Goodbye

I left the Warwick campus today. Much as I arrived: in the pouring rain.

And now I'm back in London, in my new home. A cheerful top floor of a pleasantly scruffy house down south. Lying on an unfamiliar bed, in the dim light of an dusky lamp, stone cold sober, thinking. And trying not to think too much about the one inescapable fact: I'm not going back there.

The richest experiences are rich precisely because they end quickly. A skydive, a jungle trek, even a month backpacking. You troll through the time taking action to take things forward. But the MBA had a community. When you're working and studying in each others' pockets and half the cohort lives a two minute walk away, you feel wanted, part of everything, alive, even in the most despairing moments late at night before an exam you know you're not ready for. It wasn't a year out; it was a life. And now it's gone and I'm already missing it.

Lots to do, lots on the calendar. But the dreamy green campus is behind me now, and I'm sad. In just two week there'll be another crop of bright-eyed MBA students using our Syndicate rooms, eating our doughnuts, sleeping in our beds. (And, if this year's anything to go by, each other's beds too.)

It was a great year. Thank you, Warwick University. Signing off.... now.

Sucks like a Dyson on steroids

This sucks. Too many goodbyes, too much work, surrounded by packing boxes that only remind me this life is about to end. I'm fighting the dark pool of sadness welling up inside me, but it hurts.

Somehow, this year's been about more than an MBA; it's been about constructing a different life, something humanscale and close-knit instead of the broadness and infinity of cities like London. And although it's contained some very dark moments, I think it's been the best year of my life. I've trekked across scorching deserts and jumped out of aeroplanes just to feel something, but sometimes all you need is a little room on a greenfield campus and the warmth of a great institution around you to feel part of something amazing.

And now it's almost over.

This sucks.

Sorting out life, intense as uncut wasabi

Mission almost accomplished. This week I've part-sorted my next role, confirmed some other work that'd take about a day a week for some extra pocket money, and talked about a potential project in Paris that'd pay off a chunk of MBA debt. And I saw my new home.

In keeping with my year-long principle of 'letting go', not deliberately controlling my environment - in order to open myself up to more possibilities - I'm not going back to my own little chunk of the London property market next month. I'm going to take a step back, and share a vast house in south London with three friends. A sprawling space to kick back in, a few stops by train from central London, and a big room at the top of the house to crash. Brilliant.

Training back to Victoria after checking it out last night, the lights of the city ranged below me, I felt that same cocktail of sad-and-happy I've had before. This year at Warwick University really has been a great year: painful at times, but it's taught me much cut, with plenty of laughs. The rolling green campus, its iconic Modernist buildings of University House and the Business School that make my heart soar with architectural joy ... it's been a far greater year than I ever expected.

And I got it by kicking back. Not being in control. The last ten months my timetable's been set for me; that was the point. Handing the reins to someone else for a while had the converse effect of self-actualising me even further.

The quote that drove me to do an MBA - from 'Batman Begins', "You know how to fight six men. We can teach you to engage six hundred." - still holds. I could take on an army now. More interestingly, I could build one of my own.

I think I'll bunk off project work this afternoon and see 'The Dark Knight' in Leicester Square. It'd just fit somehow.

Growing young disgracefully

"But I was so much older, then - I'm younger than that now." - Bob Dylan

Sometime in the last year, I discovered the secret of not getting old.

The secret is... don't get old!

It's no harder or simpler than that. Your body and mind are self-renewing tools. Down the decades they may need some patching up, but plot medical advances on a curve and life expectancy seems to be increasing about ten years every decade; already, the old have stopped dying. (The USA and Japan's fastest growing demographic: octogenerians.) The dream of immortality is within our grasp. But technology is immaterial: what matters to staying young is attitude. And at some point since January, I got myself a new one.

It wasn't forging a new identity; it was getting rid of an old one. Working for a living since my teens meant I'd always felt 'older', but when I hit campus I started reverting. I'd spent much of the previous ten years in jeans and T shirt dreaming up headlines; hardly an adult occupation, after all. I started thinking: maybe I'm young after all. And I think the process is now complete.

I just caught sight of myself in a window and the figure strolling in step with me was a young man. Tall, fresh, strong, relaxed, even with a perceptible stomach and squishy limbs after four months away from the gym. Somehow, against all the odds, I'm at peace.

It had nothing to do with body and everything to do with mind. I just stopped worrying about stuff and JUST DID IT. (I mean, joining a University skydiving club at 37?)

A couple of years back I made an effort to pursue a 'normal' life, worrying: where is the wife? The children? The car and the lawnmower? I was aging, weakening, not in body but in mind. Then this year came the apocalyptic realisation: that I really, really, don't want that.

I wasn't falling behind; I was ahead of the game. I like being alone, having my own space, doing my own thing. And for the next ten years - where I'll concentrate on making money - a 'normal' life would be an annoying distraction.

(Of course, since having that realisation I've had women buzzing around me as if I'm made of chocolate, but that's by the by. I'm much too young for a serious girlfriend.)

When I restart my physical fitness routine post grad, it'll be different. Aerobic and meditative exercises centred on other things, the heartbeat and breathing, going for poise and agility rather than strength and speed. I still plan an Ironman next year, but it'll be a side result of my training rather than a goal. With the right attitude, even an Ironman triathlon is easy. Fitness for events is one thing; fitness for life is another.

Before, I worried about losing what I had. Now as I reach the end of an expensive year, I have nothing at all... and it doesn't worry me in the slightest. No money? I'll make more. No home? I'll buy another one. No friends? I'll go out and make some more. Everything is easy now.

I used to worry about all that stuff... back when I was old.

Among the new faces

Back on campus. With skydiving, London trips, and overnighters elsewhere, I've spent precisely two nights in the last 15 in my own room, although I've sort of adapted; I don't feel I'm running on empty, far from it (life's actually full of adrenalin.) But one thing I notice this morning is the predominance of new faces around Lakeside.

Summer courses and short modules abound in 'Term 4', the near-mythical part of the university calendar that spans summer, and the school puts its empty residential blocks to good use. So there's an influx of changing faces around the student village, none of whom I recognise. (Even on a 5000 strong campus population you see the same set of faces during the academic year.) And now that villagey feel has gone. Just another sign it's all coming to an end...

