Here’s an excerpt from the book
You don’t need to buy the book to read these eight paragraphs.
It’s all circles, the lot of it.
We’re bundles of atoms; minute collections of energy, each in co-relation and retaliation — forming, eventually, cells. Cells that pass in circles through the heaving liquid cycles of our bodies. Bodies themselves tied to the ebb and flow of day and night, months, moons, and seasons. Seasons which witness the circular Coriolis flows of pressure and precipitation across the spinning spherical surface of the Earth. Earth, a small sphere in a circular loop of the sun.
As with tide and time, the events orbiting the platter of a cone on a campus just beyond the outer rings of Coventry cannot escape the determined circles of life.
A few thousand middle-class, home-county eighteen-year-olds arrive each year, dreaming of internships, creative discovery and well-moderated fun. Slowly, their spirits dissolve into the comparative tedium of their parents’ suburban subsistence.
Swotters swivel in library seats, clutching the coloured collections of stationery they use to circle all and any objects for potential examination.
Starry-eyed fresh faces sit ritually in circles, playing ring of fire to a looping soundtrack of mercenarily genre-mashed music. Afterwards, their small groups gyrate cyclically about the sticky halls of a nearby nightclub, hoping for a postliminary, sweatingly fumbled entanglement.
Positions of artificial power arise. CV-fuelled megalomaniacs leap to the challenge — execs fill as hearts empty. The privileged protest. The interns tussle for their corporate interment. The phlegmatic student rightists bumble on with their business, pretending to ignore the ills that avail the university.
And finally, a handful of renegades arm themselves with bottles of Lidl Rioja and sit back to mock the whole affair.
These things come, and these things go. Everything passes and nothing changes. Just as the Hoar came gurgling and farting into this world, it must now go grumbling and dribbling into the obsolescence of the night. To everything there is a season, and now it is our turn to pass.
