Meet interesting and intelligent people from all over the world... and kill them

It was only a matter of time. Yet another TV crew has cannoned into a primitive culture without realising that a simple sneeze can have consequences for people never exposed to the right germs (it doesn't matter whether it was this crew or not; the principle holds.)

Apparently the TV crew was so far upriver because the first tribe they were introduced to was 'too Westernised'. (Well, yeah, and WHY are they 'too Westernised', Mr TV guy?) If you've ever seen a TV crew at work you'd know instantly how this stuff happens; getting a job in TV is hard enough that the people with such jobs tend to be very singleminded about getting the story or the shot, to the exclusion of everything else. Causing massive damage to a stately home, or blocking road access for 2000 people, or even causing a fatal illness in the subjects of your documentary, doesn't matter a damn to them.

Bouncing around campus

I'm having a reasonably fun week. Yes, at last I feel like a student. After last week's exam madness, this week is going like a dream.

A couple of hours in the morning on an assignment; Corporate Finance essay planned, I wander over to the Learning Grid for coffee and reading. Wave to three other wandering MBAs over the course of an hour; a light lunch at Tiko; catch up with email. Some time in the wonderful atrium of University House, finishing last week's Economist.

This is it. La Dolce Vita. The sweet life. Every day should be like this: full of variety, a mix of ideas, interesting things to do with just enough tension to make doing them worthwhile.

The day continues, and I continue with it, drifting around campus from venue to venue. Over to the Arts Centre, for tea with The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. Cross paths with another MBA; back to Lakeside; read-through the Modelling assignment draft, make my comments ready for editing tomorrow. Tasks crossed, even a frustrating hour-long conversation with my bank doesn't dent my sunny disposition.

The bright afternoon turns to crisp evening, recent rain making the air smell fresh and clean as new-mown grass. A burger at Varsity serves as dinner. More waves and chats to three MBAs pleasantly adrift on the post-exam sea. Fix some dates with my Dissertation subject in London next week, confirm a couple of other meetings while I'm there, including a bite the same day with a friend who's leaving, his Warwick term done.

The day's been fairly busy; but unlike the last few months, I've actually got time to do stuff. Nothing's popping up randomly and chaotically, like impromptu group meetings, endless phone conversations, or the aftermath of lectures. The sun's shining, and all is right with the world.

Hail to the BHB

There are a lot of Big Honkin' Binders on the Warwick MBA, but nothing seems to blunt the thrill of opening a new one. And I've just collected another one in prep for Term 3.

Creaking the fresh spine open for the first time offers near-orgasmic excitement. The immensity of readings and pre-readings, the case studies, the structure of tabs and sections and Assessment criteria. Term 3's courses are shared with the part-time MBAs - taught in intensive one-week modules rather than spread over a term - but the binder metaphor thankfully remains as the guiding collective noun of each course, heavy and plasticky and beautiful.

These Big Honkin' Binders are, of course, a major selling point for the Warwick MBA: they're 'giving us something', weight and heft to the knowledge offered. Looking back at the BHBs from Terms 1 and 2, I've made each one mine: covered in Post-Its, notes in margins, filled-in boxes and printouts hole-punched and bound into context by my own hand. These binders are now part of me.

Just as a handwritten letter on 160g watermarked vellum means more than a text message, these binders are worthy containers for the riches of a top MBA, even if much of the course material and interaction happens in electronic form. And I'd bet that even when laptops have the same contrast, clarity, resolution and portability as a sheet of paper, these binders will still be around.

The mainstream life

Looking at my calendar for the next few days. I've got a set number of people to phone each day, various academic assignments to submit to the University, two proposals to write and five suit-and-tie meetings to attend.

How admirable. How conventional. How mainstream.

This whole year at Warwick has basically a single purpose: to push me into the mainstream. That widest streak of life where I've spent so little of mine.

Most professionals are by definition mainstream (I'm looking at the professional class here, of course.) Leave school, attend University, maybe a Masters before a job in finance, law, or consulting. Pair off, build up capital, have children, go into oblivion. That's it. That's the mainstream, and most people are happy there.

Compare this with what's on my CV. Left school (in teens), bummed around North America, fell into copywriting as a way to avoid anything that felt like working for a living, somehow got good enough at it to be named 'one of the world's top 100 creatives' and judge the One Show. A decade of that, then a few more years in London doing marketing plans for all sorts of companies, working my own hours and answerable to no-one. Yet somehow getting those companies better ROI than any big agency. That's a long way from the mainstream.

