days on my calendar number just 3 a month I'm finally getting the economics of student life. My days of "Oooh, what a nice £150 T-shirt, I think I'll buy it" are truly over. I mean, THREE WHOLE QUID FOR LAUNDRY? Damn evil thieving laundrette operators!!)

So I face that age-old student dilemma: if a lady's visiting your student room, is it OK to not change the sheets first?

I mean, everything else is in place. Wine in fridge, check. Clean glasses, check. (Yup, my Oakleys are unsmudged.) iCradleful of Velvet Underground, check. In the bathroom cupboard - well, let's not go there. (Until 10pm or so, anyway.)

She won't mind about month-old cottonware will she? I mean, what's going on on top of her is surely superior to whatever's underneath.

(And IF my block subwarden is reading this: SHE'LL BE LEAVING BEFORE MIDNIGHT, ITALIAN POSTER GIRL!)

"Wow! You have so many shoes!"

Why is it that everyone who visits my Hall room comments on my shoes?!

I mean, is 12 pairs really excessive given that I had to squeeze the contents of a 3 storey house into a single study bedroom? Of the 12 pairs, only 5 are smart shoes, the rest are casual or trainers, and 2 pairs are cycling shoes when I don't have any bikes here, so they don't count. The effective USC (Usable Shoe Count) is barely into double figures.

Yet every single person who's seen inside my room - from the Malaysian guy who borrowed a shirt for his CV photo, to the Ghanian girl who just dropped by to borrow a textbook - has broken off in mid-sentence to exclaim "Wow! You have so many shoes!"

I dunno, my rep as a minimalist is taking a beating. Does minimalism apply to clothes?

Velvet smooth

I'm all but sure that when it comes to seduction soundtracks, there hasn't been anything in 40 years to equal Velvet Underground. I mean, next to 'Loaded', Barry White is the geeky kid with glasses who sits at the back of class.

Which makes it a pity I'm flying solo tonight; had a chance of dinner a deux or mixed volleyball and ended up flunking both over a deadline. (It's really hard turning down a £600 a day rate, even when you're supposed to be studying!!!) I just hope these guys appreciate what I gave up to supply them with 800 words of copy.

(I used to have a standing joke that my day rate, divided by the number of words I actually produced for it - frequently just a headline - made me higher paid by the word than Tom Clancy. That's not a joke any more, not with £20K in tuition fees hanging over me.)

I'm going to have to put you on the Grid**

There are some things at the University of Warwick that just take your breath away when you've been outside academia for years, and one of them's this amazing place called the Learning Grid. The best description I can come up with: it's a library for teams.

It's got books, tables, chairs, PCs, all the usual stuff. But there's no requirement to be quiet or bookish; if you want that, go to the proper Library elsewhere on campus. The Learning Grid's ethos is teamwork. Large tables with six chairs around them, moveable screens you can wheel around to create your own 'meeting room', projectors and photocopying whiteboards and AV equipment up the wazoo. Group work is encouraged. Conversation and noise are fine. Steaming cups of coffee are welcome. The environment's bright, modern, clean, functional, and stays that way 24 hours a day.

It's a brilliant idea: not a replacement for a fusty-dusty bookworms' haunt but an adjunct to one, something complementary to meet the needs a traditional library doesn't answer. It's a great place, well-designed, but not trendy, functional but not minimalist, with enough technology to model the protein folding problem and a buzz about it that's instantly relaxing. If you had to model the ideal environment for white-collar teamwork from scratch, it'd look a lot like the Learning Grid.

**Reference: Tron (Early 1980s sci-fi movie)

Where are the crazy ones?

I haven't found a crazy girl yet.

There's always been at least one crazy girl in my life: the one who'd tramp over at 1am to waltz through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, who'd share a bottle in Hoxton encased in a red leatherette minidress, who'd skip work for a half hour of philosophy in Starbuck's. The kind of girl who just sucks in her breath and says 'Okay' inside her head, appreciating the payoff of people who aren't-quite-normal.

I thought this environment would be conducive to such encounters, but, hey, I'm on the MBA programme and everyone here's all about the money. And I learnt several weeks ago that dating undergrads is just plain sad.

Where are the crazy ones? There are lots of great NORMAL girls, but...?

Now THERE'S a vivid thought

Operations Management class, 3pm today: "This pig farm I visited in Eastern Europe is among the largest in the world. They employ six people whose job is purely to inseminate female pigs!"

