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Ladies and gentlemen, it’s week eleven. Congratulations for making it this far. Undergraduates elsewhere will already be on holiday. The concept of week eleven will hold no more reality for them than any other hideous, nightmarish vision.

For us, though, the fun is just beginning. Difficult to believe, I know, as a housemate saps the life from your veins by going on and on and on about how much coursework she has, how useless her boyfriend is even if he’s much better in bed than the last one, and how her parents should have phoned by now. But it’s really true that the fun is just beginning, even as her neurotic babble transports you a million miles from the concept of ‘fun’, just as surely as the chilli con carne she made last week still sits inside your saucepan upon the hotplate, growing greyish-brown hair and looking more and more like a cow again with every crawling hour.

Well, grab a corner of your conscious mind back from this ghastly apparition for thirty seconds, clumsily finger an all-too-blunt kitchen knife, and wonder which word ending in ‘cide’ would end your misery in the way that is most humane and most beneficial to society. It’s week eleven; the weather is dismal; you deserve it.

It is invariably this time of year that sorts the men from the boys. (I strive for a less sexist metaphor, but nothing else does the job quite so well). You see the same old faces rotated every day between lectures, home, and Chancellors, looking increasingly strained. People who ought to know better have started behaving very oddly. You will find that all but your most complicated friends have begun to evolve ‘coping strategies’.

I have discovered that ‘coping’, in this case, usually involves sticking fast to one of three outlooks on life. There’s nothing very researched about this, but there doesn’t need to be. Real psychologists have a history of just making it all up as they go along, and some of them get paid a fortune for it. Well, anyway, I’ve been busy sorting people into three types: Happies, Depressives, and Introverts.

Happies maintain a sunny, sanguine attitude whatever happens, and remain quietly supercilious about it all. Smiling, joking, laughing, and squeaking is their modus operandi. Their mantra is ‘You love it really. You might as well enjoy it’. They’re a pleasure to be with if you’re in the mood, but like all evangelists they’re a real pain in the arse when you’re not. You’ll hear nothing but platitudes, unrestrained delight, and a multi-purpose revelling in the Beauty of Creation, when all you want to do is to drown your housemate in the lake, suspend her cadaver from the geodesic sphere as a warning to other transgressors, and then go home and see your parents.

This brings us neatly to Depressives, who will argue that although Happies have a point, they’re just deluding themselves. More passive than the Happies, they will willingly discuss philosophies of life with them in Chancellors, and neither side will win. The Depressive will state ‘we are all stuck in the quicksand, clinging to one another to survive. If you rise higher, it’s because you’ve just pushed me deeper.’ And that, of course, is the trump card. You can never argue with a Depressive. You’ll just learn that the world is a savage and destructive place, populated by profoundly lonely souls who may express themselves sincerely only via extreme physical means. Leave them alone. No matter what you do, you’ll only be proving them right.

If you’re lucky, you’ll come across somebody who oscillates unpredictably between Happy and Depressive states of being, and these people, who weave the richest and most random tapestries of life, are truly blessed. The depth, honesty, and utter transience of their feelings combine to produce the world’s richest art and music, make them impossible to live with, and then they go mad and shoot themselves. No shame in that, incidentally: an early death has immortalised many an artist. Just imagine if Michael Jackson had gone a little more loopy than he did, and threw himself off a building thirteen years ago. Not only would he be a martyr to fame, but he would be remembered undoubtedly as one of the greatest musicians and performers who ever lived. Now we’ve got to live with some dodgy embarrassing psychotic bleached recluse of our own creation, dribbling out music which sounds like a soundtrack from a Globalcorp advertisement. So passes glory in the world.

Introverts, like the computer in the film War Games, realise that the only winning move is not to play. They will go home to study. They will go home to socialise. They will go home to rest. They’ve probably got a long-term partner with whom to argue for fun, so they don’t need you. (Incidentally, most relationship arguments can be solved as soon as you remember that the woman is always right. However, this makes the dynamics of a homosexual relationship utterly mystifying to me).

Introverts are just as likely to be closet Happies as they are to be closet Depressives. It’s no easy journey either way. With everyone wearing their personalities on their sleeves right now, the best solution (in true Edward de Bono style) is to think outside the box and go temporarily insane.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. The golden weathervane atop the cathedral is sending out bad brain waves and manipulating my mind, so I’ve got to go and chain myself to an oven and shout out passages from the Book of Numbers.

Published in barefacts 1045 • 21 November 2002