I’d like to talk to you about beds. Yes, beds.
What in god’s name are they trying to achieve?
There’s a malicious rumour circulating regarding the difficult subject of beds. Some bastards have taken it upon themselves to repeat furiously the mistruth that we — Warwick Accommodation — don’t have enough beds for all the students we promised them to.
This, I should like to emphasise, is not true. We have a great many beds. They are deposited in secret locations about the university in order to facilitate mass sleepovers in lecture theatres at short notice. Our beds sit amongst our proudest assets.
Our unfortunate shortage, you see, is not of beds but of bedrooms. For years now, we haven’t had enough bedrooms.
Let us not, mind you, dwell fatalistically upon the adverse circumstances in which we find ourselves. Instead, consider that there are a number of ongoing projects that aim to resolve the problem.
We have made an especial effort to employ anti-social, defeated individuals to posts in the residential life team. This measure, we have found, has greatly increased the first year dropout rate, and has thus reduces pressure on rooms by the second term of each year.
Recently, we have started to experiment with the placement of beds. Perhaps shockingly, it seems that a bed may be placed on practically any flat surface of sufficient size.
Consequently, this year’s freshers may find themselves in receipt of a grave honour. Their beds will be erected in wonderful and innovative settings: disabled shower rooms, the area beneath kitchen tables, staircase sub-landings and in much of the history department.
I was recently courageous enough to undertake a hazardous fact-finding mission to an Asian country whose name I do not recall. Hardly Accompanied by sixty-four of my closest colleagues, I took inspiration from the domestic arrangements of the natives.
My own chambers offered frustratingly little enlightening direction — a hotel suite with two private swimming pools and a helicopter landing pad is a woefully poor attempt at efficient space usage.
On the ground, in spite of the revolting largesse of my hotelier, the yokels seemed to have rather got the knack of it. In what I shall henceforth term the ‘Warwick Method for the Housing of the Masses Without Capital Investment’, these simple people appeared to have carried pieces of household waste into an open sewerage system, and used them to assemble perfectly adequate shelters upon the tract.
My excitement induced a giddiness so powerful that I almost choked upon my Bollinger on the flight back to the Midlands. The Warwick Method is the future.
I have earmarked for Warwick Method development the area of scrubby grasses that separates Westwood accommodation blocks from each other.
It is with a solemn delirium of arousal that I await the guaranteed favourable outcome of my scheme. Beds, I can confirm, will be provided by my organisation at only a relatively small cost.