AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the previous episode, the librarian notices a shift in University altitudes in regard to the library…”The ground floor, for example, was now reached by going down two flights of stairs….” In the latest installment, Dr. Snought imagines his students…

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 17
“Before you all dash off… The deputy secretary to the assistant Pro-Vice Chancellor has been asked by the Vice Chancellor’s PA’s administrator to remind you all that the Vice Chancellor’s annual inaugural start of the end of term spoken lecture series is beginning again next week. Voluntary attendance is, as usual, compulsory - so I expect to see you all there!”

That was just one of the frequent announcements that Dr Snought didn’t have to make on a regular basis. Or any other kind of basis.

Dr Snought sat in his empty office – empty that is except for him, the desk, filing cabinet, chairs, carpet, files, computer, printer, books, book shelves and other assorted office related items too trivial to list here. As sat entering fictitious assignment grades into a spreadsheet of invented students. He often got carried away with these tasks. ‘Those Chinese students are having a good year’, he think as he looked back at his handiwork. ‘Pity that little Panamanian struggled so much with the timed essay’ he’d lament. Spending so much time on your own could do strange things to a man. It could do stranger things to a woman! He’d have been thankful of such a though had he ever had it.

Talking to yourself is something common to all of 90% of most people. Answering yourself is a little less common but far from unheard of. Dr Snought could often be found, when he could be found at all, interrupting himself and finishing his own sentences for himself. Over the years he had held off the encroaching and almost inevitable symptoms of full blown insanity fairly well. His day to day life consisted of giving non existent students unimportant information and then retiring every few weeks to invent the latest batch of fictional grades for the unset assignments that the non existent students had just completed and managed not to fail to hand in. The administration staff would, from time to time ponder the odd fact that they never actually saw any of Dr Snought’s students in person, (though they may receive the odd phone call from time to time – very odd generally). ‘Still’, they would collectively think, ‘who are we to get involved?’

Dr Snought finished cooking up grades for students who didn’t exist and opened up a new spreadsheet: Finances.

There was money in education these days. Government grants to institutions had been increased in an attempt to attract more foreign students. It was felt that to secure the long term future of the free Cymru, the best route forward was to increase the population, attract the brightest and the best from around the world, entice them over with heavily subsidized university places…and then take their passports away to stop them leaving again.

Snought had already been inserting fictional students into the university for some years – only on a much smaller scale. When the new funding was revealed he couldn’t help himself. He’d gone the whole hog and invented an entire fictional degree course for house the invented students. By proposing and assuming all of the responsibility for the course he’d had free reign to control the admissions process from the start. It had been perfect. Perfect for a while…

Dr Snought had taken to spending lengthy lengths of time in his office. It was a good way of avoiding unwanted attention… or indeed any attention. It was also a good way of avoiding the voices… the voices outside his head. The voices told him to do things, things he often didn’t want to do: ‘Come to a meeting’, the voices would entice, ‘Attend a conference in Hamburg next month’, lure, ‘Publish some academic research’ they’d go on, ‘Seek professional help’, they’d add, ‘Stop living in your office’ they’d repeat. On and on and on, driving him to distraction, always pushing him closer and closer to the edge! To the very edge of the edge! So he’d shut himself away some more and focus on his invented students and on preparing the plan for his latest publication: The Definitive Guide to Cogno-spatial Cross-tempral Prepojunctions in Late Early-Adult Language: A Comparative Study of English, Ojibwa and Kulango. It was to be his masterpiece. The crowning glory on his long and otherwise undistinguished academic career.

Sure, he’d been working on it for twelve years now. OK, so his publisher had refused to have anything to do with him and his literary agent had stopped taking his calls years ago. Yes, so he’d only managed to write an introduction and the sleeve notes… it wasn’t his fault. None of it was his fault. He had a constant stream of fictitious students to invent each year. Fictitious students don’t invent themselves after all. And besides, he had been under a lot of stress lately.

Luckily he was wholly unaware that he’d soon be under a whole lot more.