Trouble is, the mainstream is also where the action is: living on the edge is great, but the jobs and projects that interest me now are happening in mainstream companies with mainstream people. If I'm to continue doing the stuff I like, I need to join a respectable business. And respectable businesses employ respectable people. Mainstream people.

That's ultimately what the Warwick MBA is doing for me: putting a respectable mainstream face on my rather unusual background. As the madness of Term 2 finishes and I start talking to headhunters, it's time to go mainstream.

Raspberry cheesecake is not the ideal dessert to have near a brand new shirt

Phwoar! WHAT a shirt! It's almost as good as a tailored: form-fitting but not snug, nicely turned shoulders sewn in three dimensions, sleeves long enough for my simian arms and tapering slightly at the waist. Nice fabric, too.

But I've really GOT to deal with this trying-them-on-after-dinner stuff. Student rooms aren't big enough to minimise potential food-related disasters, and I came dangerously close to sideswiping a cheesecake just now. OK, that's it: this shirt is going back in the wardrobe until the confectionary risk has lowered.

That's horse sense

I can understand taking the odd pet cat into a hospital to cheer up a patient, but .......? And to add insult to injury, it wasn't even the right one.

Views around the world

Here's something I didn't know before, learned while researching a new phone. Do you know that the algorithms in digital cameras - the software that works on the raw image before you see it, blurring harsh stepped edges and sharpening contrasts to give a more 'pleasing' digital image - are different for consumers in different markets? Traditions of art and visual experience around the world mean the consumer's definition of what constitutes 'pleasing' varies. Interesting.

Post mortem: Strategic Advantage

Executive Summary: hard part's over!

OK, so there are a couple of assignments to do before end March, but the Strategic Advantage exam - two essays, two hours - was a pleasant finish to exam week. Not too rushed, took a five minute holiday in the middle, managed to shoehorn a Porter's Five Forces diagram and the distinctive assets pyramid in there. Had 10 minutes spare at the end so I thought I'd add an Appendix with the Value Chain! And why not. (Appendices are cool.)

And now the first half of my MBA is over bar the resits, oops, I mean bar the shouting. Today is the last day the 80 of us will be together as a cohort, sharing a core of content: from this day forward, we go our separate ways, into diverse electives and project/dissertations.

In some sense, I'm already missing it.

Hands in pockets against the not-yet-Spring weather, I wander the emptying campus of what I've come to know as 'my' university.

University House, a beautiful chunk of geometric white angles and a soaring four-storey atrium that's become one of my favourite places. Coffee in the cafe at the Arts Centre. The card entry gates of the library. The short walk down the curving road, assorted buildings of the university becoming denser like scattered foothills. The humid humanity of the Sports block. The gangrenous 1960s wasteland of Humanities. The soaring new engineering buildings. Somehow, it's become home.

I continue drifting in the damp gloom. Back to where it all started: the collection of white cubes on Scarman Road.

Silently I walk down the now-hushed corridors of the business school. The coffee nook. The printer corner. The syndicate rooms. The student lounge. Remembering all the moments of the last six months: the frustrations, the late nights, the syrupy fog of breaktime doughnuts and the clacking vooosh of the coffeemaker. The conversations, the headaches, the scribbles on whiteboards. And the laughter. Amid the toil, there was a lot of laughter.

All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to say goodbye.

Post mortem: Modelling & Analysis

Executive Summary: Starting from a poor quality dataset with high STEM, the SD of a 50% probability reduced with a positive effect on the Confidence Interval!

MAM is one of the really hard MBA courses - building and interpreting Excel tools that optimise or maximise KPIs for business - and everyone's been dreading this one. Oddly, I found it strangely do-able.

In my business 'modelling' means making a prop for a photoshoot, so I was expecting performance to be, er, somewhat sub-Distinction level. It's an 'open book' exam (you're allowed to bring in notes) so last night I formulated a survival strategy: take in some model answers, whip through the 15 essay-type questions doing all the ones similar to my models, and leave the ones I just don't get (*cough* regression and sensitivity *cough*) to the end. Ultimately, although I know I didn't max out more than two or three questions markwise, I felt good enough about enough of them to feel pretty sure I've passed this one.

But as an aside: do WBS lecturers have informal competitions as to who can put the weirdest businesses in question format? The businesses that've appeared on exam papers this week include a chicken-breeding magazine, a maker of bicycles built for four people, a company making tapestries of witches to hang in your kitchen (it had a capacity of 15,000 a year, but who on EARTH would buy such a thing?) and a china tableware company that suddenly decided to go into industrial air filters. Are these guys laughing at us or what?

Post mortem: Marketing Strategy

Executive Summary: FINALLY an easy one. Let's face it, if I found an exam with 'marketing' in the title difficult I'd need to seriously re-evaluate my life.

