The Hoarchive

Satire, freshly squeezed from Warwick Uni

The Hoar book, pictured on a white studio background.

Study space shortage ‘enhances student experience’

You’ll never find a study space on campus at any time that vaguely resembles ordinary waking hours. Like a stretched thin mother-of-three hauling her

Study space shortage ‘enhances student experience’

You’ll never find a study space on campus at any time that vaguely resembles ordinary waking hours.

Like a stretched thin mother-of-three hauling her cluttered people carrier around a packed Asda car park, you can circulate around and around and never lay your eyes on that unholiest of grails: a lumbar nonsupporting 1m × 1m organisation of wood and cloth, wherein you can deposit both your stack of pertinent literature, and your hopes of ever meeting the basic designated demands of your dreary, deadline-fueled degree.


To not be afforded the pleasure of failing despite trying; of deciding whether smoke breaks are an hourly affair, or twice that; of struggling to discover whether Daughter’s dulcet tones are less distracting than the business affairs of Delhi being shouted down a mobile twenty paces away from you in the stairwell.

All these individual merits of a campus study space rendered unreachable… and why? Overcrowding? Under-funding? No, the beautiful differentiating power of competition.


Were we to have the luxury of lazing endlessly in an inefficient utopia wherein there would be not just a seat, but a selection of the damn things, then we’d never experience the indivualising growth gifted to us by resource scarcity. We’d never hone our animosity to unknown humans, nor our ability to confront strangers over fabricated claims of legitimate occupation to a contested study site. We’d never learn to slay the counterproductive cancer of friends, partners, and hobbies by sleeping irregular hours in order to grab hold of sufficiently empty arseholder. In short, we’d never learn the skills that will get us ahead in the real world, the corporate world. Namely sadism, with masochistic tendencies. And if we don’t learn how to further our agenda at the expense of others, did we ever really go to a Russell Group uni?

Solidarity is so Twentieth Century, it’s time we get real.

When faced with adversity, your choice is simple, adapt or die. The gift that Warwick gives us each day is the opportunity to adapt, to give us the brutality we need to make it in the big wide world. So next time you find yourself prowling the book lined corridors of our lovely library, don’t despair when you can’t find a spot rest your weary bones. Rather you should rejoice, breathe in the ecstatic freedom of knowing that it is this very shortage that makes KPMG favour your application over that of some Loughborough troglodyte. Seize the opportunity, hurl the present spaceholder’s meticulous papers onto the monochrome carpets, leave passive aggressive post-it notes fuming with spurious claims of the duration of their lecture-driven absence, and lament only the fact that, when it comes to seats, there aren’t fewer.