The class goes silent for a moment. I pipe up: "What - you mean, with equipment I hope?!"

The image in my mind at this moment is unbloggable.

(Even more muffled hilarity ensued when I tried to explain the verb 'inseminate' to the Greek guy sitting next to me with a few pelvic thrusts.)

Whining about wine

The mist settles majestically over the Warwick University campus. The evening chill wraps the buildings in a shroud of cold, and the ducks quack rhythmically as I...

... dropkick their feathery asses back into the lake to stop them cluttering up the path.

I can't BELIEVE I've just spilled a whole glass of wine over my laptop. Amazingly, it's still working, but I've done this before and killed a laptop with it. The critical factor is when you press a key: that lets the exquisite fermented grape juice soak into the motherboard and give you a mother of a problem. So the thing to do is lay paper towels over the affected area, turn up the heating, and let every drop soak up. Which. Takes. Time. Which is why I'm stomping around campus kicking the asses of our avian friends.

(Wine is a conductor, so if the stuff dries on your 'board you're screwed.)

Fortunately, I risked a single touchpad swipe to back up all my stuff onto my 500GB NAS, so no data's in danger. But with three assignments outstanding, this wasn't exactly the night to pickle my laptop in Sauv Blanc...

(And before anyone sends one of those smartass emails: I have a spare laptop.)

As if the last decade never happened

So, I'm chatting to my Hall neighbour, a Han Russian-speaker who works for China's provincial government as liason with the old Soviet States - and that sounds so freakin' hilarious I've just repeated it to myself, twice - about the possibility of future connection, given my previous experience between the Asian and Western worlds.

I'm back in the saddle, somehow, however strange the setting might be.

But what's really worrying me is...

This looks a little too cute to be true, but it makes the point: sometimes, looking away from the edges gives you a far better idea of what your customers are really thinking about. It's a pretty cool marketing professor who uses this image in class, and as a bonus it got him away from the usual zoological metaphors. I mean, how many black swans and prone penguins can one MBA student take?!!

Now if it'd been the Lib Dems, there'd be no argument

What, as if anyone who votes Conservative is automatically delusional? Not the sort of thing you expect to read in the Financial Times. Mind you, there was a time during John Major's premiership...

Having a blast

I'm pretty sure the next year is going to be the best of my life so far. Well, the next two months of it, anyway.

Somehow I'm a personality. They talk of me in strange, unfamiliar terms: 'natural leader', 'voice of authority', "leader of the group". Is it really this easy? Just asking the stupidest questions in class?

There are women here who think I'm quite a good bloke.

Wine and MBAs don't mix

I hate single-serving wine bottles. You know, the little 250ml thirds of a bottle people buy when they're eating alone and want to be virtuous without going as far as abstinence.

In fact, 250ml bottles are the saddest objects in the world.

250ml bottles (basically, one glassful) signify that you've given up rebellion. That you've become sensible somehow, measured and thoughtful and worried about tomorrow. But as Tyler Durden said in 'Fight Club': "Self-improvement's just masturbation. Self-destruction - now that's masculine."

Like most creatives, I've had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with alcohol over my working life, but to just appease social mores like this - well, that's just ridiculous. Another quote, this time from Winston Churchill: "I have taken more from alcohol than it has taken from me."

I've half a mind to glug another glass or three, citing my proven indestructibility. But indestructible doesn't mean indefatigable, and let's be honest here: sinking a bottle can't be good when you've got 7 hours of lectures the next day. Maybe I can be good. For just this year.

The Silent Ones

They glide between classes, almost unnoticed. They slide into their seats, melt unobtrusively into the back rows, leave no trace when they participate in meetings or teamwork.

They are not so much part of the group as swept along in the group's wake. They are the kind of people who are there to make up the numbers.

They walk among us, but are not truly of us.

They are The Silent Ones.

The MBA cohort contains some 6-8 people who rarely speak, never socialise, and who dress and behave so inoffensively that you barely realise they exist. Their faces share certain characteristics, neither attractive nor unattractive, bland and instantly forgettable. So we forget them. Of these 6-8, I can remember two first names and that's it.

At the rare intervals when one of them speaks, dozens of heads snap around to find the source of the unfamiliar voice. Who the hell's that? Is he new? Has he been here all term? Of course, the Silent One's tremulous question is then lost, washed out by the diluting fog of unease. And the cycle repeats, wrapping its cloak of muffling invisibility around each One, tighter with each act.

