Wow, have I been busy these past two weeks. Consequently, this post is about last week, because I didn’t quite manage to squeeze blog writing into my ever-busier schedule, but seeing as it’s currently 1am on a Tuesday night, I have enough time to write right now.

So, last week was Plenary. To avid readers of this blog (hi mum and dad), you’ll know that Plenary is the way that the Haverford student body makes decisions, basically by sitting in a great big empty basketball court and not leaving until the decision-making is over four or so hours later. Avid readers will also know how much I love voting in all its forms, so Sunday night found me lying on a pillow on the GIAC floor, reading E.P Thompson’s seminal pieces on the British working class, periodically raising my hand to vote, and scarfing down as much free food as was humanly possible. Which, it turns out, is a lot of free food.

Along with all the eating, studying and voting (listed in order of importance), I also bought two t-shirts. I think that I’ve worked out where the British education system has gone wrong. It’s not the lack of a liberal arts education, it’s not the increasing emphasis on research to the detriment of teaching, it’s not the lack of funding or the relegation of students to being mere money machines, instead, it’s the lack of university/college-themed t-shirts and sweatshirts with semi-witty cartoons and slogans.

Now, of course, we’ve all seen the tennis club sweatshirts with “Got Balls?” on the back, or the med students who wear hoodies that state “Coming soon to a theatre near you”, so I’m not denying that we Brits haven’t begun to see the value in a well-placed and slightly amusing slogan. What we haven’t realised yet is the ability to make such items of clothing for every conceivable event and/or society going. My only rule about buying these t-shirts is that I either have to belong to the club or support the cause, so I currently own a fluorescent pink aerobics t-shirt (“Give yourself a round of applause” – the teacher’s catchphrase), a bight red “Swat Sucks” t-shirt for the Haverford-Swarthmore basketball game of which more in the next blog (on the back is a list of ten things Haverford students would rather do than go to Swat – number 7 is “Drown”), an Amnesty International t-shirt (the UN Declaration on Human Rights plastered across the front is hysterical…maybe only if you’re Kim Jong-Il) and a Women’s Centre t-shirt with a cartoon of the bus that connects Haverford and Bryn Mawr and the slogan “I get off at Haverford”.

See you next week (or, tomorrow if I’m not too busy to write).