The Cheese Grater Winter 2013 5
Uncle Benn’s Advice Time As he basks in the warm autumn sunset of his long long life, the cuddliest socialist firebrand in town dispenses pearls of wisdom and avuncular advice in response to our readers’ problems. “Aaargggh! I’ve REALLY missed my family and friends back up in Wolverhampton-upon-Stoke this term but I’m worried that after living in Camden Town for 3 months things just won’t feel the same! Am I right to think that maybe I’ve outgrown life in my hometown?! Help!” Jamie Sidebottom (1st Year Arts & Sciences)
Eyes you can trust, advice you can immediatly disregard: Benn
Dear Jamie, Thank you for taking the time to write me a letter. You will be relieved to hear that this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of a problem such as yours. The worry you describe is typical of many students who I’ve had the absolute pleasure to meet over the course of my six decades in politics. Indeed, I can picture you now, sitting in your room in Max Rayne, reading Kerouac and smoking a blunt and listening to Dark Side of the Moon, with that nice lad from Haberdasher’s who you think is great, but really wants to take a shovel to your sallow provincial face until the blood-choked gurgles of agony cease and shards of skull litter the gory red mush that used to be your head, and sitting in the stairwell with your acoustic guitars at 3am having a singalong in the Trainspotting t-shirt you got from Camden Market and finally feeling that you belong. Deleting your mum’s posts on your Facebook and replacing them with GIFs from Woody Allen films instead because you’re grown-up now aren’t you, you’re cultured, not like your old mum, that auxiliary nurse who only gave up the best years of her life to rear the unpardonable piss-stain that you see in the mirror every day, so who gives a fuck about her anyway? Now you’re pouring Red Stripe on your Weetabix because you’re a student and you’re going to make a difference and no you won’t fucking conform and every month is Movember isn’t it? You’ll go home and stare into their cold dead eyes as they laugh at Mrs Brown’s Boys and pump their pallid bodies full of Quality Street in that comfortable living room. You promise yourself that things will be different and you won’t work in an office, you’ll live in a studio in Hoxton with that arty girl who you’re going interrailing with, because you just get each other and she fills that gaping crevasse in your grubby soul and you’ll drink gin and get ketted up in the mornings and sign on while you write that play. You’re going to contribute and be worthy aren’t you? Well, flash forward to 2017 and you’ve got a first, so now you’re at Deloitte with sensible shoes and without that awful fucking hair, you contemptible little smear of shit. Soon, it will be you sat with a bedraggled and well educated son who listens to Allen Ginsberg poems on vinyl and wants to break out of the middle class hell you’ve created for him, with that wife you’ve never loved and the suits and the cocaine and BBC Radio 2 and voting Tory because hey, I earn my money selling shares in diamond mines that enslave children to hedge fund managers who snort gak off tramps’ faces just for a laugh and anyway why should lazy chavs get their share for the schools and hospitals that you went on a march for and painted your face for and had a piss on a police van for. You’re not outgrowing anything, you pitiful, worthless scum. You will die, and when you die, you will be cold and wretched and alone because you deserve it. So, really, Jamie, there isn’t much to worry about! Many happy returns for a merry Christmas and a healthy, prosperous New Year. Yours, The Rt. Hon Tony Benn Contributors: Laurie Chen, Alex Daish, Alex Dutton, Bo Franklin, Charlie Hayton, Eleanor Hyland-Stanbrook, Beatrice Kelly, Patrick Maguire, Ben Munster, Hannah Sketchley, Hana White, Jon Wright.