At the three-week point, it's now embarassing to ask for someone's name, or get interested in their background. It's so much easier to treat them as rents in the group's social fabric and just route around them, like an email avoiding a bottlenecked Mae East.

Was it us - this attitude - that made them this way? People so close to some inoffensive average that everyone treats them as part of the scenery? And over time they internalise this behaviour, living out their lives as ghosts?

I'll have to ask the Organisational Behaviour lecturer. At about three metres tall with arms used predominantly as wingspan, plus the ability to construct 60-word sentences with six nested subordinate clauses in his head, HE'S certainly not one of the Silent Ones.

How to be a great performance coach

As we enter class in the afternoon, the calm bald man watches us.

One by one, as we greet each other tramping down the stairs of the perfectly-designed lecture theatre, the indignancies ring out.

"Can you BELIEVE that fire drill this morning?"

"I was in the shower!"

"I was in my underwear!!"

"I had nothing AT ALL on underneath my coat!!!"

"Ha, I thought I vas seeing you but I didn't have my contacts in so everyone vas just a mass of blurs!" (Yes, the v's are deliberate.)

The bald man looks on, chatting occasionally, not obviously listening.

When the lecture starts, he greets us. Such is his presentational authority, the hall chimes with 'Hello backs!"

His first sentence is, "So, how was the fire drill this morning?"

And, as he planned, there's a chorus of "How did yooooouuu know???"

Of course, he doesn't answer. Which is what natural authority's all about.

"There are few sights more satisfying than a pristine slab of Blu-tak straight out of the packet"

A guy on Amazon who reviews low-end office stationery - brilliant. Quotes include: "I can never decide whether I prefer the blue or the orange, although of course yellow is the classic" and "this pen is aiming for the luxury end of the disposable ballpoint market". Thanks to Gareth for the link.

And I'm not dreaming

You know you're past 35 when you're surrounded by 200 long-legged teenagers in their nightdresses, and when you think of your bed all that's on your mind is sleep.

I hate early morning University fire drills.

ESPECIALLY when it's the first morning since arriving here that I DIDN'T actually have to get up at the crack of dawn to prep for class and I was looking forward to just ONE EXTRA HOUR in bed.

(And BY THE WAY, Italian Poster Girl subwarden, if you REALLY don't get pre-warned about drills as you explained, then how come you and your husband were properly togged up for the morning chill in coat, hat, and scarf?!!!)

Whatever you do, DON'T PRESS THIS BUTTON

One of the trials about being a mature student is that you have to sit through meetings designed for teenagers on the Dos and Do-Nots of life on campus. Of course, there are far more Do-Nots than Dos, which creates the odd problem. (Basic psychology: if you tell people something they can't do, a few of them will immediately go and do it.)

I 'forgot' about the first two such meetings, but the subwardens in my block are a determined duo. Not only did they knock on my door to case my face, but slipped a note under it later to make sure I'd attend the next 'Orientation Session'! They're more persistent than Jehovah's Witnesses!!!

Well, such determination deserves rewards (note to JWs: this is NOT an invitation) so I decided to go to this one. (Ha ha, as if I had a choice.)

I already know both the subwardens - an affably handsome, startlingly young guy of generic Eastern European origin, and a girl who's practically the dictionary definition of 'Italian'. Both were at a party last Sunday. Life is getting interconnected.

They work well as a double act. The basic approach is this: Eastern European Guy will say something with earnest import, and Italian Poster Girl will then add an entertaining sexual frisson to it.

A typical exchange:

Eastern European guy: "We only allow guests in your room Fridays and Saturdays, so if you have a cousin, or a brother, or a sister visiting..."

Italian girl: "...or a boyfriend, or a girlfriend..."

There's a LOOOOOOOOOONGGG monologue about Fire Safety, and the things that may set off the fire alarms accidentally.

What sets off the fire alarms accidentally is, apparently, everything under the sun.

Really, absolutely everything. No facet of human existence leaves Warwickshire smoke detectors in an unperturbed Budddha-like state of 'just being'. Aerosols, steam from the bathroom, cooking with the kitchen door open, hot mugs of tea, drying your hair under the smoke detector, and I'm pretty sure they also mentioned 'breathing and sleeping' for good measure. All it takes is one grungy student farting for this building for every bell and whistle in the joint to start its banshee wail.

