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.

Olympic Fever

Is it bad that I actually look forward to 5pm every evening? For it is when the Winter Olympic coverage (courtesy of BBC Sport) begins, and I can settle into an evening spent laughing at foreign names (Andreas Wank being one of my favourites) and craptastic commentary.

It is true that commentators seem to thrive on the misfortune and dashed hopes of the competing athletes. Excitement reached fever pitch the other day as Swede Anja Paerson suffered a truly ugly crash at the end of her treacherous Olympic downhill, and with good reason too. Crashes are almost eye-watering to watch, especially as the coverage seems to include replaying the same stricken fall over and over and over again, in order for the commentators to waste precious air time, analysing which part of the body the skier may have broken. More often than not, the competitor can get up and stumble off the course, in which case I am sure I seem to detect a hint of disappointment in the voices of the commentators: "Oh, he's up and walking off the course... but that was a severe crash, it looked like he had torn a ligament at the very least..!"

But for all the excitement of the fast-paced Super-G, downhill, luge, and the many other death-defying acts, one thing just not make sense: curling. I cannot help feeling that even if I sit down to watch even five minutes of this "sport", I feel like it is five minutes of my life I have wasted (I will not take my hours spent on Facebook into account on this occasion).

It makes me wonder if the teams actually have to train at all, for the most strenuous activity they seem to partake in is the act of sweeping the ice. Who knows; I am woefully and admittedly ignorant of the intricacies of curling. I am probably bypassing, in my former statement, whole months of dedicated training and team-work on the part of the Olympic teams. Infact I have just done a quick perusal of Google, and it would seem that the Canadian team have to follow a programme of intensive "Muscle Endurance" exercises, which I can only imagine would serve to strengthen the ability to release the stone - extreme lunges are obviously required.. Yet I would guess that more preparation goes into the mental strategies of the game then perhaps the physical side. Indeed, I could see curling as an excellent example of the adage "easy to learn, difficult to master".

It does not, however, stop the sport from being unbelievably dull to watch; I think it is one of the few activities (apart from darts, and possibly snooker) where it is possible to enter a state of zombie-like boredom. Indeed, it seems to provide a convenient time-filler when a skier crashes out of the latest freestyle-race, or a ski-jumper entirely misjudges their landing, to disastrous and delaying effect. And sadly (yet inevitably) now that Team GB are out of the running for the curling medals, the commentators make no secret of the fact they are 'let down', and all coverage and interest seems to diminish. But such is the nature of today's media in general, I suppose. It is fickle and precarious, a profitable nightmare for PR agents or respective celebrities. It gives pond-life like Katie Price the chance to make money on the back of her own name and behavoir (at the expense of her children) and seemingly wrecks havoc upon the private lives of the rich and famous - with too many examples to name.

This leads me onto another observation I made today, following my casual browsing of the morning's news. I saw splashed across the screen "Robert Pattinson FINALLY admits he's dating Kristen Stewart", which comes to me as no great surprise. But following his apparent comment at the BAFTAS that "We can't arrive at the same time because of the fans. It goes crazy. This was supposed to be a public appearance as a couple but it's impossible", it left me feeling rather sorry for the pair of them. The fact that Monsieur Pattinson apparently related this to the delightful tabloid, The Sun, makes the whole issue even more a product of the media's tricky representation of the people we are supposed to be so interested in. I, for one, resent the fact that my brain contains the piece of information that Katie Price puts fake eyelashes on her daughter, or even that Heidi Montag's face is basically a shrine to the achievements of plastic surgery. I really am not interested in the lives of people I will never meet; I prefer to extend my cares to the people around me in my own life. That is not to say that I do not appreciate the hard work of many talented individuals who truly deserve their fame.

Yet it is impossible not to be infected by the celebrity culture that has become an off-shoot of 21st century modern life, even in the Winter Olympics, when each new crash, or even Lindsay Vonn's use of make-up is raised on the same pedestal as the jaw-dropping achievements and atheletic finesse of the Olympic competitors themselves.

Yeats

Surprise, surprise I've never held much patience for poetry. I'd rather say what I mean through plain prose rather than being restricted by rhythm, rhyme and meter. Yet my seminar tutor claimed that English is the only language that falls naturally into iambic pentameter. It is not possible to fit any other language in the world, whether it be French, Greek, Spanish, German , into the tight constraint of Shakespeare's favoured meter. But leaving all that in an imaginary corner, I found a poem I really like, by W.B Yeats of all people:

Broken Dreams

There is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake - that all heart's ache have known,
And given to others all heart's ache,
From meagre girlhood's putting on
Burdensome beauty - for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.
Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, "Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.'
Vague memories, nothing but memories,
But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking
In the first loveliness of womanhood,
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.
You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful,
And I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those What have obeyed the holy law
paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake's sake.
The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have
ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.

I don't think I'll ruin it with over-analysis.. or rather my very poor analytical skills when it comes to poetry.

In other news, my love of the pub has grown over the past week. The Rusty Bike in Exeter is the only pub I've come across where it is entirely acceptable to play Cluedo and drink lemonade. As welcoming and warm Firehouse might be, it is refreshing to go somewhere where lethal £5 white wine is not a requirement of the night.

I have just observed Emmy's Pennsylvania Road attire: pyjama bottoms tucked into oversized socks, worn with flip-flops. As sad as it may sound, this is a very practical choice of clothing in the current environment; the height of student house couture, dare I say. She could do with another ten jumpers or so though. And possibly some long-johns. After all, the spirit of student housing is apparently to adopt so-called outdoor items for indoor use. I.e - flip flops are to be worn in the shower, not for the beach. Perfectly sane.