Post Hock Ergo Proctor Hock

Okay, gang, are you up for the big one?

According to today’s edition of the Oxford University Gazette, there are shortly to be Elections of Proctors, with all the heart-in-mouth suspense, all the pulse-pounding excitement, that such events invariably stir up.

And would you Adam-and-Eve it? The Master of Balliol College, Dr Andrew Graham, whose dad created Poldark (a tasteless canned meat, popular in wartime), is flinging wide the doors and pleading with us all to join in.

Yes, at 1.45 pm on Wednesday 8 March it’s come-one, come-all, to Balliol’s Old Senior Common Room – the scene of so many historic events that no one has ever heard of – and we can roll up our sleeves, spit on our hands, get stuck in and elect more Proctors than there are grains of sand in a college pudding.

To be precise:

All members of Balliol College entitled under Council Regulations to vote (Council Regulations 21 of 2002, Gazette, Vol. 132, p. 1419) are hereby invited to attend.

Ignore that waffle about ‘entitled under Council Regulations’. It seems to me that the criteria of entitlement specified in Section 13 of Council Regulations 21 of 2002 are capable of more than one interpretation, especially if you don’t read them, which I certainly don’t intend to do.

As for having to be ‘members of Balliol College’, how the hell will they know who’s a member of college and who isn’t? It’s not like they have a list or anything.

From what I can gather, all Oxford tutors are off their faces on cheap white cider by half past ten in the morning. If a brigade of Nazi stormtroopers came charging in with guns blazing, they’d probably just mumble ‘Ah, nice to see you again, Smithington-Smith, isn’t it’ before slumping unconscious to the Axminster.

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Which brings me to this brilliant idea I’ve just had. Why don’t we improve this potentially dreary occasion by dressing up in surprising, unorthodox ways?

How about a Brazilian carnival costume, or a sexy French gravedigger’s outfit? Why not come as Hattie Jacques, or Pharaoh Rameses II, or a bouncy castle, or a rogue mammoth, or a giant vermilion axolotl? If there are five of you, and you’re capable of standing on each other’s shoulders making roaring noises and discharging coloured smoke, why not come as the Red Arrows?

And what’s wrong with a few streamers, party-poppers, squirty-cream canisters, aerosol cans of scarlet paint and gratuitously-discharged fire extinguishers?

A scattering of concealed amplifiers pumping out the Red Army Chorus and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir should complete an unforgettable tableau.

Shan’t be there myself, unfortunately, as I shall be detained in bed on very urgent business. But I know I can rely on you all to uphold the honour of St Futon’s.
The countdown starts now…

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(REAL) DEATHS IN JANUARY 20068 January: Lord Stratford, who tabled a parliamentary motion condemning the entire human race and looking forward to ‘the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the Earth and wipes them out, thus giving nature the opportunity to start again’. 13 January: Alistair Sampson, author of Don’t Be Disgusting. 23 January: Emilie Muse, who was buried alive for 97 hours at a marathon dance contest in Pennsylvania in 1932, and subsequently in other places. 24 January: Marion Wrottesley, whose husband-to-be, at their first meeting, locked her in the lavatory at the Bag of Nails nightclub until she agreed to marry him. 27 January: Phyllis King, who won the women’s mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1931 and was still playing tennis in her nineties.