Time to graduate to a creche

Hmmm, this could mean that higher education is now available to the under-5s, or that an unusual number of undergrads were lackadaisical about contraception during their degrees. Either way, looks like I'm once again getting 'down with the kids'.

And just like that - they're gone

Sunday afternoon. The University year is over, although not my year (yet). And suddenly, in the last 48 hours, the energetic lifeblood of the Warwick campus has drained away.

I got back on Friday night. Instead of the hordes of undergrads enjoying the warm weather on the piazza, there was only a handful of them. They've all gone, the 12,000 sub-22 year olds that make up two-thirds of this university's daytime population. Summer has begun and the kids have departed, maybe for a season overseas, sleeping on the steps of cathedrals or riding pillion across India. Because they have the time.

I envy them. Because the only thing I've ever wanted is more time. I wish I could have my time again, a thousand times over: I've lived the best of all possible lives, but there's a multitude of bests, and I want them all.

And sadness. The sadness that comes from the constant reminders that, all too soon, this strangest of years in my life will be over.

Goodbye, undergrads.

The Good Student

I'm a good man. And tonight I had proof.

Just spent an evening with a friend, nothing fancy, just noodles and Sauv Blanc. Forgot completely I'd had a load of laundry tumble drying in the block opposite, so went out to get it at 12.30am. I'd been ready for bed for some hours and groaned as I headed downstairs again.

On the way over, there's a girl arriving at the block's other door. Leggy blonde, boobs and bum half out of sequinned minidress, the usual thing. You can't help but look; I mean, whoa.

She's behaving a little strangely. Keeps doubling up, dropping things. Not unusual around this time on campus, although not an everyday occurence on a Monday. After the briefest of pauses I head towards the other door, bundle my bone-dry clothes into my bag, and head for home.

She's still there. All tits and ass and legs, in a giggling heap. I ask if she's okay. She is by the happy undergrad standards - i.e. paralytically drunk - but not if she wants to get home. While campus is safe enough, I don't want to leave a vulnerable teenager in a doorwell.

I offer to get her home. (My key fits this lock thanks to the laundry access.) I pick up the bundle of tits and ass and legs and support it on my shoulder, trying to get her to talk (it seems like just drunk, but if it's drugs I'll be able to tell once she's talking.) She talks, giggling. It's just drink.

"I'm Jess." Giggling. Oh hell and damnation, the bare arms are going around my neck. The face is startlingly beautiful, model-girl even. I ignore it. I'm a good man.

She doesn't know where she lives. I support her more. She remembers it's on this floor. Walking down a corridor I notice '------ JESS!' on a door. Whew. Now all we have to do is find the keys...

She's on the floor again. I sit her against the wall. The minidress barely covers her backside and there'd be nothing left to the imagination, if I imagined it. Concentrate, Worth, concentrate. You're a good man.

The problem here is that the evening out put half a dozen units into me, just enough to affect judgement and oh bloody hell she's kissing me. Stop. Stop her. I stop her. This isn't what I expected when I went to collect my laundry. Keep it together. Her breath's on my neck and the long legs are - you've got nieces this age, Worth. In fact, you've got 501s this age. Concentrate. You are an adult helping a young girl home. That's all you're doing.

We open the door. She nearly falls. Blast and buckets of blood, that means I've got to go in. Take a deep breath.

It's an undergrad room. In other words, it's just about possible to see the carpet under the jumble of towels, sheets, clothes, underwear, bags. "I leave in two days!" she mumbles among the jumble. Yeah, sweetheart, and I'm leaving in two minutes.

I don't even want to think about what'll happen if security walks down this corridor. I know exactly what it'll look like. This is bad. I ask her to take a few steps forward, to her bed and sanctuary. She reaches around and DON'T UNZIP YOUR DRESS DON'T UNZIP YOUR DRESS I stop her wriggling and manoevre her to the 'bed zone', a mountain of assorted blankets under which there's probably a mattress. I lie her down. She won't let go. Her arms are around my neck and I'm horizontal. Let go. The breasts are popping out and my resolve is hardening. I escape her honeyed grip.

She's on the bed at last, lying on her side, best position if she vomits in her sleep. She's peaceful, breathing evenly, not in danger. She'll wake up with a headache, but no worse. I force myself not to linger for a look, and leave.

My laundry bag's in the corridor where I left it. I shake myself and head across the lawn to my block and home.

I'm a good man.

There Will NOT Be a waterfight! See Below -

And supposedly mature MBAs will definitely NOT be attending.

"Right, as some of you may have heard, the recent attempt to organise "Warwick Water War 08" was cancelled due to "health and safety" issues. The university has said they do not wish for any alternatives. So, furthering on from that particular group, I bring you a warning:

-There will NOT be a waterfight held in warwick to mark the end of the summer term.
-It will especially NOT be held on Monday 16th June.
-It will NOT start at 2PM and end whenever people wish it to.
-It will NOT take place in the field behind Tocil Woods (or anywhere else, subject to change or better ideas), especially in such a place where it will be hard for security to notice anything going on and get to quickly, and where it is easy to run away if any trouble does occur.
-You SHOULD bring your student cards just in case any trouble does start at a waterfight and security asks for them.

I urge you all to forward this warning to as many of your friends as soon as possible, to make them aware of this. Suggestions welcome.

Many Thanks,

;-)

DISCLAIMER: For "Health and Safety" reasons - By joining this group, you agree that if you just so happen to attend any waterfight that just so happens to occur as a result of this group, despite my warnings to the contrary, and you just so happen to somehow inexplicably injure yourself, then you promise not to sue me, or anybody in this group, the student's union or the university, blah blah blah etc."

Sunday afternoon on campus

I don't know why I should be so endlessly fascinated with a collection of brick and concrete boxes on a 1960s university campus, but I am. And days when the sun is shining makes it even better.

June 5th, 2008: the perfect day

I want to preserve this day. Wrap it in gauze and keep it in a wardrobe like a wedding dress. Dry it gently in the breeze next to a new-mown lawn, then fold it lovingly to the dimensions of a rosewood drawer, then slide it shut to keep it crisp and fresh forever.

Today is the perfect day.

The sky's been bright but the sun not unstinting, stretches of sunlight interrupted by dreamy clouds breezing by. Warm but not hot, no jacket required. The perfect weather.

Preparing my dissertation, I've been drifting from Arts Centre to Learning Grid. The structure of my summer project is becoming clear. The perfect work plan.

