Vada Scoparti's Diary

There hasn’t been much productivity here recently considering that the majority of the writing staff has been sitting in the library sobbing into the pages of books on Renaissance etiquette. If you expect to me to apologise, stop. In fact, I really have much better things to do right now. To introduce to the fray is our new columnist - the sassy sashaying student soliloquist, Vada Scoparti. Hence: 

I indulged in a most unsavoury liaison at Vodrevs Tuesday last. He wasn’t an Adonis but I saw he was dressed well so, TVRs flowing (if it’s too complicated an acronym then you belong in the proletariat), I thought it apt to go home with him. Honestly I was absolutely out of it, I must have had literally a gram of meph on top of that, so one couldn’t very well be blamed for falling into so promiscuous a trap, nor if I make any minor discrepancies in this story (which I assure you I won’t). The house. Was. Filthy. Ohmygod - I had to leave the Kurt Geigers by the door simply because of the state of the carpet.

Making a god-awful semantic nightmare of ‘salacious’, among other lengthy words beyond his comprehension, he wooed me to the cesspit he called his bedroom. I stopped by the bathroom beforehand however. Now, who in their right mind lives in a cold house and doesn’t have a wooden lavatory seat? What am I meant to do with porcelain, let my buttocks freeze to the seat? I am not wont to such blue-collar displeasures.

I got over this. But then the shit really hit the pan: Sainsbury’s Basics toilet tissue. BASICS. 2 shitting ply. Ohmygod. What kind of despicable oaf expects me, of all people, to wipe with such dross? I kicked aside some filthy clothes, finished his drugs and took my leave, slamming the door and harumphing loudly enough that he got the message.

As a mark of my disdainful contempt, I did not flush. 

VADA SCOPARTI

FAMOUS PAINTINGS EXPLAINED No.2

Bill Hammond - The Fall of Icarus, 1995. Acrylic on canvas.

Tears of acrylic seep down the canvas, sliding desperately down the painting into a white abyss, eternal nothingness. The drips remind me of a desperate man clawing for purchase on a cliff face. Unsuccessfully. The painting is meant to represent man’s effect on these elegant birds’ habitats - they sit powerless in the dead trees as pollution melts their world away, a despairing view of hopelessness through watery eyes.

But that’s what Hammond wants you to think. What people don’t realise is that he’s actually one of Anna Wintour’s harshest critics. You see, Hammond has an unfounded and totally irrational hatred of her, but has disguised this for years behind the ingenious veil of worrying about climate change and all that la-di-da. All the birds are in fact sullen little Anna Wintours watching her aging face in the mirror droop down the canvas (her cheekbones). So in fact, the abyss is the irrevocable past, and the long trickles of paint are Wintour's looks cascading into it, where they will remain. Ouch. 

As in The Merchant of Venice - 'truth will out'. Other interesting revelations that have come to light this month include the news that John Flaxman's Athena in the form of Penelope’s sister tells the queen of the return of her son Telemachus (1810), contrary to its lengthy title, actually depicts the most bodacious happy-slap of antiquity - the famous 'diving bitchslap' pioneered by the Athenians in the 5th century BC (below). 

THOMAS