When all else fails send in the heavy artillery.


This last fortnight has led me to question if any kind of superpower could in fact exist. I have lost my “Very Best of the Corrs” cd, my hair straightening device is making it all curl upwards in a very eighties Molly Ringwald situation that I seem to be losing and my broken laptop started working again just as I accept the bill for the new one. In other words things really are going my way. If they were going any better I might suggest they were going in the opposite direction.

I have never claimed to be in any way graceful- 13 years of Irish dancing has at least taught me that much. But I do believe I can save myself from the majority of embarrassing clumsiness that I could befall. Last week was obviously my bad grace week. I walk through campus like everyone else, head phones in, head down, bag on back and desperately trying to stay upright on those devil incarnate red tiles that have been generously rooted through our campus.


I am similar to Pac Man in my approach to a daily route to and from the Student Centre, trying with all my might to steer clear of the red tiles (consider them to be those nasty blue blobs in the screen that try and kill Pac Man when all he wants to do is eat the yellow dots of goodness). I brace myself for my plot, I stage my coup and then dash (albeit carefully) through the red death that is campus. I will ignore anyone I know during this mission,, my mother could be sprawled out on the tiles selling her body to get the youngest sibling through college and I will not stop. I need to get from A to B without splattering.


Last week, things didn’t go according to the coup. I was distracted, I forgot myself and this led to me, ass first outside the Boole. People stifled their sniggers, some shook their heads as the resumed walking cautiously in the other direction and others stood, helpfully, and stared at the plight in which I found myself in. I gain composure- after swearing like a sailor on leave, and up I get. I walked right into that Boole, head help high, posterior throbbing.


However that was not to be the end of it. This evening as I walked to work listening to one young Elle Fitzgerald muse about some Fever on my iPod, I lost my footing manoeuvring those death-trap steps we proudly negate daily. Knowing full well how this was going to end I tried to compose myself, you know, to get some sort of marking upon dismount. I landed on same ASSet, thankfully different people around to judge. It was a Friday evening therefore the student population on campus consisted of mature students.


I propose a constructive protest in the most literal sense. I will supply the hardware appropriate for such a project and then we will dig up the red tiles. We will dig them up in a similar fashion to the dismemberment of the Berlin Wall and then we will march, we will march to Cork Port and there we will build a red tiled haven for the homeless. Everybody wins and I can wear converse to college.