The Naff Student’s Handbook
Introduction
This was written so long ago that I think it even pre-dated personal computers. It certainly has no truck with any kind of political correctness. It’s full of stuff about writing longhand notes in lectures and there isn’t a mobile phone in sight. I don’t know how today’s Naff Student might utilise a mobile phone to their nefarious advantage, but I expect it’s been done. I never had the courage to quiz my own two about their more shameful adventures at their respective places of higher learning, so this one, for me at least, has to stay a monument to the past and more a nostalgia kick than anything else. On a serious note, it also stands, quite deliberately, as a kind of homage to the great Michael Green, whose series of books about Coarse activities, together with numerous collections of Alan Coren pieces from Punch, provided valuable early demonstrations in the art of comedy writing throughout my formative years.
I did make a listless attempt to start upgrading some references, changing pronouns from masculine to feminine here and there just to make it sound more universal – but frankly my heart wasn’t in it, and sometimes saying they merely kills the joke. “What, are you talking now about all students? Or just the one individual you just named which you are now referring to as ‘they’ purely for the sake of social form? Wait, I’m confused, were they a guy or a girl? Surely it matters?”
Well yes, in the case of this little piece of nonsense, I believe it still does matter, not least because most Naff Students are always going to be the masculine of the species. Throughout life I have found that women generally seem to be a lot more sensible than men, and in most situations behave more responsibly, with more thought for the comfort and dignity of others, respecting the institutions with which they have dealings. Perhaps they are more naturally gifted as a sex with a greater sense of long-term goals and take care not to risk queering their own pitch? Men might shove a lit sparkler up their ass just to get a momentary laugh and fret about the consequences of second degree burns on their scrotum later, whereas I honestly can’t imagine any woman doing that, least of all because they think such an act might impress somebody of the opposite sex. (Assuming, that is, they don’t have scrotums in the first place, a dangerous attitude to adopt without further investigation these days – see above.)
I suspect there might be some Naff women students around, but I met very few of them during my time at university. Maybe I just wasn’t looking. But it was hard enough as it was pretending to be anywhere near as wilfully stupid and useless as the narrator of this book needed to be; to have projected my basest instincts onto a whole other sex would have been a presumption too far.
PS – Small personal side note: while I was originally compiling this book sometime in the eighties, I developed the first serious toothache I’d ever had. It started, typically enough, on a Friday evening and I wasn’t able to get it seen to until the following Monday morning. It was, quite simply, the worst weekend of my life, but I carried on writing. It is a source of pride to me now that I can no longer remember which section of the MS I was working on at the time, and no part of the text gives any hint as to what I was going through. Even Evelyn Waugh changed the ending of Vile Bodies because his wife left him during its composition. Amateur.
PPS – This MS also contains some recycled jokes that you may see cropping up in other areas of this website. One has one’s wealth of experience and one redistributes it as best one can, appropriately adapted if necessary. And sometimes one either simply forgets one has already used stuff elsewhere, or one doesn’t care.