Two essays from a choice of eight, both with elastic subject matter I can fit a number of possible diagrams to to show I DID listen in class. There's something for everyone here. One of my essays, though, ends up being based on my personal experience of segmenting history (geographics, demographics, then psychographics) rather than an amalgam of slides presented; I'm unlikely to get a high mark for it but at least the examiner will find it interesting. This is the first exam I know I've passed, and in such exams it's good to have a little fun.

However, one thing's really annoying me: the way people TALK in the exam hall, before, after, and even during the exam. They just won't shut up. Mouths are twitching long before all papers have been collected; basically at the first possible moment they think they can get away with it. Why do so many people lack the self-discipline to stay shut up for just TWO FUCKING MINUTES longer?!!!

I am concerned about the low incidence of cola bottles in Haribo Tangfastics

I never eat sweets except when I'm studying something, and the last week I've been getting through half a pack of Haribo Tangfastics per day (and about as much toothpaste.) As gelatin-based sugar-coated sour -flavoured globules of nutritional nothingness made from a synthetic approximation of crushed cow bones go, they're rather good.

However, the cola bottle shapes are the tangiest, and my most recent pack appears to have just 2 of them. The ankh shapes are a reasonable backup, but there are only 5 of those, too. So for much of the afternoon I'll be subsisting on the heart shapes - or worse, the crocodiles which seem to have taken over the pack. Bleeah. They're nowhere near as good. Haribo, bite me.

Post mortem: Management Accounting

Executive Summary: AARGH! Have I crapped out on TWO of the bastard exams? Management Accounting was a nightmare! Maybe I'm just not cut out for this MBA stuff.

What's worse is the course wasn't all that bad: lots of numbers, obviously, but unlike Corporate Finance the concepts of budget-flexing and activity-based costing are mainly commonsensical. Yesterday afternoon I concentrated on variances, since it's the area I was weakest on, and was determined to choose a 'variances' question in Section B today. Of course, there was NO BLOODY VARIANCES QUESTION.

Let's just say I now know why the Ops Strategy elective has so many people in it: it's non-examined...

Anyway, the exam starts badly. The Hall's warmer than yesterday, in the same way the surface of the sun is warmer than an ice cube, but the atmosphere's a bit locker-room since there's only one GIRL around (admittedly the one is a hottie, but I don't function well in 30:1 male dominated situations.) And the paper is REALLY REALLY DIFFICULT.

WBS to MBAs: Ha ha, thought you were starting to enjoy yourselves, did you?

Five choices per question, and every choice A-E is plausible; there's no knocking aside of obviously wrong choices to increase your chances of guessing correctly. Every question, EVERY question, needs either a detailed act of memory or copious calculation to get right. I doubt I even got 50% here. The essay-type question is easier (maybe, just maybe, I picked up a few points) but there was still very little opportunity to bullshit.

And what you really need in an exam is bullshittability.

What's odd is that Management Accounting is a bullshittable subject. It's a lens created by accountants to present a company's operations in a certain light: it's as much a strategic and political tool as a reporting mechanism. That's its whole reason for being. Set people certain targets, contextualise their department in a certain way, demonstrate the method by which advantage is gained, and you've got people gaming the system. If you can get them to game it the way you want, you're onto a winner. You might even make money.

But when the game gets turned back on the gamer - i.e. in an exam - the bullshittability vanishes. Where Corporate Finance yesterday felt borderline but possibly passable, I'm pretty sure quite a few people (including me) will be getting resit invitations (or worse) in the next month or two. Not good.

A beautiful dream

I met my grandfather last night. And not as the tired shadow he became towards the end of his life, as he neared the century, but as the rotund retired shopkeeper of my childhood. And I'm pretty sure it was in the kitchen of his old home on the coast, with the three-step stool I used to perch on. Yet I was my adult self, finally talking to the man on equal terms.

I always dream vividly, but this was exceptional. It was a beautiful dream.

I remember we had a real conversation, not all dreambabble. He knew he'd died some years back, and joked about it. "What about the brass band?" (Sorry, Gramps - no uniformed marchers allowed at a green burial site, but we did play some of their music for you.)

He knew where we were, too. He knew that the static occluding his kitchen window wasn't the salt spray of the south coast, but the swirly stuff of the dreamscape. He was satisfied to be there, in his favourite place, and grateful for the time we had. Near the end, he gave that jocular wink of his and chortled, 'You ARE having a dream, you know...' as if I wasn't aware. It was my dream, but he was the star. And then I woke up.

