David Bowie's problems were more interesting than your problems

Pause for a moment in your daily routine and ponder upon the high concepts and accompanying dilemmas that lie scattered hither and thither throughout the varied lyrical canon of David Bowie. Then contrast these with the prosaic concerns that one finds cluttering the lumpen majority of contemporary pop music:

(1) A mother is no longer certain whether the child she has raised is a boy or a girl (Rebel Rebel)

(2) There's this alien who wants to visit earth. However he is convinced that merely by standing in our presence he will cause our minds to short circuit. The best that he can do is to offer words of encouragement from a safe distance, while strongly advising that we allow our children to boogie (Starman)

(3) Bowie attempts to explain to a friend that the return ticket from Suffragette City lies beyond their financial means (Suffragette City)

(4) Bowie has been made aware of a brand new dance but doesn't know what it's called (Fashion)

(5) Bowie gets his facts from a Benetton Ad, which is probably worse than relying on Wikipedia. (Black Tie White Noise)

(6) Bowie's girl was born in a UFO, but he was born under a stone. How will the pair bridge the gap between their disparate cultures, one terrestrial and the other extraterrestrial? (Born In A UFO)

(7) Bowie highlights the enduring social problem of homeless cacti (Eight Line Poem)

(8) Bowie's attempt to rid himself of a gnomic stalker by putting him on the train to Eastbourne backfires when the gnome returns with his cousin, Fred, and takes up residence in the chimney (The Laughing Gnome)

Changes: A novel By David Robert Jones (aged 11)

I wrote this piece of tongue-in-cheek steam punk David Bowie fan fiction several years ago. I think I originally posted it on the website of the now-defunct and sadly missed WORD magazine. I am reposting it here today in remembrance of David Bowie - a man who transformed his life into a magnificent work of art.

Changes: A novel

By David Robert Jones (aged 11)

In the celebrated history of the British Empire, and all across its expanding length, and widening girth, there can have been few careers more mercurial than that of Professor David Bowie. His rise from bare-knuckle pugilist,where he fought under the moniker Bromley Dave, to respectable man of science and intellect is a stirring tale for our age, and a timely reminder of those remarkable individuals who have been chief among its architects.

This young man’s extraordinary ascent, from what had been a base and brutal subsistence on the wharves of Greenwich, was, in part, subsidised by a series of boxing matches, arranged to slake the bloodthirsty urges that were barely-repressed by otherwise upstanding members of The Royal Society. Every Friday for two years the teenage Bowie would climb bare-chested into a rope-bound arena measuring just 24 feet square. There he would pit his strength and his wits against a succession of automata fashioned from raw chemical elements by the finest minds in all of England and her principalities. The end goal of these scientific pioneers: To create a Periodic Table in which the raw building blocks of the physical world were arranged not by atomic number, but in order of brute strength and guile.

During one such bout, a sharp left hook to the face, dealt by a golem fashioned entirely of Potassium Permanganate, resulted in a permanent violet discolouration in Bowie’s left eye. As disfiguring as this injury was to the young man, it allowed him to perceive the world in a lilac hue, paving the way for the numerous scientific discoveries that he would make thereafter.

It was before the fruits of one such breakthrough that the professor now stood. The Tin Machine was the culmination of a decade’s worth of research. At its heart was a patented Reeves-Gabriels engine. Its surplus hydro-energy was contained as miniature lightning storms inside a pair of giant Sales Jars. A labyrinth of gleaming metal pipes that completely obscured the walls of the cellar wherein the device had been constructed, funneled obliquely into the Quantum Field Chamber that occupied one corner of the room and contained an ornate full-length dress mirror, tilted upwards at a slight angle.

It was into the chamber that Dr Bowie, resplendent in a floor-length, sequined ball gown, now stepped, positioning himself with his back to the looking glass.

“I think that I am ready to proceed” he announced.

From across the room the Professor’s tousle-haired assistant - a man named Michael Ronson - performed a sequence of last minute safety checks. Satisfied that everything was in order he depressed the ignition button.

For a few moments a heavy silence that was pregnant with anticipation filled the confined space. Then, slowly, the engine began to stir, the mechanical throb, building in pitch and intensity, spreading clockwise around the cellar as, one by one, the Tin Machine’s components juddered into life.

Inside the dead-end street of the Quantum Field Chamber, Professor Bowie glanced at his pocket watch to find time running wild.