I've paused only for coffee with beautiful women, conversation and frisson more sophisticated than you'd expect on a university campus, outside on the benches while the highly diversity-aware trees sway slowly, listening in. The perfect coffee break.

I'm needed. The need to be needed is perfect, too. Yesterday I was at Lord's with clients; tomorrow WBS itself wants me on another Open Day; recruiters have started calling. The perfect sense of belonging.

In the sunken central plaza, every step is occupied by groups of laughing students, drinking, smoking, doing things students do. A living place. The perfect plaza.

If only I could store days like this. Open a drawer and spritz a single cloud of lemon to bring this day back, late in the year when outside is scuzzed with slush and a million moist noses report sniffles season. One a week is all I'd need. To experience the perfect day once again.

But doing so would kill it. Value departs when available in infinite measure. And it'd kill me too. For living the perfect day, again and again, would make further progress down life's path meaningless. So I'll just appreciate this day while I can.

And so... I near the end ...

- of my perfect day!

Database driven life

One of the really impressive things about Warwick University is its databases. Or more to the point, the way its databases connect to the student intranet and let me, slumped in my study bedroom, collect pretty much everything I need to write my assignments and dissertation.

Take just now. An article referenced in one of the readings for a Strategy module caught my eye. It's not in the readings, although it's a seminal article on the globalisation of business from the 1980s. This is probably a test: the course director may have left that article in plain view, referenced in the folder's readings but not actually in the folder as a handout, in order to see which clever buggers would spot it and look it up.

So I look it up. A few clicks and searching into the library, the business section, and a subscription index. A search on author and title. And - within a second - it's there: the full-text article, not in ASCII but an actual scanned page of the Harvard Business Review from 1983, complete with foxy-edged pages and the imprint of someone's pen pressed too hard on a previous page a quarter of a century ago. Brilliant.

In the vastness of the Internet, I inhabit a more tightly-clustered node: an ordered space of indexed scholarship, given shape and form by subscriptions and module structure and the sheer buzz of a campus wired for desseminating knowledge. From my little room here, I'm wrapped in a warm, comforting coccoon of information plus the means to make sense of it.

I'm going to miss this place.

The name's Worth, Chris Worth...

Of all the ridiculous things a year as a student has allowed me to do, attending the University Sports Ball as a member of the Skydiving Club is probably the funniest one so far. (Just booked my tix today.)

Now the next problem: sorting out a dinner suit.

It's been several years since I last wore black tie; I've completely forgotten the whole culture around it. For example, a 'tuxedo' technically means white jacket, which is pretty hard to carry off outside the Caribbean anyway, and at a ball where the dinner involves tomatoes it's completely out of the question. Black jacket, definitely. But whose?

I mean, I have to overcome a natural disadvantage here: since it's the summer ball of the university's sporting clubs, there'll be a large number of physically imposing males in the tent (well, in addition to me, obviously) and it'll take a lot to look impressive in that crowd. I've scheduled in daily swims and sessions to get myself back in shape after a few weeks of lumpen deskbound-ness, but that's only half the problem. The other half is the suit.

There's no way - no way - I can go for the standard Moss Bros rental like everyone else. I need the kind of suit Daniel Craig gasped at in 'Casino Royale' when Eva whipped out a tailored one for him, after he'd protested he already had a dinner suit. That's what a truly great suit does: make you go 'whoa'. But how can I get one?

There's got to be a way. Discounters, vintage shops, and friends (of my height and build) are on the list to call next week; one of them will have something truly sensational in my size. It'll be the perfect way to make the evening go with a bang.

Where money stood, we planted seeds of rebirth*

The Lakeside swans have had their kids! A couple of fluffy cygnets are now floating around the lake, flanked by Mum and Dad. It's always great to see the cycle of life in action.

*With apologies to David Bowie.

Warwick gets a new Chancellor

So Richard Lambert is the new Chancellor of the University of Warwick. An ex-FT journalist and Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, he's perfectly in tune with the commercial focus that made Warwick Margaret Thatcher's favourite university.

He inherits a university with strong finances, a top 10 UK rank, a world-class business school, and a well-equipped campus. As a 60s university Warwick will never have the dreaming spires and sterling history of Oxbridge, but as Britain's second wave of universities move towards their half-century it's obvious which ones have succeeded, and Warwick's firmly at the top of that group. Good luck to him in keeping the good stuff good.

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.

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.

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.

Power to the People

When they cut the power, the People must make Power of their Own.

Beard-stroking liberals aren't a common sight on commercially-focussed Warwick University - and least of all at the ultra-capitalist Business School - but when the electrons stopped flowing today, things got uglier than a hairy leftie on a bad hair day.

Yes, there were power cuts across campus. Possibly connected to the 'quake last night, where 5000 students woke up and... fondly thought they had company. In the dusty aftermath, this top-tier university acquired a third-world electricity network for the afternoon.

In the MBA section, the lesser syndicate groups were walking out in disgust, stripped of their power by... lack of power. Hardier syndicates gamely stayed on, forgetting the PCs and PowerPoints and resorting to... actual conversation, can you believe it.

There were demonstrations of undergrads in the darkened corridors, chanting "WHAT DO WE WANT? NET PRESENT VALUE! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!" in Chinese accents. OK, only joking, but the point is made.

The coffee machines were off. The security-carded doors were open to all. (Yes, ALL. Undergrads in the postgrad wing. Science people taking shortcuts back to Lakeside. Even... shock horror... LIBERAL ARTS TYPES?!!) Civilisation, truly, neared its end today. It was a strange kind of chaos: quiet, accepting, yet utterly apocalyptic, like the 2000 neocon takeover of the US government that set the USA's respect in the world back 75 years.

And when at last the power came back on, we felt... cleansed. But at the same time, slightly disappointed. Our NPV and ROI focussed lives had been given a taste of what it's like to live... off the grid.

And some of us, perhaps, liked it a little.

Quaking in anticipation

I thought something happened last night! Remember waking up to a shaking room, dazedly concluding someone was under my bed shaking it, and drifted back off to sleep.

(It's perhaps a measure of how thrashed I was that I didn't consider the fact of someone being under my bed to be worth further exploration.)

Sheesh, a 5.3 earthquake in the UK after 25 years. Just what's happening under the Earth's crust these days?