I knew it was a dream ... but I wish you hadn't told me yet, Gramps! Wish I could have stayed and talked longer. But all good things come to an end.

I wrote at his funeral that no life truly ends until all the lives it's touched have ended. And because I met him again, over steaming cups of tea drunk from mugs purchased long after he died, his memory's again as fresh as if I saw him yesterday.

Until next time, old man. And I know there will be a next time.

Exam hell: cold turkey

It's hell not being able to have a glass of wine until THURSDAY. Especially after discovering I am the one person in the 80-strong cohort doing FIVE exams this week. Combination of doing an extra elective this term, plus all my chosens being assessed by exam rather than assignment. I'm the Man.

Hey, if it isn't hurting, it isn't working. Management Accounting tomorrow; time to snuff those variances.

Post mortem: Corporate Finance

Executive Summary: Either I failed the exam, or the airline in Section B got a real bargain on leasing its planes!

That's the central problem with Corporate Finance: you can't really tell if the numbers emerging from the equations 'feel right'. A discount factor of .8972 or .7118 - both are on the table, both are plausible, but put the first in Year 0 instead of Year 1 and you're screwed by multiple tenths of a percent in the final cost-of-capital figure. Of such mistakes are global economic meltdowns made.

There are other bad luck questions: the very first multiple-choice is on mortgage payback periods, the simplest equation in all of Corporate Finance, and it's NOT ON THE FORMULA SHEET. Bad start, bad start. But even worse, the temperature of the Sports Hall was a fraction of a degree above Absolute Zero. (When people from Siberia say it's cold, it MUST be true.)

But the basic issue remains: the intractibility of applying Corporate Finance to the real world. I'm a real-world person with an interest in the inchoate; does that explain why the subject interests me, but also why I'm so monumentally crap at it?

The problem with Corporate Finance is that it's a shared delusion: only real as long as enough people are willing to suspend their disbelief. It's why the whole subprime mortgage mess - which now threatens to tip the entire world economy into a slump - is happening. Because a rich white guy on Wall Street thought an unemployed guy in a rotting crackhouse on the bum side of Alabama could, properly spun, be an insanely great financial asset. He didn't think once of how his spreadsheets and sliced-and-diced CDOs applied to the real world.

The CFO of Goldman Sachs - presumably the smartest financial guy at the smartest financial group in the world - explained away such vast errors of judgement as '25-standard-deviation events, happening several days in a row.' Look buddy, 25 S.D. events just DON'T HAPPEN. Britain's recent earthquake - the first in decades - was perhaps a 2 S.D. event, and on the asymptotic scale of the Normal Distribution, 25 S.D's would've happened about once since Ug the Caveman was the man of the moment. For such events to have happened on several consecutive days - well, it'd be less surprising if a herd of Aptosaurii materialised in Hyde Park and started dancing the timewarp.

What happened, but which CFO Vinar didn't understand, was that his complex financial models were simply wrong. Not even in approximation, but in fundamental assumptions. Just - wrong. Yet to him - and to a thousand other City and Street movers and shakers - they represented reality better than reality itself.

[AAAARGH! I've just realised I forgot to add back the initial cost of the planes in both instances, which would have made A2 and B4 planes much closer competitors!!!] (But this illustrates my point: I'm applying my models to the real world. At least when I'm wrong I KNOW I'm wrong.)

I don't know if I've passed or failed Corporate Finance, but if I fail, it's because of those bloody aircraft. Well, I suppose that's appropriate given that 'winging it' is the only life philosophy I've ever had any success with.

Three million quid for potato contracts?!!

Apparently someone in the Sainsbury potato buying department may have taken £3m in bribes for steering decisions towards one grower.

Something doesn't quite mash here. I've a feeling this story's been sliced and diced a bit. (If you already want to rush off and be sick, I'll be here when you come back...)

A bit of Googling reveals the UK grows 6m tons of potatoes a year. Sainsbury has 15% market share, so let's say it sells 900,000 tons of spuds annually.

And Greenvale supplies half its potatoes. Genorously assuming Sainsbury buys British all the time, the retail value of all those sackfuls at around 35p a kilo is just £157m. The main UK supermarkets squeeze their suppliers until the pips squeak, so Greenvale's profit from Sainsbury - if it makes one at all - is only £5-6m at most.

To pay someone £3m on the side... when your profits are already being battered ... is really fishy. There's just no way a lowly potato buyer could salt away that kind of money without it being wrapped in news. The journalists would eat it up.

And even if the bribes had been paid over the years, chipping away at the law, then there's still the NPV to consider. The 'discount factor' if you include the risks of being discovered would be huge. I mean, you'd be deep-fried if you got found out.