“515 the angels have gone,” he muttered. “I must prepare as best I can to gaze upon the strange.”

Swallowing hard, he turned towards the mirror, as if to face himself.

In that same moment the entire machine seemed to make a noise as if incredulous of the demands that had been placed upon it and the universal laws that it was being called upon to brazenly disobey. There was (the two men later agreed upon this order of events) a prolonged grinding noise; the rending sound of metal sheering from metal; a loud “POP!” as one of the Sales Jars shattered, followed by a shrill whistle as an adjacent boiler blew a gasket in sympathy, sending a scalding jet of white steam into the air. A small explosion of orange flame brought the proceedings to an abrupt halt.

As pieces of plaster began to rain down from the ceiling, Professor Bowie emerged from the cloud choking on the mildly caustic vapours and feebly waving his hands in an attempt at dispersing it.

“Damn! Damn and blast!”

He staggered to the centre of the room where the fumes were at their least dense. Broken glass crunched underfoot.

“Ronson! Do you still live? Speak up man!”

A head, crowned by an unruly mop of shoulder-length blonde hair peered tentatively from behind the console.

“Is it safe Sir?”

“Yes, yes... Oh for heaven’s sake, do come out Ronson. You are not to blame. The fault is entirely my own.”

The young assistant emerged from his makeshift refuge. Following in the Professor’s wake he busied himself as best he could, brushing the debris from the explosion from the pleats of the ruined ball gown. If Bowie was aware of this supercilious attempt at placating the foul mood that invariably ensued in the aftermath of a failed experiment, he chose to ignore it. Instead he paced the walls of the laboratory making a cursory study of the rent and ruptured pipe work; for the first time regretting his decision to construct the metallic parts of the tin machine from so flimsy an alloy.

“As you know Ronson, I devised this apparatus so that I might objectively quantify how an ordinary man, in possession of no great intellect, might perceive a faker, such as myself. Alas! If today’s experiment has taught me anything, it is that I am too fast to take that test. By the time the device has accumulated sufficient enough of a charge to document this quantum event, the desired image has long since vanished into the ether.”

Ronson continued to studiously brush the dust from Bowie’s garments, while inwardly he racked his brains for a considered response that might sum up the predicament the Professor found himself in.

“If I may say so Sir, you are renowned among your peers for your impetuous velocity.”

“Yes…Yes quite. Up until this day such god-gifted speed has served me well. Yet now my quicksilver talent hardens to reveal a double edge that impedes my research and by association hampers the very progress of science. For how am I to communicate how others see a faker, if my experiment cannot be replicated and dragged into the realm objective truths that are the currency of all rational men and a select coterie of masculine women."

He paused in mid-step, turning on his heel to address his assistant directly.

“Ronson: You are a man who has spent long hours in my company. One might almost say that there is none better qualified than yourself to describe to the high society how an ordinary working class commoner from the north of England might perceive a creature of my singular appearance.”

Unfortunately, and in common with most men, Michael Ronson’s visual cortex was only able to interpret the shifting chain of chemical reactions taking place across ten-dimensional space-time, that constituted the physical form of Professor Bowie as a nebulous cloud of shifting primary colours, bisected by a red lightning bolt and bedecked with an ostentatious plume of ostrich feathers. In vain he searched for words that might do justice to the spectacle, only to find himself quickly overwhelmed.

“I wouldn’t rightly know how to explain it, Sir. As you have remarked on previous occasions the enterprise is beyond language.”

“Yes… Yes, of course. Clearly something must be done slow down the faker in me – a distraction of some kind that will give the machine the opportunity to…”

A spark kindled in the professors left eye, his face suddenly animated by the wild fires of inspiration.

“Brilliance! Genius incarnate! Ronson, reactivate the Tin Machine at once. There is no time to attempt repairs.”

“But Sir...”

“Now, Ronson!”

Hitching his ball gown and its numerous flared petticoats above his knees, Bowie hurriedly made his way over to the quantum field chamber. His assistant returned to control console at a more reluctant pace than before and commenced the process of restarting the machine.

“May I wait in the corridor Sir,” he called plaintively from across the room as the wounded engine sputtered into life.

“I am afraid that will not be possible Ronson...” replied Bowie, raising his voice so as to be heard over the ascending mechanical din.

“...I will need you to join me inside the Quantum Field Chamber. My plan requires that I simulate oral sex upon your person!”

Speculative lyrics of a theme song for an as-yet unmade Scooby Doo cartoon

1969 Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.