In such meetings my mind tends to wander and I occasionally cause the odd bit of mischief. Fortunately, I managed to stop myself chortling about how I'd like to test these theories (I think.) Hey, only three people came up to me afterwards and stated that if the fire alarms go off, they'll know who did it!!!

Eastern European Guy continues. "We do have to evacuate every time there's an alarm, so this is not comfortable in the middle of the night..."

Italian Poster Girl: "...or if you have a guest, and it is during whatever social activities you are engaging in during the night..."

No wonder this girl's husband always looks tired in the morning.

After about 1000 years the Fire Safety lecture ends, and we move on to Guests.

They're surprisingly cool about guests in this building. Not many student halls have a policy explicitly FAVOURING overnight guests; all they ask is that you note their names down on A Piece of Paper on the Kitchen Notice Board, put there specifically for this purpose. (I wonder what this is really for - do the subwardens keep a scorecard and play Who's Had Who at the end of term party?)

Of course, it is Italian Poster Girl who clarifies my unspoken question.

Eastern European Guy: "We don't really like term party, we prefer 'quiet gathering', so if you just note people's names on the sheet 72 hours in advance..."

Italian Poster Girl: "Except the short-term ones, I mean like those random people you bring home from the Union, you don't need to tell us those stories..."

At this point I really, REALLY want to butt in with "On the other hand, if anyone DOES want to tell those stories, I'll listen!" but with superhuman effort I resist.

(Glad she narrowed it down to 'random' people. Any woman who comes back to my place has to be pretty 'random' as a basic personality trait.)

The lecture ends, and everyone scarpers. Even free coffee and coke isn't enough to keep this gang around. Aside from the odd person testing out the fire alarms, I think Eastern European Guy and Italian Poster Girl are going to have a pretty easy year...

Doctor Steel vs Max Fightmaster

Yes, there's a real guy called Max Fightmaster. But in this hilarious list of macho men's names, the 'Doctor Steel' gets my vote thanks to the cracked.com copy: "Did you catch the last item on the list there? He’s on the team of guys whose job it is to blow up a fucking asteroid if it threatens the Earth."?!!

The fear that unites us

At the crack of dawn on campus**, a scream of horror sweeps across the lawns. "my.wbs is down! My.wbs is down!"

Early morning peace is shattered as a thousand laptops whirr into life and the discovery is repeated from Lakeside to Tocil, from Claycroft to Heronbank. "my.wbs is down! My.wbs is down!"

Yes, the ultimate horror, our worst nightmare, has come to pass. No disaster planning could possibly have foreseen this. My.wbs - Warwick's undeniably brilliant student intranet - has gone all 404 on us. This is awful.

The chorus of anguish continues its Mexican Wave around campus. "MY.WBS IS DOWN! MY.WBS IS DOWN!"

The website links all the ingredients of your degree - course materials, modules, assignments, grades, all sorted into your own study groups and subgroups - with an artful and pragmatic set of pages that put discussions, resources, and messages front and centre. Keep up with my.wbs, and you're keeping up with the University. But this morning, my.wbs is gone.

MY.WBS IS DOWN!!! MY.WBS IS DOWN!!!!!

How did Universities actually work before the web went mainstream? I mean, how did people support their MBA work with just coffeeshops and photocopies? The shared infrastructure of my.wbs is as important as the campus itself: it's a community of knowledge, aggregated into a discrete entity so you can get a grip on it.

And this morning, it's down.

From this day forward, 8th October 2007 shall be known as The Day the Servers Stopped.

**9.30am.

India's human Internet

Thanks to Praveen Kumar for this link. A business run from a rickety slum in Mumbai delivers 200,000 lunchboxes from 35 distribution centres daily, despite owning no vehicles and many of its employees being minimally educated.

It strikes me this network succeeds for the same reason the Internet did: it solves an infrastructural problem through fault-tolerant protocols. The tiffin-wallahs treat late trains and crowded streets as damage and route around them, using their own knowledge of the neighbourhoods and people they deliver to. All that tacit knowledge, all that value, locked up in the heads of a few thousand workers guided by a common plan. It's so effective it achieves Six Sigma quality standards.