OK, enough puns. But it demonstrates it's worthwhile looking beneath the crispy outer layer at the bits within...


[Update 8.40pm: the Times website confirms my guesstimates weren't that far off: "Greenvale... turnover was £139.7m in 2005-6, but it lost £4.2m. The company, which has received the Queen’s award for innovation, is understood to supply about 45% of Sainsbury’s potatoes." In other words, the bung wasn't even for profit: it was simply towards contribution. Now THAT'S desperation for you.

"i will only post in vardhamansheshak puranjyoti suryapradesh logvishwabhinandan community website."

Enjoying an entertaining half-hour with the world's most extraordinary newspaper, the Times of India.

If there's one thing Indian English resembles, it's 1930s Britain: prissy butlers, nervous vicars, and endless attention to social rituals while taking tea on the lawn. Educated Indians, heirs to a 5000-yr old culture, are more English than my grandfather. (On my MBA course: the Indian participants sometimes ask me to edit a letter, and I'm transported into a bygone age.)

Murders are 'unseemly'. Horrific accidents involving hundreds of people are 'unfortunate'. And 'Are we being irresponsible making prank calls to emergency services?' is posed as a serious question. It's a natural tendency to tolerate bad luck and enjoy complexity that makes India what it is... huge, varied, explosively chaotic, but somehow managing to be a democracy where most people get along, most of the time.

Right, entertainment over. Back to revision...

The skydiving take on Corporate Finance

An image from the skydiving course has stayed with me: de-gloving your hand. It's what (can) happen if, for example, you don't remove your watch before jumping and a stray cable whips off the watch at 120mph, taking all the skin on your hand with it.

(Yes, at first I thought it just meant pulling off your gloves, too.)

I wonder if there are equivalent expresions for other parts of your body? De-socking your foot? De-epauletting your shoulder? Or even de-balaclava'ing your head?

The last would be exceptionally nasty, but let's face it, it'd be a grand exit - landing with a bloody grinning skull where your face used to be. Since you're going to die anyway, the best thing to do would probably be to get someone to pour petrol over you and set fire to your head. "Newsflash! A skydiver from Warwick's been revealed as the Ghost Rider!"*

So what's this got to do with Corporate Finance? As possibly the hardest of Warwick's elective courses, Corporate Finance revision has been having a similar effect on my brain as that stray cable on a watch-wearing wrist. I feel that learning one more equation or methodology is going to 'de-Finance my brain', and all the stuff I've already learnt will be blown away.

Revising this subject (and two others, to be fair: there are only two exams I feel confident of passing next week) has become less about getting a good score and more about survival. Four techniques - NPV, WACC, bond pricing, and CAPM - are bound to feature in more than 50% of questions, so I'm concentrating on learning these four methods and sod everything else.

The reason for this is that revision as-you-go-along hasn't been possible this term; too much time taken up in groupwork and projects. I've had to fit basically all my study into the last seven days, and it just hasn't worked. I'm hardly the only person having problems, but all the same I can't wait for the next few days to be over.

*This does NOT imply I enjoyed the Nicholas Cage film of the Ghost Rider character, which ranks among the worst films ever made.

Too much news day

Hmmm, looking at today's BBC News site (click for a screenshot) it seems the credit crunch has made the leap from 99% of news to 100%. The 'Related Sites' link is interestingly Freudian, though.

Pi Day

Apparently it's Pi Day! I shudder to think of the wild parties that are surely taking place in the Maths Block tonight. Doubtless the numbers geeks will be drawing circles on each others' bottoms so they can make the infinity symbol when they clench, yelling out slightly incorrect equations that make everyone collapse in laughter, and poking fun at anyone who makes a mistake in the seventh decimal place after solving linear functions for np-hard problems in their head.

Mine's a steak and kidney, guys.

Yesterday's news

The switchover's happened. Halfway through the MBA, with team projects and groupwork over, and the Modular MBA crowd have taken over 'our' part of the WBS building. Syndicate rooms, coffee space, even printers are surrounded by an invisibile force field that clearly states: You Fulltimers Are No Longer Welcome Here. Stories abound of being physically pushed aside at photocopiers.

It is perfectly obvious what has happened here.

With the most structured teaching finished, the 2007 intake is now yesterday's story. We have been abandoned to our fate, shunted into the gaping maw of weekly crammers and Project & Dissertation terms: no longer an 80-strong group of the 'special ones', but now merely faces in the vasty crowd of ALL Warwick's MBAs, modular to executive to distance learning, a cast of thousands. We have been tossed aside like an outdated case study. On the fulltime programme, the focus will now be on the 2008 intake, marketing the Warwick MBA to a fresh crowd of hopefuls and getting those GMATs and signatures done in another round of the endless business of adult education. And it hurts.