China, girls, and undercover economists

Just back from a talk by Tim 'Logic of Life' Harford at the Warwick Economics Summit. As he explains the strange wisdom-of-crowds groupthink behind subjects as diverse as speed dating and prison populations, I'm looking around the room and noting further evidence of two trends in British education: girls and China.

Most of these kids are Economics students. Now Economics isn't quite as much a 'boy' discipline as physics or chemistry. But it still feels vaguely masculine.... yet more than half the students in the room are female. It's in keeping with a general decline in males participating in higher education in the UK.

What does this mean for the next generation of British males? There'll be a surfeit of highly-educated women fishing in a shrinking pool of educated men; this means an increase in women 'marrying down' and a rise in the existing trend of males feeling underpowered, directionless, and trapped. It looks like Fight Club got it right. What I'm seeing in this room today could lead to a breakdown of society within 20 years.

The other influence is China. Approximately one in four students in the room is of Chinese extraction. The economics of China itself, of course, answer this - mainland China long ago outstripped Hongkong as the UK's source of foreign students - and its growing middle class, a natural tendency towards education, and the sheer gravitational pull of a country short of a million accountants (to quote one example) will keep Britain's business schools chocka with Chinese for decades to come. There are economic reasons for top universities like Warwick to accept them, too: they pay international student rates, which are much higher than it can charge locals.

So there are economic outcomes and drivers for both the situations I see in the lecture hall this morning.

But what does this bode for Britain?

A new elite of female leaders, but an underclass of sub-educated men, and the birthrate dropping to zero among ethnic white British as a result? And will the gap be filled by immigrants from India and China? I don't think so; those countries have enough opportunities at home for bright young graduates. Much of Britain's population growth at the moment is due to recent immigrants having larger families; unfortunately, the sectors of British society having all the kids aren't the ones creating wealth. The unemployment rate among British Muslims is three times higher than the general population, yet they have many more kids for the taxpayer to support. The incidence of NEETs (not in education, employment, or training) is growing, yet the chav sector, too, has higher birthrates and they have their kids young.

So it's a depressing snapshot of Britain's future. A shrinking labour pool in the middle, a foreign elite at the top, and an expanding Bottom Thirty Million being supported by the State. It looks like life for the UK's hard-squeezed middle class is only going to get tougher.

I think my first evening out with the Skydiving Club went surprisingly well

After my first social event with the skydiving club, I have learned several things about today's undergrads.

1. 87% of the conversation is about alcohol. Unsurprisingly.
2. Only 9% is about sex. Surprisingly*.
3. The entertainment possibilities of helium-filled balloons are truly endless.
4. They use the word 'random' approximately 6 times in each sentence.
5. They don't run for midnight buses, even when the driver is jolting forward impatiently.
6. After a few drinks the fact I've got nieces their age becomes immaterial.
7. Even those who've accidentally triple-booked for Valentine's Day are pretty nice.
8. Coventry town centre isn't a bad place when you're in a group.

But the Skydiving Club are a pretty good bunch: surprisingly un-jocklike for what's after all a fairly extreme sport (jumping out of aeroplanes.) I'd trust any of them to pack my chute any time (except perhaps tonight, when most are the worse for wear.)

Roll on first jumps course...

* Although the Terminator story almost made up for it.

Doing my dirty laundry in public

In this case, literally. It's stupid how fast you build up a suitcaseful of clothes when you're studying / working / doing stuff up to 18 hours a day, even when you wake up at 3am (as I've been doing, for some odd reason, the last month or so.) In the meantime, the pile of textbooks awaiting reading is too huge to contemplate. What is this, school or something?

They're BACK! Yaaaay!

A rush of hope re-enters my life. The swan couple, which I thought had been cruelly cut in half over the winter, has reappeared! Yes, instead of one bereaved swan, there's now a pair again, sailing up and down the lake as a couple.

Maybe the second swan was late back after its winter break, or just had some stuff to take care of down south and told the other to go on ahead. Maybe they had a tiff, and are back together after some me-time. WHATEVER. The swans are a couple again, and that's all that matters.

Order has been restored to the lake. Yaaaay!

Nearly went under... but not quite

It sucks to be me this week.

My work, study, and personal lives are all COMPLETE crap right now. I'm down to about a third of my usual energy, the sheer frustration of scheduling projects and meetings is leaving precisely zero hours for actual study, I'm more undecided about the future than I've ever been. Not to mention I've lost a WHOLE THREE MINUTES from my 1600m time and my heart's stuffed with a writhing mass of blackness even a twenty-year-old Executive Stress Relief Consultant from Latvia can't cure.

Life sucks this week. And then it got worse.

There's a pair of swans on the lake near the postgrad block.

Only one of them returned from its winter break. Plowing forlornly back and forth beneath the little bridge, lost without its partner, unable to take Warwick Lakeside any other way.

And it all but broke me. I stood there for five minutes, quietly sobbing.

I can deal with all the project work, the hundreds of pages of reading, the demands of clients back in London, and the - let's face it - that 'other thing' that happened this week. But the death of a swan just pushed me over the edge. It was the sight of its bereaved partner, and being reminded of what my suddenly-solo avian friend had just realised: life has no purpose, no reason, no goals or targets or Key Performance Indicators, save those we impose upon it. Life is without meaning.

The cold, infinite, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.

Tonight I'll buy a small bottle of wine and pour it into the lake, remembering what shouldn't be forgotten. I hope those swans had at least a year or two together before tragedy struck.

Goodbye, my aquatic friend. You helped me feel something.

I have not had a hangover like this for some considerable time

Grurp. Stonking hangovers are a very rare event for me these days, and I suspect it's connected to the vodka shots that I participated in after red wine over at Heronbank last night. (These things always seem a good idea somehow at university flat parties.) Gotta clear this up or I'll lose a whole day.

That was an alarmingly large baked potato I had in the Arts Centre this lunchtime

There's nothing like a mile in the pool after a few hours in the lecture hall, but when I got out I was HUNGRY, and thanks to an overrun it was too late to head to University House. Pity, since Mondays is often a lasagne verde day and the cooking down there is surprisingly good for what's basically a student canteen.)