Best of all, the trust and value inherent in this network can't be bought or built by multinationals: its entire success depends on close personal contact with the customer. The multinationals must be infuriated!

Tribe, Village, City, State

Of all social structures, cities are the one I'm most familiar with; I've lived in the world's greatest. But I grew up in a different structure, and as I get more used to this year on campus, I'm starting to like it again. The village.

Campus is a village: part of a broader society, yet somehow not. The instant you drive onto Warwick University's campus a few klicks downstream from Coventry, you're in a different place: banners proclaim you're on intellectual turf, car parks and buildings are suddenly off limits. Unless, of course, you're part of it.

The Autumn chill is closing in. But somehow the campus is warm. A living thing, connected by thought and ideas and 100Mbps internet connections. The warmth of its breath grooves and stretches campuswide like an organic WiFi hotspot, mellowing, calming, making a whole out of the parts.

The Mathematics Building, two perfect squares atop the Pythagorean triangle of Gibbet Hill and University Road. The Social Studies Centre, a writhing complex of murky corners and dark existential corridors. The Automotive Centre, all crash-tested flowing lines and safety-conscious rounded frontage. The Humanities Building, ablaze with life. From a systems perspective, there's a line surrounding all these places, marking that subtle divide between organism and environment.

And within it, my room. My little place for the year.

Shelves. Duvets. A big cheap desk. A little flat red iPod. A couple of steampunk laptops. I didn't bring anything valuable here; no design need. So simple, yet every part of it significant, because used and useful. Somehow part of the bigger picture. No shiny things here still in their wrappers. Everything's a valuable part of the ecosystem. I feel alive.

Time to stomp. To walk campus, drink it all in.

Making study a snap

Of all the bits of equipment I expected to use on this course, never thought the most useful one would be my camera.

I mean, you can justify an iPod by listening to downloaded lectures on the way to class (although I haven't done so yet and the walk's only six minutes). A laptop and printer - go without saying. And a PDA is pretty much vital, with a To-Do list that extends to at least 20 tasks and appointments a day. But a camera?

What I'm using it for is capturing stuff: everything from class-sized whiteboards to A4 pages I can't be arsed to scan. (With 10Mp on tap, a page of text snapped from half a metre away is perfectly readable.) And teamed with a zoom - which zooms out as well as in, letting me capture more of a scene from closer - it's saving hours and adding real value to my notes.

I'm writing revision notes as I go along, so by course end I'll have a complete summary of my MBA in a couple of hundred pages. But the real reason for doing so's a bit less nerdy: the act of writing something down and putting it into your own words aids understanding.

What makes a great MBA?

MBA schools are a lot like professional sports: there's a huge mass of wannabes feeding the league tables, a lucky few make it into the majors, and a small elite get all the coverage. (Of 5,000 schools worldwide, fewer than 100 matter.) Fortunately, that few dozen at the top includes WBS.

So I've been thinking about what really makes an MBA *great*. Quality teaching by enthusiastic experts helps; at least two of my lecturers wrote the textbooks used on the course. And of course the depth of course content matters. (For instance, Warwick's Marketing module is more about business strategy than consumer behaviour; deep and meaningful.)

But I'm thinking the real wow factor of a top MBA lies in the way it joins things up.

On Monday, we do a P&L in Accounting, and the next day the Economics class shows how a company's bottom line is linked from macro trends. 24 hours later Organisational Behaviour looks at the same thing from a human factors viewpoint. It's all interlinked, so you can relate taught concepts to a broader base of learning. It's what separates 'information' from 'knowledge'. And why 'knowledge' is so difficult to manage; the value of knowledge isn't the information, it's the links it creates between ideas.

Where are the Americans?

I've noticed a distinct lack of Americans in my life this last year.

OK, so most of the 95% of human beings who aren't American would be pleased to say that, particularly during the Toxic Texan's reign. But citizens of Uncle Sam have been a part of my life since my teens, ever since a long backpacking trip that took in virtually every State save the two you can guess, and to not have any around feels odd. (There are a couple of Yanks on the course, but neither's a Republican and one's been here so long her accent is half British.)

Furthermore, the Americans you meet outside US borders are a different breed to the ones inside the USA: more travelled, better rounded. It's a shame they're always targetted by armchair critics when they travel, because in a way they're the 'best' Americans, open to new ideas - we shouldn't be pissing them off by constantly harping about US policy and aggregate attitudes, so I try not to.

