Some discursive remarks on
study and terror!
Here I sit, surrounded by scattered books, strewn papers, bits, yes, once these were useful items, but now
they’re bits, once assembled in rank and file like Howard Moon’s Stationary Town. Now, just strewn; still utility,
but carrying the added burden of the thrill of the chase, and the inevitable conclusion that, having been found,
the mission is long forgotten.

My computer - window to a parallel dimension and gift from the computer game industry to me… the monitor is
so tattooed with reminders, log-ins and passwords it looks like it has a Maori moko. The law is supposed to
make order from chaos, but the chaos which has evolved from my recent usual orderliness, has been caused by
the law. I am studying law. “So what?” I hear you ask, “so am I. And the guy next to me is doing medicine, and
the guy in the geeky glasses over there... well, I think he just comes here ‘cos it makes him feel important”. Ok,
so I didn’t hear you ask that, but this is a creative environment so cut me some slack, dude.

Apart from the law, I’m learning how to learn, and I’m learning what it means to learn at university, because
while many of you who may be joining me at study this year may be in the first half of your life, I am quite
patently in the second half of mine. I have, probably, only seventeen years of working life left in me (unless I go
for Soylent Green in the mean time), and I have just dedicated eight of those to the off-campus pursuit of a law
degree.

There are few academic prizes more sought after than a BLL, but there are few less productive creatures than
the middle aged man. His natural habitat is the couch. His prana comes from a cathode ray tube (yes, I am too
old and reactionary to go LED or, God forbid, plasma!). He is sedentary. One definition of the word sedentary is
‘pertaining to animals that move about little or are permanently attached to something.’ (Back to the couch
then). A simple word, ‘sedentary’, but later in life it becomes a synonym for indolent and idle and I take no
shame from the fact that I idolise indolence.

Now, however, the world spins on its axis and the centrifugal force flings me from the couch and into the ‘office
chair’ (actually a dining chair placed in front of a computer desk, just as piss-weak as Martin Prince embellishing
Bart Simpson’s ‘study space’ with a pot plant in Bart Gets an F). Initially I was accompanied by a phalanx of
office equipment. Pens of all persuasions, notebooks, folders, printers, textbooks. Now I am surrounded by
lumps. Lumps which represent unfiled notes on one subject. Lumps which may or may not correspond with last
Cont. page 9
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