My backup option was the Arts Centre. There's always a few baked spuds left, and whoa, the one I had was HUGE. It was like eating a carbo-loaded rugby ball. Not the best thing to eat at lunchtime when the afternoon's going to be a manic rush of assignments and presentation prep bracketed by runs to the laundrette; even now, 4 hours later, I can feel its starchy vastness sitting in my stomach as if I'd swallowed it whole. Man, that was one HUGE potato. And as for the helping of cottage cheese - let's not go there. It's almost enough to put me off dinner, but for some reason I'm feeling in dire need of protein...

In the mood for action

Out on the road, getting a few two-legged kloms in since the pool's closed today, just me and Nikeplus. And thinking.

Much as I'm enjoying my time at Warwick, I am looking forward to getting back to London. The bright lights, the thronging crowds, the galleries and museums and architecture. Even the Tube; I still get a buzz out of taking a train through the Earth's crust. Not because it's better, but because it has action. Excitement, adventure, really wild things, 24-by-7-by-363*. I love London precisely because you can't get used to it.

Life isn't fun unless it resembles a movie script starring you. Every passing vehicle should hint at the possibility of dark secrets inside (even if you know they're Russians). Every door without a brassplate should hide billions in wealth (think of those anonymous offices in Mayfair.) After dark should be full of delectable pleasures in still-smoky underground dens, dawn light tinted with both regret of the previous day and hope for the forthcoming one. Life should be a riot of conflicting emotions, intense experiences to cut that searing pain of mere existence that never goes away.

I've joined the Skydiving Club and I'm doing my first solo jumps in March. Jumping out of a moving aeroplane at 4,000 feet will take the edge off, but a tightly-governed thrill ride isn't the same as being in a theatre of action, where anything could happen and it's up to you to survive and thrive.

As HC said, life should contain constant action. Inside my head I'm an action hero, even if it's limited to pacing campus after dark, wearing black trenches, and leaping the desks instead of going round them. Action. I need action.

(Aside: I'm seriously disappointed that nobody has replied to my class spam asking my MBA cohort to join me at 4000 feet. There are at least two guys apart from me fitting the action hero sensibility - Si***** and Io*** and you KNOW who they are - but neither has responded.)

If I walk down the street and only three or four bullets get fired at me, I find it hard to stay awake.

But skydiving will assuage the emptiness a little. And it's surprisingly cheap. "Subsequent jumps are cheap" (hopefully that's not because second jumps are 'subsidised' by people who paid for a second jump but, er, didn't quite excel on their first.) Although it's wrapped up the cotton wool of British Health & Safety: why, for example, do you have to wear a crash helmet? If at the end of a 4000ft fall your head's pointing downwards, you've got certain issues a fibreglass hat isn't going to fix.) Skydiving has some action, but it isn't Action.

So that's why I think that after I graduate, I will return to London, even though my shoebox of a house down there could be exchanged for something detached with four bedrooms up here. London means Action. And without action, you're already dead - you just haven't stopped moving yet.



(*363 because the trains stop Dec 24 and 25 and nothing happens.)

The day it rained forever

It's been raining at Warwick University since Thursday.

I've been back at 'school' a few months now, but tonight really felt like it. Because it was my first session in the Humanities building, one of the original University buildings from the 60s. It was so like going to comprehensive school in the 80s I almost shivered with the naughtiness of it. The same pale cream crumbling paint layered ten coats deep over sills and windowframes, cheap green paper towels in the toilets, overcooked radiators blasting dry eco-unfriendliness, and blackboards. Yes, proper blackboards with real chalk.

And the smell. Magnified by the rain, the smell is everywhere. The smell of teenagers: cheap perfume, stale sweat, boiled cabbage, free-range hormones and old socks. The Humanities Block is a proper Skool. The Business School's beautifully geometric building is so fit-for-purpose it just couldn't be any better: a song of cool lines and orderly corridors, and being in this other building reminds me that most people in British education don't have it so good.

It was fun, though (the French class I sort of missed last week) and added to the sheer weirdness of being a university student in my 30s. I hope I have a few more weird experiences like this before September comes.

Down and dirty in the SU

I don't quite 'get' Warwick's Student Union.

At any one time, half the bars and kitchens are either closed or devoid of customers. And the opening times seem fairly random, too. For instance, there's a paid-entrance party on at 11pm, so the whole downstairs area shuts down at 10pm and everyone has to leave and come back again.

The crowds seem equally elusive. I've walked through here on Friday evenings and the place is packed; other times, like this Friday, it's practically empty. Us postgrads obviously don't have that finely-tuned undergrad sense of where the Happenings are. Nine bars and six restaurants at the last count, yet it's always odds on the place you're heading for will be shuttered.

Tonight it's a party to welcome the new crop of exchange MBAs from Mannheim, and they're a little... different to the last lot. Man, these guys are TALL. It's like talking to trees. And not just the guys: the girls are so statuesque I half expected modelling agents to be scouting the joint.

Seeing their heads jutting above the less-lofty Warwickers make it look as if the entire cohort has been transplanted into Sherwood Forest, and the illusion's even more appropriate when you consider the rainstorm outside is somehow penetrating the ground floor of this 3-storey building... via the roof. (Makes me wonder what this dripping water went through to get here.)

We enjoy a 'few' beers, and end the evening upstairs in The Graduate pub. The appalling weather has created some interesting olfactory effects, and the floor - let's just say it has noticeable adhesive qualities. But there's still time and room to chat to our new colleagues, about their motivations, their dreams, their hopes for the future. (Actually, those involve beer too.)

The things they say in the Learning Grid

For a top-flight educational aid, some of the little signs and notices in Warwick University's Learning Grid are a bit ambiguous.

What, for example, is implied by

"Student Advisors are here to help you with anything."

Really? Anything? (All right - find me a girlfriend!) And the followup advice to 'look for the blue T shirts' didn't help either, since there was a pile of them near the entry turnstile and their conversation wasn't up to much.

"Please eat hot food in the atrium."

As if we had no choice. ("Man, I'm gonna have to leave this atrium! One more mouthful and I'll burst!")

"There's no such thing as a stupid question in the Grid."

Now there's a red-rag-to-a-bull question. "Excuse me, why does Superman wear his underpants over his tights?")

I love the Learning Grid.

I think that I shall never see, a life so lovely as a tea... cher

What a life it is to be an academic.

