Wheelie bins.

The above picture is entitled "Sinkhole shithole".

It is one of the many perks of living in the student house.

In other news, there appears to be a certain trend developing in this house. It is the trend of items that are usually reserved for outdoor use, finding their way into the house. I came out of my room one morning to be greeted by the sight of a green, stinking, wheelie bin sitting in the landing. Not only did it block my path to the delightful shower room downstairs, it also was covered in the crap that can only accumulate from a life spent outside in the elements.

But the wheelie-bin was not the only outdoor item to take up residence in our landing. This was only the latest in a series of moronic appearances. Included were a sandbag. The sandbag stayed there for over three weeks, gradually seeping into the cheap carpet. It would have eventually probably dissolved into the floor, leaving nothing but dirty sacking behind. The traffic cone was an unoriginal addition; every student house in the land has probably played host to various pieces of roadwork equipment.

All these little offerings seem paltry in comparison to what happened to my great uncle in his time at Hull university, in the sixties, when it was a real achievement to actually go to university, let alone manage a degree.

He came back drunk one night, fell asleep in bed, in a blissful state of alcohol-induced ignorance. He woke up the next morning in bed, in the street, next to a bus stop. A line of waiting bus users were his wake-up call.

But even this seemed a poor effort, compared to the time he and his friends fell asleep in a cabin on a building site at the dockyard. His friend almost fell to his death as he opened the door to the cabin, expecting to find solid ground beneath them. In fact, their supervisors, to 'teach them a lesson', had attached the cabin to a crane. They were 20 feet above ground.

It makes the sandbag, the wheelie-bin, and the traffic cone seem beyond pathetic and lacking in imagination, in comparison.

"I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy".

The above picture is a pretty good summary of my life right now. Once banned, often excoriated still dauntingly difficult, Ulysses has become the canonical twentieth-century novel. Or so I keep being told, again and again. Ulysses is the obvious choice for a module based upon modernist literature of the 20th century. Yet I am not more than 200 pages in, and I join the ranks of its many readers, all of whom state how Joyce can almost bring them to tears with confusion; to read Ulysses is to be constantly frustrated, exhilarated, nettled and perplexed, on many varying levels. The complexity weaved into the novel is something that Joyce revelled in: "I've thrown in enough hidden meanings to keep all the critics going for hundreds of years". In the episode entitled 'Nausicaa', I can honestly say that the fact the protagonist Leopold Bloom is masturbating over a crippled girl did not leap to my attention at all. I only found this out after consulting a guide, and it still required me to read the passage several times to actual discern the true 'meaning'.

Whatever crafty intentions Joyce might have had, I wager he never considered how it would make the most inane activities, such as shredding napkins in Starbucks, suddenly seem fantastically interesting in comparison. Just working out what is going on, let alone who is speaking, is enough to cause a brain haemorrhage. I am hardly being original in stating this opinion. Yet I think we are doing little justice to Joyce's work (and the department showing little consideration for our social lives) by expecting my fellow literary peers and I to read and digest Ulysses in one week only.