(Surf guitar)

Scooby Dooby Doo,

We search high and low

North, South, East and West,

to the four corners of the known world

and to the farthest reaches of the universe beyond

for your whereabouts,

for we require your assistance

Scooby Dooby Doo,

scion of Bartholomew Doo

of the noble Doo lineage.

It is regarding the matter

of a haunted fairground

and your tried and tested

methods of distracting

a pursuing monster

by way of improvising,

for example,

a scene from a barbers shop,

and convincing your tormentor,

be they ghost, mutant, or robot,

that they are in need of a trim,

before spraying shaving foam

in their face,

and running away,

so fast that,

for a few seconds,

your feet struggle to

find traction on the ground.

Or, if not a barbers shop,

then an Italian restaurant,

serving gigantic platters

of spaghetti and meatballs,

where you and your

stoner friend, Shaggy

are momentarily waiters.

We need your ability

to evacuate a

haunted ski resort

as part of a massive

ever-growing snowball

We are depending upon your talent

for concealing yourself in one

of a row of large vases,

only to reappear from

the neck of a different vase,

and to perform a similar trick

with the drawers of filing cabinets.

(15 minute trumpet fanfare)

Velma will be on hand

to ask the hard questions,

which are not your forte:

“Why would a swamp monster

require bi-focal reading glasses

and leave behind

footprints in green paint?”

we need you to

lift our spirits

by pronouncing

the name of the

actor, Mark Ruffalo

as “Rark Ruffalo.”

That never gets old.

We have Scooby Snacks,

whatever they are

- some kind of bespoke

biscuit tailored to your

specific nutritional needs, maybe.

Also, an improbably tall sandwich.

Scooby Dooby Dooby Doo,

are you mere dog?

a lab experiment

gifted with the

power of human speech?

a diluted Nordic myth?

the lingering residue

of a hard acid trip?

Or allegory for man,

as he unwillingly confronts

his basest terrors

in the most cowardly

manner imaginable.

(Surf guitar)

Product review: Lush 'Experimenter' bath bomb

The Experimenter

Habitual readers of scientific journals – the kind sold in newsagents and marketed at the non-academic, armchair-bound hoi polloi - will occasionally find themselves regaled with fanciful descriptions of distant planets. These florid accounts of alien geography, assembled from bland screeds of data, cribbed from the fuzzy, monochromatic images of intergalactic majesty harvested by isolated space telescopes, and subsequently imparted in the style of a Thomson's holiday brochure, speak in wide-eyed tones of vibrant pink and green skies dappled with clouds of hydrochloric acid the size of continents. They wax lyrical over sparkling, crystal-clear turquoise lakes of liquefied copper sulphate that will strip human flesh from bone within seconds. In these off-trend, far flung worlds, that are seemingly destined never to be troubled by the ruinous bootprint of humankind, anything is garishly possible; the only constant being the corrosive nature of the elements making up the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. If there is a conclusion to be drawn, it is that man was not meant to live anywhere that is too colourful.

In recent years Lush – the bath and shower cosmetics chain, whose high street outposts frequently elicit a barrage of sneezes from olfactorily-sensitive passersby – have carved an idiosyncratic niche for themselves as a producer of bath bombs that mimic a strain of alien geology last seen on the set of the original series of Star Trek.

The Experimenter, in name alone, conjures an alarming mental image of a disturbing sex toy designed to boldly go where no man has gone before. Thankfully it resembles something liberated from the semi-precious minerals exhibit of a natural history museum that exists entirely inside the over-stimulated head-space of a two year old child, whose recent exposure to sugary fruit squash and colourful plastic blocks has conspired to induce an entry-level acid trip. It is in appearance a mottled, brazenly-hued hexagonal polygon, speckled with glittery deposits that catch the light in a pleasing manner.

Described in the accompanying hyperbolic bunf as “your own bathtime motion picture” and by me as “in this regard not as good as Mad Max: Fury Road, but about on par with Jurassic World,” it is also said to comprise “vibrant colour, popping candy and comforting Fair Trade vanilla.”

While the ephemeral snap and crackle of the popping candy is well and truly drowned out by the thunderous sound and fury of the hot tap, the vanilla scent lingers pleasantly on the skin. Whatever your opinion of the Experimenter, you will emerge from it a more fragrant human being than you were beforehand.