I've been in a university environment over three months now, and I can safely say there's a reason so many lecturers seem so happy. I mean, compared to the hardscrabble, living-on-the-edge, risk-filled rollercoaster of private business, being an academic is one seriously cushy number. Sometimes I feel like one of HG Wells' Morlocks accidentally emerging from his hellish subterreanea and glimpsing the verdant paradise above.

First off, academic life is fun. Just imagine the work environment of the average don. You spend time either with people who defer to your superior knowledge (students) or who share your interests (departmental colleagues.) Being an academic is like one long Sunday afternoon in the park with friends.

You get financial security too. Maybe the salaries aren't great, but plenty of academics do private consulting at high rates - and additionally, as civil servants, many academics get an index-linked pension: the gold-plated sort that pays out an ever-increasing, inflation-proof amount without you having to pay in increasing sums. Someone recently calculated that the average private sector manager would need to build up a pension pot of ONE MILLION POUNDS to enjoy the same payouts as the equivalent civil servant. Being an academic means never having to worry about your dotage.

You get a great living environment. Lots of academics live in subsidised housing, some right here on campus: the dreamy, intellectual atmosphere of the ivory towers, combined with annual influxes of young people to keep your ideas fresh. Academics get everything but free backrubs from naked maidens, and I'm pretty sure even that's on offer in the Humanities block. (How come the OB guys always seem such happy souls?)

And the work itself? Well, given that academics always note their 'research interests' on their CVs, isn't that a bit like... 'doing what you enjoy'? Your job involves reading and writing about the stuff you like the most? Does that even qualify as a job? Either way, being an academic offers a great working life.

Of course, you're allowed eccentricities as an academic that the private sector wouldn't let your feet touch the ground for. The scruffiest jeans and jumpers, and barely decipherable handwriting? And some of these eccentricities cost the taxpayer serious money. At Warwick, the maths guys came out in open rebellion some years back, about... the whiteboards in the Maths Department. (They liked blackboards and chalk.) At huge expense, the whiteboards were replaced with blackboards, just to satisfy a bunch of numbers freaks' fits of pique. Being an academic lets you do your own thing, all the time.

Furthermore, under the UK's RAE grading system, you only have a 'performance review' every FIVE years, and even then it's based on just your best FOUR pieces of work. Four pieces?!! In five years?! You could just spend six months producing four really good bits, then goof off for nearly half a decade. Unlike the private sector - with its quarterly earnings requirements, its downsizing habits and its dog-eat-dog culture - being an academic lets you thumb your nose at performance standards.

Oh, what a life is it to be an academic!

Twelve months later

It's been a strange sort of year, 2007.

I was at a crossroads last Dec 31, having realised I didn't want to be a solo marketer any longer but with the alternative (being an outsourced marketing department and recruiting a team) not looking any better.

A month in the desert the previous summer had reconnected me with the planet, but Q3/4 were horrendous as a result. A single full month away in five years had decimated a great roster. I spent Dec 31, 2006 wondering what I'd be in a year's time. Off adventuring for the last time? Working overseas again? Dead drunk on the London streets?

What I never thought, though, was that it'd involve becoming a University student.

But here I am: living on campus at Warwick University a few minutes from the gleaming white geometry of the business school. And just three months outside the madness of London has made everything clear again. I now know what I want to do next.

Here are my goals for 2008:

To rejoin a team. Being solo works when you have no commitments, but when you're selling your time it's hard to make year-on-year upticks to your bottom line, and I'm not getting any younger. So I want fresh resources to leverage: people, technology, capital, in order to make a bigger difference. And that only happens in organisations. So the lone wolf has to rejoin a pack.

To get international again. It's seven years since my work took me outside Europe; side trips to Asia and Africa and America have been just that: holidays. However pleasant having clients in Paris / London / Madrid may be, I miss the business travel that marked my calendar for my first working decade. So whatever I work on next, it'll have to be something that works across borders.

To reconnect with technology. Working with consultancies is great, but to really see how business and markets interact you've got to understand the technologies: why Ajax is exciting (hint: it enables Web 2.0) why UDWDM is a p-shift (hint: it steps up to mass broadband) and why the iPod has nothing to do with selling hardware (hint: it's about control of media distribution.) So I need to re-involve myself in TMT, which in the last year - without a single digital agency as a client - I've missed.

To play strategically. I'm sick of clients whining about my day rate; whatever I earn in my next role will be related to what I do for the business, not what I can squeeze out of their marketing budget. If I want six figures and an option on 1%, I'd better be able to demonstrate additional turnover attributable to my actions. And with the stuff I'm learning on the Warwick MBA, I'll be able to do it.

And of course, sluicing into all that is a more basic goal: to be a better person. To be less cynical. To network with people more, even useless ones. To tolerate fools more gladly. To gather points of view before taking one. To chase material success less. To listen and understand rather than dismiss and judge.

It'll be hard. But - with five new course folders on the shelf, with titles from Corporate Finance to Modelling & Analysis - I'm in the best place to start from.

Happy New Year!

This is really boring

3.30pm and I'm ready for dinner. Dear me, living on a deserted university campus is worse than spooky; it's BORING.

I mean, I should be appreciating a few days of doing my own thing, catching up with consulting work (gotta pay those tuition fees somehow) in the peace and quiet. But somehow I can't settle properly. Normally I enjoy being alone, but 'alone' to a Londoner means the anonymity of the city, being alone in a crowd, not alone because there's nobody else about.

Let's see: I've had all the baths and showers one can usefully have in an afternoon, checked email more times than is healthy, and completed not one, but two tax returns (personal and business) but I'm still REALLY REALLY BORED. I think I'll have an early dinner.

Dead in the water

There must several hundred aquatic birds living at Warwick U, mostly of the breed in this pic, but plenty of shorter-necked ducks and a pair of swans too.

Which raises the question: how come I've never seen a dead one?

I mean, your average duck has a lifespan of a couple of years at most, which means a couple of ducks a week should make their last quacks. Yet I've never seen so much as a wobbly one wandering about at Lakeside.

Do ducks bury their dead or something? Where are the dead ones?

I am alone, totally alone

I am alone in the flat.

Sixteen rooms along the corridor and I seem to be the only one here. The joint's deserted. There's a howling wind outside, and the windchill factor's pushing the mercury well below zero in the darkening gloom.

It's at times like this my comic-booky imagination takes over, and the particular situation that comes to mind is Infocom's Lurking Horror game from the 1980s.

