Eating Raw Animal

Because of the last post I thought I would relieve your anxiety that I was doing something along the lines of too much work, or thinking, or maybe even something worthwhile.



Here we are at the beach with the Ski Club. Yes that’s right a ‘ski club’ that in the summer plays on a trampoline, plays basketball, football and badminton, and goes to the beach to collect shellfish. The first thing you notice about the ski club is that it is a mix of all sorts of personalities and people – from quiet to stupendously chauvinistic, from the ugly to the undeniably beautiful, and there is a proportionally even gender mix as well. When they play sports it is to have fun, the strong feign weakness or give to the weaker. Everyone claps after every ‘goal’ and there smiles all around, the aim is not to win but to bond and make everything inclusive. It almost seems (dare I say it) utopian.

Anyway, the beach was a bit of a grotty piece of crap. It was small, covered in jellyfish (which maybe unsurprisingly make a horrible jelly-like mess when you stand on them) and surrounded by tankers, oh, and it had a wonderfully scenic factory sticking completely obtrusively into the already not-too-impressive view. But somehow the day was beautiful – the sun was out, my Japanese was on top crap form, there were lots of people to talk to, and we were catching our tea. After half an hour of digging up shellfish you didn’t even notice the man-made offending articles. In fact we got so swept up in it that despite the undeniably probably polluted waters we ate raw fresh shellfish (quite delicious). We also found a crab whose arms fell off, a very disturbing, and highly ineffective defence mechanism.



You will notice the photos are in fact beautiful, oh how I could write about the power of manipulation in image, or maybe the effect of taking photos with the knowledge that other people are looking at them (all that romantic framing, use of shutter speed, is this really reflecting my experience or shaping it?), but no I can’t be bothered and many someone else’s millions of times more perceptive, erudite, and pretentious than me have already got there.

After this we met up later at university to cook and eat the shellfish. Let me explain something about the university, despite the orthodox tutorage, it is amazing. People stay late at night to work, talk, and have parties. The tutors sometimes organise parties that involve lots of great food and loads of great soft and hard drinks. There are areas of the university that are open 24/7 for the students to do whatever they want in. Yet the university isn’t a crumbling mess, I wonder what it would be like if Brighton University was like this? Well anyway, yes the food was amazing, again, but what was more interesting was that the utopian-ness I talked about earlier, was actually a silly misperception. There did seem to be a small amount of bullying going on and the victim just seemed to except this, they called her mushroom girl and she was a monster from the sea. Although she seemed to acknowledge this and even shout it out herself it did seem, to my eyes, a tad sad. But my eyes are probably inevitably always going to be wrong. We introduced the Ski Club to a game that a group of Japanese people showed us at the last party, which caused a lot of people to be very, very ill (no the game was not 'pass the meningitis', but it did involve too much alcohol). I will post a picture later that shows that the party was beyond the term 'messy'.

…sorry for annihilating your attention by this oversized post.