Upon introduction to turbid water the bath bomb immediately jettisons its colourful outer layers; an effect reminiscent of a poster paint explosion inside a primary school art supply cupboard. Swirling, iridescent tendrils of pink and yellow infuse the clouded surface with a glittery shimmer as the decomposition of the bomb settles to a gentle ferment.

In stark contrast to the sparkly, two-dimensional cords of rainbow-tinged suds, the water beneath assumes the leaden pall of a rain cloud. Upon immersion into the bath the foam quickly disperses. Whether it is absorbed into the skin or seeks shelter inside one of the bodily orifices I cannot confidently say.

With the initial riot of colour now thoroughly dispelled, one is left marinating in waters reminiscent of the bleak Manchurian skies that inspired the music of bands such as Joy Division. Anyone entering the bathroom at this juncture could be forgiven for assuming that you had spent the previous hours lying underneath an ailing motor vehicle.

Maybe we are being taught a lesson – one that resonates particularly strongly around this time of year, when the initial burst of bright colours that accompany the Christmas period abruptly fade, leaving us to face January poorer in pocket, somewhat unwell, and harbouring the nagging suspicion that we have displaced more bathwater than we would have prior to the festive orgy of over-eating and general self-indulgence.

The Experimenter (final form)

The story of the Little Drummer Boy doesn't hold water

The Little Drummer Boy, following his fatal overdose at the age of 27.

The Little Drummer Boy was a liar; his claim to have met Jesus an outright fabrication concocted to raise his fading profile as a drummer, and to extend the lifespan of his flagging celebrity moment beyond its allotted 15 minutes.

This brazen opportunist, recognising that the public had grown weary of his monotonous pitter-patter, fastened himself to the coattails of our Lord Jesus Christ - a gifted illusionist and anti-establishment figure, who lived fast and died young in a sexy, rapid-paced era of chariot races and gladiatorial games.

For such a pivotal event in the Christian mythos, the birth of Christ is dispatched with alarming brevity in the scriptures: The nativity as we know it is spliced together from the gospels of Luke and Matthew. Of the pair, St Luke's account is perhaps the more comprehensive, incorporating the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the birth in the manger, and the visit by the shepherds. The book of Matthew introduces the three wise men and is otherwise a smear piece directed against King Herod, who is portrayed as an inveterate baby killer.

The gospel of St Luke contains passing references to characters who have been written out of contemporary retellings of the birth of Jesus: A just and devout man named Simeon, who had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had laid eyes upon the messiah, and Anna - “a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Ase.”

Given the Little Drummer Boy's profession, a Beatles analogy seems apt: Together, Anna and Simeon are the Pete Bests of the nativity; their positions usurped by a ghastly chocolate box confection of questionable ability, but with better hair – the biblical equivalent of an unloved CGI character, inserted by George Lucas into one of the updated versions of the Star Wars trilogy.

In the carol it is strongly implied that the Little Drummer Boy has a chance meeting with the magi who are on their way to the stable in Bethlehem with their “finest gifts.”

Finding himself with nothing to present to the baby Jesus, the young percussionist serenades the saviour of mankind with a drum solo – the curate's egg of live musical performance. This is where the narrative begins to crumble:

The “Parapa pum pum” rhythm of the carol, which is clearly intended to mimic the drumming style of its protagonist, is plodding and ponderous, in a manner that even Noel Gallagher would consider lethargic.

Despite the prosaic, flat performance, the reaction, according to the unreliable narrator, is favourable:

“Mary nodded,” confirming her status as an insufferable hipster. Although the song doesn't specifically mention it, I am guessing that she wore a plaid shirt and kept her arms folded throughout the entire set.

Implausibly, “the ox and lamb kept time,” like a fucking Disney cartoon.

However the most damning evidence is the reported reaction of Jesus:

“Then he smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum
Me and my drum.”

Smiling in babies occurs approximately two months after birth. Yet the festival of Epiphany, which celebrates the visit by the magi, falls on the 6th of January, not even two weeks after the arrival of Christ.

Jesus never smiled at the Little Drummer Boy, because he would have been too young to do so, but more pointedly because the Little Drummer Boy was never present at the manger scene. Like one of those people who claim to have witnessed The Sex Pistols' performance at the 100 Club, this shameless self-promoter inserted himself into the nativity at a later date. If he had really been there, then St Luke or St Matthew would have made record of his attendance in their gospels.

The Little Drummer Boy is the Walter Mitty of the New Testament. Nothing that he says can be taken at face value. He did not play in a band with teenage Jesus and they did not have crazy rock star adventures together on the road.

