The Ned Wood Archive

When looking to the future

Don’t build your hopes too high

I beg you to remember

I’m just an ordinary guy

The Brogues

I was sat in my tutor’s office.  I’d only been there two or three times in the past two years, so I was taking a good look around.  I didn’t know then that all lecturers’ offices at all universities look the same.  They get issued with identical offices, identical books, and identical piles of paper when they start and, provided they leave the books and the paper in the same piles on their desks and on the floor, they get to keep their jobs forever.

But I didn’t know that then, so I was having a good nose, trying to read the titles of all the books, which is what I do whenever I go somewhere new.  I didn’t realise it was such a bloke thing till me and this guy I work with got invited to some Lord’s house in Hampstead or somewhere for some charity gig and we both spent all evening eyeing up the bookcase.  

It’s a bit like records int it?  You know what I like about looking through someone else’s collection?  Well, yes, of course there’s finding out that you’ve got something vital that they haven’t.  Like when we go to Ray’s and he’s got the Commitments soundtrack, but he hasn’t got any of the originals, or Marty, who has all of the Jam albums, but none of the singles.  Yeah, I like that.  Who doesn’t?  But you know what’s better?  What’s better is finding someone who’s got that special album that’s missing from your collection.  Like when me and Bernie went up to see his mate in London who had all of the Springsteen bootlegs.  When you’re thumbing through a collection and you spot something that you’ve always wanted to hear and finally you come across it.  That’s neat.  And Bernie’s mate introduced me to a lot of stuff that I hadn’t come across before.  Which is why I remember him, and what I’d like to be remembered for.

I went to a punk exhibition in London once.  It was all punk and post-punk album covers and posters and singles.  It was interesting, but only up to a point, because you couldn’t really brag about the albums you’d got that they hadn’t – who’d you brag to?  The guy on the door?  And also, when you found an album you had never been able to listen to, you still couldn’t listen to it, just look at the cover.  So, I guess, I should really have stayed at home that day.

Anyway, my tutor had hundreds of books, all on the same subject, and none of which I’d heard of or intended to read.  So, no bragging there either.

Meanwhile he was reading out my results.  I hadn’t done very well.  Funnily enough, the two papers I didn’t want to take, I’d done OK in.  Archaeology was the one I was most worried about, but although I could only answer two questions, one was about the technology of Stonehenge.  So I wrote about the night we all went down and the archaeology prof. must have liked that.  And then in Environmental Science, I’d just repeated all of the neat stuff Chris had told me the night before, even though very little of it was anything to do with any of the questions.

So it was ironic that the two subjects I’d done to make up the numbers, the two exams I hadn’t wanted to do, were my best.  If I’d done 100% geology like I wanted to, I might have been out on my ear.  Or maybe what saved me was Mick Wright, one of the guys I play rods with in the coffee bar at half time during the labs.  He’d done really well in the paper that my tutor had set and had been round to see him and had told him my performance had been due to  ‘something to do with a woman’.  And my tutor had laughed and had thanked him and then overlooked my display.  I didn’t find out about this until months later, but it had really surprised me because I’d always thought that Wrighty hadn’t liked Annie because he was always joking about her and being rude on account of her being Scottish. Or half-Scottish if the truth be known, her dad being English. But it just goes to show you, which is something I’ve learnt since, that what people say and what they think are sometimes totally unrelated. And what they do is another world entirely. Anyway, bottom line is I get to come back next year to see whether I can salvage a degree.

Either way, I was pretty upset when I left the boss’s office.  I blamed the papers for asking all the wrong questions.  Well they had.  Look at the TV replay and you’ll see.  I blamed the department for having all the wrong courses, like all these papers on rocks and minerals, instead of sexy stuff like plate tectonics (all of which ignored the fact that I’d screwed up the Geotectonics paper just as badly).  I blamed the university for being the wrong university, because I knew that at Edinburgh or Imperial or wherever, they’d recognise the knowledge in me without having to ask questions.

And when I got back and saw Chris and Helen and told them, Chris said not to worry.  It was all part of being a Buddhist that you have to clear your mind and recognise that you are a learner and will stay a learner until you reach enlightenment.  And that the less you know, the more you know.

And Bernie said, “Riffy, just like I said, you really have to blank out your mind to become part of the blank generation.”

So, that proves it.  I’m a genius.  Unlike our mate Bill, the astral traveller who got firsts in all of his philosophy papers.

And then I saw Annie and told her and she said I should stop all of this exam stuff.  I should stop testing myself and just accept the way I was.  And she also said that I should stop running around all over the place and just stay still and enjoy where I was.