Tuesday rant: 'Someone give me a cigarette!'

You’ve just got up at seven in the morning, feeling groggy and like you’ve criminally under-slept – an average day for many. But today’s different, you’ve got your final yearly exam  at 9 o’clock sharp in a dusty old dining hall – you know, the ones full of the smell of liberally applied floor varnish and where the light bulbs burn with a sickly, pale yellow. Oh, and you haven’t had time to grab a proper breakfast.

Not the most appetising of mornings, but it’s ok, things are all fine, because this is your last exam. You’re going to be DONE. Completely finished for the year in terms of proper hardcore work. So you haul your ass up to the dining hall, a few crumpled pages of revision – all carefully highlighted in orange – tightly grasped in your hand.

That ‘last minute’ revision while you’re standing outside the exam hall waiting to go in – as if a scant five minute glance over your notes just before the exam might actually have some significant affect on your mark. Who are we kidding? Still, it’s nice to imagine it helps.

And then some absolute twat comes in and interrupts you – one of those arrogant bellends that totally just pollutes the air around you with their obnoxious manner.

‘I need a cigarette’ the guy says. ‘Why does no-one here smoke?! Someone give me a cigarette.’

And all this as if someone would actually just bow down before him and offer up a pack of ten-Benson like magic. Who would actually be willing to donate a fag to this tosser?

To make matters worse, he continued to repeat his plea, adding in little eccentricities which I imagine he thought made him so terribly cool, like ‘Why can’t I stop singing about cigarettes? Ha! Ha! I just realised I’m singing all this to the tune of Gary Numan’s Cars. This is going to put me off my exam now!’

You don’t say! It’s putting me off mine!

Maybe it’s the law of averages. In a university environment of many thousands of student, you’re bound to end up with a few bad eggs. But equally, could it be that these immense annoyances are actually some kind of subscriber to the unwritten rules of ‘lad’ culture? These unwritten rules – a code of quirks that they seem to think makes them utterly irresistible and ‘bang on trend’... The reality? Merely confirms them as complete tools.

There’s such a thing as trying too hard, to establish yourself as part of an ideal (and an immensely flawed one at that). Steamrolling their way through life with this obnoxious attitude, it doesn’t do anyone any favours, except boosting their already massively inflated egos. You almost want to take a pin to them and deflate them like a balloon until they resemble something bearing a passing resemblance to someone who actually has a sense of regard for their fellow people around them.