The carol itself is a travesty, even when David Bowie performed it with Bing Crosby.

Despite his manoeuvring the Little Drummer Boy never had another successful song. All that remains of this self-aggrandising one hit wonder is his minor revisionist take on the birth of Jesus, where the messiah is relegated to secondary importance, and the image of his body, dead from a heroin overdose, at the age of 27, in a hotel on L.A.'s Sunset Strip.

The Little Drummer Boy

Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum
A new born King to see, pa rum pum pum pum
Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum
To lay before the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

So to honor Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
When we come.

Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum
I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum
I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum
That's fit to give the King, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum,
On my drum?

Mary nodded, pa rum pum pum pum
The ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my drum for Him, pa rum pum pum pum
I played my best for Him, pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

Then He smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum
Me and my drum.

Jessica's Ironing Tutor

“The Great British Ironing Circle... It's on the BBC... I don't know, six o'clock? I watch it on my tablet on the commute home. I have to sit in the spoiler carriage on the train so I don't ruin the ending for anyone who hasn't seen it...

...but that's what I've been saying. Everybody has an ironing tutor. It's the in thing.”

A repetitive beeping sound heralds the departure of the elevator. The bulky, dented silver doors slide shut slowly, as if mired in discarded chewing gum, gradually screening off the small ticket hall of Gloucester Road underground station.

“Look, I've got to go mummy.”

Jessica ends the call. Some of the other passengers in the lift look down at their feet attempting to stifle their laughter.

~

The alfresco dining area outside Sheridan's.

Daisy takes a sip of Shiraz and then keeps the wine glass up by her mouth. with the rim resting on her curled-over bottom lip and the blackcurrant-coloured contents lapping at the curved interior.

The three-way conversation is like parallel railway tracks that occasionally criss-cross.

Clarrissa - “Mmmm, I'm getting really good at that rectangular pleat you get in the back of men's shirts.”

Jessica - “I mean I like Carlos, but I'm effectively paying him £30 an hour for me to iron his clothes. I'm starting to see the same pairs of pants.”

Daisy - “Is it really necessary iron pants?”

Clarissa - “You know what, darling: Have you shagged him yet? Grind a few buttock-shaped dents into those bed sheets of yours. Give yourself something challenging to iron.”

Jessica - “No, I forget to tell you, I'm back with Anthony and we're both trying to be good this time.”

Daisy - “No gak binges?”

Jessica - “We both still do coke. We do it as a couple on Sundays after we've visited one set of parents. So it's like our reward...”

Jessica - “...You know, I do like it when Carlos stands behind me with his head over my shoulder and guides my hands.”

Smirks all round. And Daisy finally puts down her wineglass and checks something in her handbag.

Clarrissa – “I think you might found my happy place for later, you know when John is flopping about on top of me...”

“Did you just call me a cunt?” - A valediction for uncensored, no-holds-barred, on-campus debate

Lay to one side any academic qualification that a person might obtain from spending three years at one of the UK's fine higher education establishments, and consider for a moment the kind of individual these faculties will eventually unleash upon the unsuspecting world.

English universities have long been places where young men and women, who have mastered the art of passing A levels, are granted an opportunity to slip free from the shackles of parental expectations, along with any dismal real-life persona they developed during seven concurrent years of puberty and secondary school. It's a period of experimentation - a time for trying on new and colourful identities, prior to settling on a less-grating personality - one that won't get you punched too frequently after you graduate.

On campus, hilarious stereotypes abound. I used to walk to lectures from my hall of residence, my footsteps dogged by a female black metal fan, whose smudged corpse paint, which covered her entire face, left her resembling an undead panda. You don't get that quality of individual in the dreary world of minimum wage 'work-till-you drop' jobs that I now inhabit.

There are common pairings too – certain types of people who seem preordained to be friends with each other. One half of an on-campus bro-mance that I used to encounter regularly was the young man whose recently-grown, shoulder-length hair, and newly-acquired leather jacket, hinted at clumsy exploratory forays into the world of goth metal, and possible ownership of a Type O Negative album. Riding on the rebellious vapour trails of this proto-edgelord would be his lanky, wire-haired, ginger-bearded sidekick – who had confounded society's expectations of lanky, ginger-headed men by opting for a degree in the soft humanities, as opposed to, say, Geology or Archaeology.