I loved Infocom's games. Text adventures, the old 'GO NORTH', 'TAKE LANTERN', 'YOU HAVE DIED ANOTHER GAME Y/N?' The best were as immersive as any great novel. It's something today's youth - with their turbocharged graphics, billion-triangle rendering engines and Hollywood-standard photorealism - would never understand, the same way the Facebook Generation will never comprehend how thrilling Usenet was.

It started with Zork, a Dungeons'n'Dragons fantasy born on the earliest mainframes. But I preferred the later games. There was one set in an Eastern Bloc country, another set in a circus, so real you could smell the urine-stained concrete and the greasepaint-flecked sawdust. There was one set in a hi-tech city where you never played a character, just took viewpoints from what your antagonists typed into terminals or passed in front of CCTV cameras; another sent you on a Kafkaesque journey to get a single form signed-off through a maze of bureacracy. Frustration, fear, and bewilderment laced those games. That's what was so great about them.

Lurking Horror was set in a University, during a blizzard. You had to get across campus using hidden tunnels under the school, but the sense of foreboding it created was as dark as HP Lovecraft; I shiver thinking about it, even now. Because when you're at a computer screen, your back's always turned to anything creeeping up behind you...

And tonight, seemingly alone in a building designed for 600, I feel the same icy finger on my spine. Exquisite.

Let's do lunch sometime

Lunch at University House was awesome today.

I realise that's not a blog title that'll set the world ablaze, but I was really impressed. Now I'm back in the pool a lot, I get hungry, so I've been having a hot lunch most days at the cafe in University House opposite my favourite spot, the Learning Grid. Usually there's a choice of three or four hot meals, none of that microwaved-from-frozen stuff so common in university cafeterias; this stuff always feels homemade. Today it was Christmas Lunch. And it was amazing!

Roast turkey carved on the spot, and no Asda Special Turkey either: it tasted free-range, mix of dark and white meat, generous servings expertly carved. Add to that fluffy roast potatoes, stuffing, gravy - the equal of anything I've had in London - and extras like brussels, carrots, parsnips, and chipolatas with bacon, and for £5 or so it was breathtaking. (Doing parsnips and potatoes properly takes care: you've got to start with real heat and watch carefully. Doing it on an industrial scale takes serious skill.) How did they do that? Forget lunch; I'd be fine with that for dinner.

Of course, after the exam this morning (OB today) and 60 lengths I was hungry anyway; any kind of protein would've done. But discovering that a low-cost cafe - a university canteen, what's more - can cook a brilliant Christmas lunch for a fiver is awesome. If I were 18, a canteen like this would be enough reason to come to Warwick in itself.

A few hard lengths

Hmmm, 72 lengths, not bad. I try to do sets of 12 lengths rather than 10 at the pool these days; incremental improvement, and if I can do 5 minutes a set I'm hitting my target time. (Yeah, I KNOW Ian Thorpe does 1500m in under 15mins; I said MY target time, not the Thorpedo's...)

I'm now back in the water often enough to get tired, which does wonders for my technique; I seem to thrash around for 20+ lengths unable to co-ordinate properly, and then when I start getting tired, my body sort of realises it's got to apply some methods if it's to complete another 40 lengths within half an hour. It's always about 30 lengths before I settle down properly and start stroking in a manner that doesn't make passersby snort with laughter. Got to get a grip on that.

It's symptomatic of a real problem I have in life: I can't just Be Here Now. Life should be about the journey, not the destination. But my trouble is, I only ever think about where I'm going, not where I am. Just wish I could relax enough to enjoy the journey.

Tesco bag tumbleweed

The chill wind whistles aimlessly around the deserted campus, drowning out even the giant sucking sound of the village emptying of students.

It's eerily quiet. The ghostly presence left by a generation of departed students pervades the damp December air. And along deathy pathways roll tumbleweeds of stray plastic bags.

Us postgrads of course are around another week or two, and it's nice to have the place to ourselves. Even if it's just a week of exams and then a week finishing a project I haven't started yet.

I think I'll take a stroll to the Arts Centre and check for signs of life, taking my Accounting revision with me.

Beneath a darkening sky

Sometimes, nightfall in Warwickshire can be just... breathtaking.

These photos were taken about five minutes apart, between 5pm and 5.15. The first's of Warwick Business School, taken from Lakeside student village. No, the school isn't really an ultralong building that goes all the way across behind those trees; there are two buildings of similar architectural heritage on opposite sides of the road, but they're several minutes' walk apart and not connected physically or culturally.

The second pic's taken from the winding path leading from Heronbank to central campus, alongside the freshly-ploughed field where non-performing WBS lecturers end up minus identifying dentition. (Sssshh.)

The third was snapped at central campus, looking across the 'plaza' at Rootes Social Building, where I've never done any socialising (like the Student Union, it's principally an undergrad scene.)

It's amazing how in the right light, a mob of budget-constrained, functional modern boxes - hallmarks of any modern British university - can look arresting, even gorgeous. But of course they can't beat that sky.

Why I like it here

I'm running a client project in tandem with my MBA, and it involves a database design I'll soon need implementing. Trouble is, I'm a few months clear of London now, and my contacts list is starting to go stale.

So I'm walking along, hands in pockets, and wondering where I'm going to find a couple of enthusiastic database programmers who'll work to a budget and are close enough to see the whites of their eyes...

Then I walk past a building labelled 'DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE'.

It's great living on campus.

"You're my best friend" she said softly, as my heart shattered

It's happened again. I'm her fucking best friend!!!

What, precisely, am I doing wrong here? All the fucking time?

Against all odds - possessed of a mean temper, a persona that sways between joyous-for-the-hella-vit and Lovecraft-dark, and prone to fits of pique that'd shame a 4-year old - I'm somehow a fairly good bloke, and there are a surprising number of women in this world who actually seem to like me.

And that's about it. Like me. Nothing more.

I've got an improbable number of ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL women in my Outlook Contacts, intelligent and charming and about 10 lightyears out of Mr Average's league. I have coffee with any one of these women, and guys on the street outside are pressing their noses up against the window, slackjawed and drooling, in pure wonderment at what they're doing hanging out with a guy like me. If only they knew...

... that not ONE of them is currently cognoscent of the fact I'm a red-blooded male. I get about four emails a day from female friends agonising over their latest husband/ boyfriend/ conquest /don't-know, and the logical next step for them seems to be 'Let's call Chris.' Yeah, just CALL. That's it.