Of course, we all knew this would happen. But when you've been working in each others' pockets for months, you get territorial about the little spaces you inhabit; some of us have spent multiple all-nighters in those little Syndicate rooms, and now the syndicates are no more, the rooms have been re-allocated. To Executive people. To Distance Learning people. To Modular people.

(What is a 'modular person' anyway? Can you take them apart, unscrewing their heads and limbs, and click them back together in different configurations? Are they posable?)

I only just got here, but there's a feeling now that my year out is already starting to end.

Journalist gives lessons in how not to interview at SXSW

(Too many skydiving stories. Do something else. Ed.)

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. A friend's at SXSW, where journalist Sarah Lacy has conducted possibly the worst on-stage interview of all time with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Now Zuckerberg looks like a nerdy kid at the best of times, but what he's achieved is genuinely visionary, and Lacy made the error of treating him like a nervous kid. In front of an audience that wanted to hear Zuckerberg, Lacy apparently dominated the interview, even complaining at times that her job was hard.

Sarah, you forgot the cardinal rule: know your audience. This crowd of geeks and propellorheads had probably never heard of you; the interview wasn't about you. You're not Terry Wogan or Jay Leno. You weren't the entertainment.

By Lacy's miffed blogging, she apparently hasn't learned her lesson. Let's see if she keeps her job after this object lesson in how not to interview...

Dead calm on the edge

"Look up and in.... GO!"

And I'm falling. Through fresh air with nothing more substantial in it than a few wisps of cloud. The ground is 4000ft below and the air is rushing past at 120kph.

Yet amid the chaotic whooshing, I feel strangely calm.

Because I know what to do. In 10 surprisingly physical hours yesterday, the RAPS instructors trained us to jump with a static line. All the stuff you need to do in the air, most of which happens in the five seconds before your parachute opens.

(Yes, I know it looks like a watercolour, but that's me in the pic.)

I don't do it quite textbook - my "ARCH THOUSAND, TWO THOUSAND..." speech is too fast, and when I look up the canopy's still unfolding. You miss a lot by waiting, though: it's a thing of beauty, like orchids expanding in timelapse photography. "Is it big?" No, but give it a moment...

Floating below a good canopy at last, I'm at peace.

Never been here before, but I recognise the place: it's where you feel life at its fullest. The edge.

'The edge' is what I call any environment that's alien to human beings, yet where by our resourcefulness we're able to survive. Extreme cold in mountains, a searing desert, a solo jungle trek. Gore-Tex, Toyota, and Silva help us to balance on that line between life and death, as long as you know how to use them. The edge is where you learn what it means to be human.

Most species of animal live on the edge all the time. But too many of us humans have forgotten it, encased in our comfortable prophylactics of cities and services. We don't appreciate running water or electricity or rooves over our heads because they've become too Normal, taken us too far from the edge.

All the problems of the world would just dissolve, if everyone lived closer to the edge.

And there's a fairly strong case for skydiving being edge. Like all edges, it's perfectly possible to survive and thrive simply by following certain rules. If I do something wrong, I'll plummet a vertical mile and end up slightly dead. But as long as I don't do anything stupid, there is only a one in four million chance that both my main and reserve 'chutes will fail (far smaller still now the main's inflated without trouble) and I'm in considerably less danger than crossing the street. Completely safe, in this utterly untenable environment.

I don't have a care in the world, up here.

I was second out of the plane, so there's only one 'chute below me: he's drifting some distance from the white X. Ha ha, I'm certainly not going to make that mistake. Let's just line up with the landing arrow and do our three stage turn at 1000-500-300ft, shall we...

Two minutes later I'm directly above him, having turned around to face the wind for landing, and discovered the windspeed exactly matches the speed of the canopy. My descent is basically vertical, and I land in the muddy field several hundred metres from the X. Jumper 1 and I tramp back together.

But damn, it feels good. I've just traversed the distance between a plane in flight and the ground, VERTICALLY, using the contents of a rucksack. This rocks.

I'm the Buddha. I'm Zen. I'm the Bulletproof Monk. In a state of satisfied equilibrium that isn't exhilaration; it's more like... understanding. Comprehending the true vastness of human experience. And loving it.

Next challenge: 6 more jumps to start freefalling. The midterm goal is to freefall from 15,000ft by September. I'm on the ground now, but I'm still a mile high.

Managing the risks

As I walk back to the classroom, one guy in the air actually has to use his reserve chute. It's rare, about 1 in 2000 jumps. But that's not the point.