So I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Americans.

Pricey pieces of paper

TWO HUNDRED AND FIVE POUNDS FOR FOUR TEXTBOOKS??!!!!!

What's the paper made from, pulped remnants of the true cross?!!!

These are textbooks, not Gutenberg bibles!

I ain't got noooo-bawdeeeee

9.21pm Friday, and I'm feeling out of sorts. Just finished two fairly important chunks of work, written a to-do for the weekend, got organised... but there's no WAY I'm tackling that accounting assignment tonight. Which means I've got hours sort-of unoccupied until bed, and it's a no-alcohol night, which means I can't even buy a bottle of wine to celebrate the end of the first proper week of coursework.

Now, this is serious. Home alone without booze. What else can I do tonight? The trouble is I'm feeling a bit bloodyminded about it: subconsciously determined to spend the evening fuming about wasted opportunities.

I could do some laundry.

I could, but I'm not going to.

Similarly with late-night Tesco, Economics and Operations re-reading and pre-reading, and catching up with back issues of The Economist. Sometimes, even when you've got a neat 2-3 hour gap and your brain's still capable of working, the contents of your skull just scream STOP at you and you're incapable of doing anything productive.

Might stomp around campus when it gets to midnight.

Crossrail gets approved

Finally, it looks like Crossrail's going ahead - although it could be yet another Brown election ploy. London needs this east-to-west link desperately; the overground trains that scoot commuters into and across London at the moment date back centuries, and there's only so much capacity you can cram into surface construction, surrounded by streets and buildings.

The £16bn project will span over 100km, a third of them underground, but it won't be a Tube line. It'll be proper big-ass trains, like Eurostar or France's RER, carrying thousands straight across without the huge logjams at the major rail stations as people switch from Track to Tube. Brilliant.

It's perhaps the first piece of 21st-century-capable infrastructure since the M25 or Channel Tunnel that's about really big thinking, on the same dream-not-little-dreams scale as the Victorians. if this thing works, London will be even further ahead of other world cities, the undisputed capital of the world. I miss you, my city, but I have other reasons for joy.

Project Walk on the Wild Side

The project: work in a team of 9 to solve a business problem for a charity. And what a charity it is: a community centre used largely by *disadvantaged* families. One of those ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff places, scooping up the bruised and bloodied chunks of flesh that the rat race left behind.

Those on the very bottom rung of society, who don't have the energy to look for the rung above due to the sinister clink of needles and broken bottles beneath their feet.

Those who live in a world made of pain, where the choices are zero and the only noise is a shrill shriek of lost hope.

Though I walk in this world often, I rarely touch it, and almost never touch the people within it.

And for the next six months, I'm caring for their kids.

I don't have a strong connection with the weak and desperate - or, as something of a societal Darwinist, much in the way of social conscience at all. So this project allocation is some way outside my experience. Furthest from my comfort zone. And lightyears distant from anything I'd actually want to do in the real world.

In short, it's absolutely perfect.

Hey, this isn't supposed to be fun, you know.

Whoa dudes, get that cheerleader

Before arriving here I thought about writing the blog in the style of an American teen college movie - Whooa, dudes, let's snarf a keg and get wasted back at the frathouse! - but realised the joke would run out of steam after, well, one blog.

However, I'm sorely tempted to degenerate into teen-sex dialogue after those two cheerleaders I saw wandering along the lakeside today. Yes, this British university has a cheerleading squad!

Whoooooa dudes, bring it on!

Now THAT was a shock

There's a blue shipping container outside the Hall of Residence, and I'd assumed it'd been there forever, in the manner of shipping containers. (Come on, how many of them do you see just sitting on waste ground year after year?)

But today, it was open, and a gaggle of Chinese students were extracting their possessions from it. Trouble is, I was walking by at the wrong angle, and all I could see was a procession of Chinese people apparently emerging from it carrying boxes. Obviously the thought crossed my mind - momentarily - that the container had been full of illegal immigrants who were only now being released.

It was quite a shock. But I contained myself (groan.)

Whoooo, here we go

OK, it's a little busy now.

Accounting and Finance: 1 assignment. Market Analysis: 1 assignment. Practice of Management: 1 assignment, but it's a REALLY REALLY BIG ONE. Project and dissertation: no assignment, but we've got to starting thinking about it now. Reading list: 4 textbooks, preferably before next week.