Davies’ Diaries

Photo Credit: Jack Western
Photo Credit: Jack Western

It’s over then, it’s done. The Festive season has come to an end for another year. That bird has well and truly flown, which is a daft bloody thing for it to do where I’m from because somebody is liable to shoot at it.

The January essay deadlines have, for most of us, come and gone and I have successfully (although I’m not 100% sure if that’s the right word) completed my Political Enquiry examination, because the truly inspired genius behind that module decided to reverse the traditional essays in January, exams in May dichotomy that has always served the Department of Politics so well; presumably as an intentional attempt to slip us up.

Regardless, my essays and exams have left me with little of note to share with you this edition, having temporarily cancelled my social life and taken up the vast majority of my thoughts. So with that, the rest of this little diatribe should take on a decidedly library based theme.

During my almost two week long internment in Harry Fairhurst I was reminded of a number of things. Chief amongst these being that Harry Fairhurst is a preposterous, post modernist adventure playground where normal societal rules don’t apply. Over the course of this essay deadline period I have witnessed one individual brushing his teeth in the ground floor toilets and another wandering around the library wearing six different scarves at once. As Gary Jules once so wisely opined, it’s a very, very mad world and it’s particularly condensed in the Harry Fairhurst building. Completing a library exam period is a lot like doing a tour in ‘nam. You see some things you never want to have to relive and it’s really bloody hot.

Finally, those of you who spent most of last year’s January exam period endlessly bitching about smokers outside of the Library main entrance where they could, controversially be both seen and heard will be glad to know that we ‘baccy stained untermensch have been banished forthwith to the other end of the Library bridge, having been herded now even from the benches to the side of the main doors by the library greyshirts. Of course we can’t be allowed to sit down, sitting down is for the clean lunged, who in a cruel irony are fit enough to not have to do so. Apparently this is the thanks we get after the British government has spent four years seeing if it can raise the tobacco duties to a point where we can single handedly smoke the country out of recession.

Of course, the smokers of the University of York, being naturally cunning vermin like all of their kind have managed to get their own back. With the removal of the ashtray from the front of the library and the frankly rather spotty policing of the anti-smoking policy smokers have been simply forced to throw their butts onto the ground in front of the doors, leading to a remarkable number of cigarette butts ending up trod into the carpet of the library foyer. Stick that in your pipe and…oh of course, you don’t smoke, do you?