Desire and Power.

I have spent a large portion of my time considering the above title over the past few days. Rather than being something provocative and thought-provoking, Exeter University's English department has made it one of the driest subject areas available for study. If I had properly consulted the booklist, and found that the Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene is a Jacobean-style exercise in brain torture, then I might have reconsidered. However, as much as I rail and complain, it does not stop the fact I have four exams to get through before the 19th of May. Come the 19th of May I will probably kiss my clean kitchen floor at home with true, heartfelt relief - I'll have survived! The tortellini diet will be no more!!!

Moving on to less literary and more topical subjects of desire and power, unless you have been living in technophobic isolation, one can't have missed the making of political history this week. Britain has been entirely consumed in the shifting sands of political allegiances: Cameron, Clegg. Brown, Clegg. Never have I watched BBC news more. I must add that their coverage of the whole affair has been excellent in every respect; they've pulled out all the stops, including a studio especially constructed outside the Palace of Westminster, for round-the-clock political commentary! Except they did seem to go a little overboard whilst charting Cameron's visit to the Queen: "Cameron is now just leaving Buckingham Palace, Cameron is now in the car, Cameron is now making his way down the Mall...". It all got a bit overwhelming, like I was watching a very restrained version of Big Brother, but with cars and politicians instead of hair extensions and hot tubs.

So overwhelming that it provoked some pretty heated debates across the kitchen table at home. My brother claimed we were in danger of being overrun by fascists - a completely laughable notion if you just look at the BNP's performance in the election. Countering that, my mother mentioned on more than one occasion the idea of driving up to London and waging protest outside Number 10 until the then-primeminster Gordon Brown did the democratic and noble thing, and resigned his post. I suppose she was just driven mad by the thought of five more years of Gordon's bumbling media performances and international embarrassment. In fact, I believe the tweeting of Jemima Khan sums up best the reasoning behind mum's protestations:

"Didn't vote for the party which invaded a foreign country for no reason, lied about it, made us an international pariah, then bankrupted us."

I, personally, have never been so delighted to see the slimy, supercilious, manipulative little snake that is Lord Peter Mandelson leaving Downing Street. He just seems to miss the point of a General Election entirely, flatly refusing to admit that Labour would not be able to democratically form some kind of government for the next five years. In his usual, slippery way, he was conducting secret meetings with the Lib Dems in the small hours, desperately attempting to maintain his hold on his position of Secretary of State; I expected nothing less from an unelected MP. A very brazen, but hardly surprising move for a man who is widely known as Lord Voldermort, and is credited with having some kind of a political hit list. He is perhaps the penultimate example of a man driven by the desire for power - who ever said English degrees weren't useful?

To lay aside all selfish human pursuits for the end of this post, I found a wonderful poem by W. H Auden , whilst in the depths of my revision. I felt I should post it, even though many will recognise it as 'that poem' from the funeral scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral:

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

It seemed to transcend all the political mayhem.