Skydiving isn't about taking risks; it's about managing them. Every jumper, every jump, has a reserve chute backing him up. There is a risk you'll have trouble with your main chute; you manage that 1-in-2000 risk away by taking a spare, squaring the problem to 1-in-4-million. But that's not the point either.

The point - as I realise over the afternoon's training - is that the reserve chute is not an emergency procedure. It's a normal procedure, because emergencies are part and parcel of your normal checks at the start of each jump. A normal jump is simply one where you considered all the options and decided not to deploy your reserve. On the very rare occasions you need it, you'll simply take the other decision and deploy it. Based not on panic, but on having one 'No' answer among the three you ask yourself on every jump.

Life is not about avoiding risk, it's about recognising and managing it. That's what's wrong with Britain's ever-tighter Health & Safety culture: it assumes risk is something bad, something to be veered away from instead of confronted head-on. In newly risk-averse Britain, Health & Safety people are the biggest risk of all.

Because by trying to legislate away risk, they make us less capable of dealing with it. They forget that we are alive because we took risks. And learned how to manage them. We bob and dip a lot, but we soar. Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter.

There are no emergencies in parachuting; there are simply alternative courses of action.

Ready for the jump

Training for a skydive is almost as much fun as the jumping-out-of-aeroplanes part itself.

This weekend I'm at a small airfield doing some static line jumps, i.e. proper parachuting. A cable attached to the plane does the important work of pulling your 'chute out, but after that you're on your own. The main bits of training cover what happens in the first five seconds after jumping, and the last five before you hit the ground; everything in between is common sense.

The training is both interactive and entertaining.

We learn the basics first: what a ram-air system is, getting touchy-feely with an actual parachute. They're surprisingly complex pieces of engineering: imagine a pack of sausages lying side by side, with holes in the skins allowing meat, sorry, I mean air, to swirl between sections in a controlled way, inflating the canopy part by part. Making sure this part by part goes smoothly is the main point of today.

'Arching' is fun. Splaying your arms and legs out and upwards creates a shuttlecock shape, with your hips out front (the instructor calls this 'shagging a leper') meaning you'll fall stably and the 'chute has a nice measured environment to open in. Getting this part wrong can have consequences I don't want to think about just yet.

There's a checklist post-exit from plane. We shout the checklist again and again. Is it big? Is it rectangular? Is it damage-free? Is it a nice colour? (OK, we added the last one as a joke since there are many girls in the training group.)

My practice exits are bit showy. "Stop leaping so much - you're older than these guys and you think you've got something to prove."

The plane we'll jump from is one seriously cool chunk of metal: a little Dornier G92, slab-sided, scruffy of interior, and as noisy and smelly as an ancient diesel. But it shoots into the clouds in a way that suggests it knows EXACTLY what it's doing. (Photo courtesy Alex Lane.) Scruffy frame and scuffed edges it may have, but everything is screwed together tight as a drum. Good workaday technology, just add pilot and stir.

When someone asks you what you this weekend, 'Jumped out of an aeroplane' is a pretty cool answer.

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand - SHIT!

Hmmm, just learned that there's a 'theme' for the Saturday night event during the Great Warwick Jump course. The theme is... SUPERHEROES.

The Skydiving Club has obviously not thought this through.

I mean, undergrads aren't the most organised of people, so many of them will be looking for things to make costumes out of on Saturday afternoon.

Now, what article of clothing is commonly worn by superheroes? A cape. And what is a cape? A large area of.... brightly-coloured billowing fabric.

So they'll be looking around for a source of large areas of brightly-coloured fabric, to cut a cape-shaped piece out of.

That would be.... PARACHUTES.

Yes, the skies over Lincolnshire on Sunday will be ABLAZE with the death screams of plummeting undergrads with cape-shaped holes in their canopies.

I estimate that due to this decision (presumably taken by the social secretary of the Skydiving Club) we'll have a higher-than-average 'wastage factor' this weekend. (Separate this from 'wastedness', which will be high anyway.

I must find the social secretary of the Skydiving Club and give her a good spanking.

Why am I not more worried about jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane

I've got to have SOMETHING to get my mind off the MBA between projects finishing and exam week, so I'm jumping out of a plane or two this coming weekend. (It's possibly unwise to be watching clips like this, although I prefer them to the less 'interesting' jumps: it just demonstrates that even after 2 unlucky strikes you can still come through.)

I hoped it'd put some action and adventure back into existence; living at Warwick U's pleasant enough, but life has lost its dark, exquisite edge. There's just no acid-etched tingle of fear and risk clawing at your soul, and we all need that just to remind us we're alive. Without it, life's just... existence. And mere existence isn't worth the effort.

