The future of Oxbridge

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read that an inner-city school in London had recreated the study of an Oxford don to help prepare its students for interviews at the elite university.

The deference to Oxford and Cambridge in the UK is quite extraordinary. Rather than impose reform on the anachronistic institutions or encourage young people to have broader horizons, we seem to believe that social mobility revolves around getting a small number of working-class kids to 'share' in the experience enjoyed for centuries by an elite.

The recreation of the room did, however, get me thinking of a possible future for the snooty Oxbridge colleges. They could be reinvented in a theme park, perhaps somewhere like Chatham or Romford. Local people and foreign tourists alike could share in the educational experience for a day, attending mock tutorials with animatronic academics. This way for the seminar on the Sturm und Drang proto-romantics. Down the escalator if you want to get plastered on daddy's allowance and smash up some local restaurants.

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A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m...

Becoming a Twister board

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It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...

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