I've had the 'you're my best male pal' conversation about 60 times in the last two years, and I'm fucking SICK of it. I'd call it emotionally draining, except I don't have any emotions to drain.

The latest one lives nearby, smart as Versace with a billion-watt smile. We chat in the corridors a lot and Facebook daily. I'd almost have called it dating. She didn't quite say 'Let's be friends' in our latest exchange, but that's what she meant.

I'm SICK of these either/or relationships. I appreciate I'm a handful, but in a village of 5,000 single females shouldn't there be a FEW who don't recoil in horror at the thought of having an actual relationship that involves both talking and intimacy?

I'm going back to dating undergrads. At least they put out, even if the conversation's not up to much.

Nicholas Bate, if you're reading, there's TEN GRAND in it for you if you can solve this conundrum.

I'M BAAAAAACKKKKKK!!!!!

I made it for a swim today. A quick klom at the Sports Centre, on second attempt after being phoned into a meeting just as I reached it at 12.38pm. Finally got there at 2.30.

Now, that may not seem like anything to write home about. But I'm a naturally active person and I've been sitting on my ass for two months almost solidly. (Actually, the ass itself is somewhat less than solid as a result.)

What you don't notice is how much 'physical' people deteriorate in that time. So brief, yet of such violence against the self that against it the decay of centuries is nothing.

Tonight I feel GREAT, buzzing with energy and inner strength; that half hour struggling along swim lanes has somehow relit the furnace. My flatmates have commented on how different I look. I'm 'myself' again. It's good to be back.

In two months hunched over a laptop or lecture desk, my shoulders have lost something like 6cm in lateral dimensions. My arms have shrunk to puny sticks; ruddy skin faded to blotchy whey. There's a perceptible beergut, and I've spent every day tired for as long as I can remember. I'm a shadow of my former self.

What I forgot was: this isn't me. I'm not a milquetoast academic; I'm an adventurer. My home is barrelling across deserts in a 4WD or grokking the electric neon night of a New Asia city, not the overcooked softness of the academic world. I like it here, but I don't belong here.

I see so many of them, young professors and postdocs old before their time; 35-year old men going on 80. They're not part of my worldview, and maybe that's why I dropped out of school at 16.

But for a few brief weeks, bound up in the hysteria of an MBA first term, I nearly became one. Soft. Rounded. Sunk in the custardy gloop of a pleasant, rarified life of thinking and writing.

And it nearly killed me. Only last week I went blotto for a full 24 hours, exhausted by the sitting and talking instead of moving and acting.

Ha. Almost got me.

But now the endorphins are awakening from their Autumnal slumber. Racing into my system. Electrifying my being. Bringing me back to life. I'm fizzing again.

You got me, but - not - quite.

I'm back.

The Warwick Take-One-for-the-Team Society

A notice has appeared on the Student Union message board: "CHARITY SPEED DATING". I know what speed dating is - hell, most girls who date me want it to be over as quickly as possible - but for charity?

Perhaps 'Charity Speed Dating' is where you agree to date the fat bird with glasses who can't get a date - i.e. dating as an act of charity. Yes, that must be it.

A meeting with Sir Humphrey

Midterms are over! And yet, glutton for punishment that I am, I choose to attend a WBS event featuring the ex-head of Britain's Civil Service (Lord Turnball) rather than head down Varsity to get wasted with the others. I kill me, I really do.

Lord Andrew Turnball inspires somewhat mixed feelings. The content of his speech - he's been at the centre of many Blair/Brown battles during the last decade, and is one of the best people on earth to ask about what really happened during the Blair era. A real-life Sir Humphrey Appleby from 'Yes Prime Minister'. But his delivery - soft-spoken, reliant on notes, head down and poor projection - fails to keep the room's attention. Which, as a civil servant to the core, he's probably quite pleased about. These guys are all about shrinking into the shadows.

And he's sitting about one metre away from me.

The speech ends, and what I can't believe as Q&A begins is the utter, infinite, unbelievable patience of the man.

There are a lot of local government / civil servant types in the small lecture hall - Warwick Business School offers MPAs in all sorts of public sectory stuff, like local government finance - and once again I'm struck at the behaviour of public sector people, so different to anyone in business.

Yet he lets these strutting posturing nonentities speak, with a benign, tolerant air. Let's face it, this guy mediated the worst bickerings of Blair and Brown; to him, chestbeating academics represent a challenge somewhat equivalent to fighting cockroaches.

Whereas business types will engage in debate and make cutting remarks, parrying and attacking in cut-and-thrust back and forths, civil service types just want to talk. Question and Answer sessions in the public sector aren't about give and take. They're about giving a speech, establishing your political credentials, and if we're all very lucky there might even be a small question at the end of it.

There's one WBS guy embarking on a lengthy oratory worthy of Thucydides, at the end of which there may or may be have been a question; only a rising intonation spurs Lord Turnball to answer. (He correctly surmises the content of his answer isn't important; this is just about giving respect, not answering a question.) Next comes a Sociology person from the University, equally desperate to demonstrate how very, very clever she is. She's about 55, but There Was A Time, and I catch myself checking for a wedding ring (there isn't one.) Two of my MBA pals have just shuffled into the hall: BEHAVE!

Really, it's that bad. I have to keep remembering where I am, or I'd be rolleye'd and drumming on the desk. It's all I can do from spouting my mantra for successful meetings at the congregation: "GET THE F**K ON WITH IT!"

More questions come in from local government types, of the lank-haired, bespectacled indicative type you'd expect. (The people, not the questions.) Why do so many people who work in local government just seem to have... given up? I mean, these are young women and men studying hard to gain higher ed quals; they're not stupid, not are they naturally unattractive, although most are somewhat slablike. These politicians of the future aren't bad people. They're just a little... dull.

I sidle up and introduce myself to Turnball later over the post-speech cocktails, and he turns out to be just as affable in the flesh as at the podium. Like a lot of civil servants intelligent enough to have done other things (and probably made a lot more money, if fewer gongs) he's an interesting character.

While a bit of a marathon after 2 midterm exams today, the evening has been worthwhile: yet another example of just how my life's changed in the last few weeks, largely for the better. And I manage to snaffle a couple of WBS pens on the way out: everything's a bonus.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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)