One morning a small group of us converged around four pushed-together tables in a room adjoining the corridor that comprised our university's Philosophy Department.

The younger, slightly more twattish, version of myself, who was fond of quoting Rimbaud and, when drunk, randomly bellowing “PARKLIFE!” at the top of his voice into the ears of unsuspecting strangers, had just concluded what was, as I recall, a masterful summation and critique of selected passages from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

That was when mock-Goth boy chimed-in:

The gist of his counter-argument was unremarkable enough to have been lost in time, but I do remember its conclusion where he summarised my presentation as “a load of old cock-swallow.”

I felt a boiling tide of anger rising inside me. My knowledge of Aristotle had been openly challenged in front of people who I hardly knew and barely respected.

How dare this cretinous streak of piss with the ginger-headed best mate disagree with me.

- This contemptible archduke of wank, clad in a leather jacket that now bore Tipp-Exed quotes from Milton's Paradise Lost.

- This human skid mark, whose key to unlocking the underwear of impressionable female students was the one song he had mastered on his acoustic guitar, which he would play incessantly. That song was Under The Bridge by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. 

 

This was nothing better than a playground scrap re-contextualised in a peer-reviewed setting, among the stunted, swamp-bound spires of Reading University. 

Fortunately for me battles in this environment are won and lost, not with flying fists and off-balance attempts at roundhouse kicks, but with finely-nuanced rhetoric, forged in the molten crucible of minds honed from four years of GCSEs and A Levels. A world of the intellect where witty and insightful rejoinders spring readily to the tongue:

“Did you just call me a cunt?”

We were in an educational setting so the words came out in dressed in academic vernacular – 'Sir, either by design, or through your pitiful intellectual shortcomings, you have grievously misunderstood the tenor of my argument. The statements that you have made in support of your rebuttal are flimsy in construction and unlikely to stand up to the crushing weight of my response,' etc.

None-the-less, the underlying meaning of my reply was clearly evident in my tone of voice.

Rising to the moment, I continued, stabbing at the air with my finger as I launched into an impassioned speech that would have dazzled the Roman orator Cicero with its power to sway the hearts and minds of my rapt audience. I began by positing the hypothetical scenario upon which I intended to construct the arguments that would utterly demolish my opponent:

“What if an alien from the planet Cock-swallow were to venture down to Earth...”

Others in our small group, sensing that civilisation was about to disappear into a gaping sink hole, began to wade into the discussion with their own inane theories and opinions. This was no longer a finessed debate – the exploratory back-and-forth of two duelling fencing masters, each feeling out the other's weaknesses, always meticulously plotting two or three moves, or counter-moves, ahead of their opponent.

This was a 'post-five-nil-at-home-defeat-at-the-hands-of-the-shittest-team-in-League-Two- full-on-pub-brawl' with students chucking bits of Platonic dialogue and Aristotelian maxims around like empty Grolsch bottles, while figuratively kneeing each other in the bollocks.

Spirited discussions like this are what I miss most about university. They were safe spaces where you could argue vociferously, and sometimes crudely, back and forth without fear of any long-term consequences.

Many of us were from middle class backgrounds. We had been told, almost as a matter of routine, by our parents that we were brilliant, and had experienced very little adversity in our lives. Being thrown into a situation where an essay that you had worked hard on would be openly challenged and torn apart by your peers if you didn't stand up and fight your corner, bred within us the resilience and the reserves creativity that we would tap into in the face of future adversity. 

These bare-knuckle scuffles made me come alive. I am sure that I was wasn't the only person to leave the room at the end of a debate riding high on a crest of Adrenalin and exhilaration.

Two decades on, safe spaces mean something different. Cultural paradigms in academia have shifted alarmingly in the direction of political correctness, which has taken a hammer and a chisel to free speech, with potentially damaging long-term social consequences. 

Sanctions for perceived misbehaviour on campus have, at some higher education establishments, become draconian and out of step with wider society. A student must now consider not only the strength of their argument but the way they express it and whether this will cause offence or contravene any university policies on free speech. The young man who, in the early 1990s, glibly referred to my presentation on Aristotle as “a load of old cock-swallow” could, in 2015, credibly find himself suspended for sexual harassment, or for triggering a student who found his off-kilter terminology offensive.

I never graduated from university but what I did learn there was invaluable in preparing me for the harder world that awaited just off campus.

I wonder what impact the neutered debates that increasingly characterise the modern university experience will have on the current student cohort as they leave education and enter the workforce.