I'm jumping solo; hoping to get my freefall license this year, and you need a minimum of 17 solo jumps to get it. And there are enough female undergrads taking part to give 'The Great Warwick Jump' a whole new meaning if the Saturday night party goes well, phwoooaaar. But, I mean, 4000 feet? You barely need a parachute for that.

Seen on a box of microwaveable Thai curry I found in my fridge

Ingredients: Thai green chicken curry (60%), jasmine rice (40%). Thai green chicken curry contains thai green curry sauce (60%), cooked marinated chicken (40%). Thai green curry sauce contains coconut milk (43%) (water, coconut milk, maltodextrin, milk protein (from cow's milk)), water, onion, green curry paste (4%) (coriander, sunflower oil, garlic, lemongrass, shallot, galangal, water, ginger, salt, green chilli, sugar, lime, basil, turmeric, acidity regulator: citric acid; coriander seeds, cumin), rapeseed oil, sugar, green chillies, coconut cream, modified maize starch, fish sauce (anchovy, salt, sugar), chicken boullion (salt, lactose, flavourings, dehydrated chicken, yeast extract, onion powder, sunflower oil, spice extract), lemongrass puree, lime juice, coriander, salt, soy sauce (water, salt, molasses, sugar, soya bean, wheat flour, colour: ammonia caramel; acidity regulator: lactic acid; preservative: sodium benzoate), fennel, lime leaves, nutmeg. Cooked marinated chicken contains chicken breast (90%), water, modified maize starch, rapeseed oil, coconut milk powder (coconut milk, maltodextrin, milk protein (from cow's milk)), sugar, lemongrass puree, lime juice, fish sauce (anchovy, salt, sugar). Jasmine rice contains cooked jasmine rice (water, rice) (95%), rapeseed oil, spring onion, lemongrass puree, salt.

I have decided to become a poet

They've found some recordings of Philip Larkin in someone's garage. This basically doubles Larkin's entire recorded output: the guy didn't like the sound of his own voice and there isn't much of his own performing on file.

It's quintessentially Modern: the idea that artists must perform to be 'authentic', that anything written down isn't valid unless the creator had enough vocal or acting talent to drive it into the public consciousness himself. I'm not sure why this is: Homer just wrote down ancient orals; the Bible's just an anthology of pre-Babylonian flood myths; even Shakespeare reused and repurposed lines hackneyed at the time. And as for Bob Dylan - well, turning folk songs into greenbacks is certainly a skill, but how exactly is it 'authentic'? While of course, the really original artists - David Bowie, Andy Warhol, computer games programmers - are decried as playing to the gallery. That's fucked. But anyway...

I've got about half a gig of ancient sound recordings by everyone from Yeats to Dylan Thomas and even some Alfred Lord Tennyson, and it's weird just HOW differently people used to speak. (And how different it could have been. It was a knife-edge decision when the BBC got rolling as to whether announcers should have Northern or Southern accents; the Southern win made London forever 'posh', despite Manchester and Yorkshire being top dogs in the Industrial Age.) These people knew the score: where life's going, how dark existence really is, why none of it matters a damn to the infinite blackness beyond Earth's atmosphere. They KNEW.

Being a poet is far more authentic than being a musician: musicians are poets-lite. Rock stars and model slebs are only a pale imitation of what these guys get up to: Brendan Behan once coughed up his own liver and managed to swallow it back down. And since poets don't have even the CHANCE of commercial success, their authenticity is greater.

ANYONE can enjoy a rock song; that's the point. You get lost in a beat and there's nothing too difficult about it. But poetry? To enjoy the written (or spoken) word, you've got to understand meter and pentameter, grok the rhythms and structures of non-drumbeat-accompanied English, understand nuance and metaphor and be prepared to put in some effort. The audience for new poetry in the UK today is estimated at approximately 4000 people.

The poet will always live among a tiny coterie of educated admirers, no mass appeal, no life outside that circle. Utterly authentic. Utterly contextual. How amazing.

In the words of Fight Club, "Self-improvement is just masturbation. Self-destruction - now THAT'S masculine." Them's fighting words.

I'm putting pen to paper tonight. (Poems should always be on paper.) I've written a bit before here at Warwick - one of which I've actually delivered to its subject - and, of course, it singularly failed to impress: the female person in question just isn't soaked deeply enough in the culture of verse to absorb the passion I put into it. (Well, she's become my friend, but that's far from the result I was looking for.)

So here I go: I'm turning pro. The world's first MBA poet. Watch out, world.