Carnivorous Cow

"The thing about stereotypes," Carnivorous Cow grumbled to Gramsci the spider, "is that they resonate. Why else would they have survived?"

Gramsci peered out from the gleaming bookshelves. He wasn't sure if this was a trick question, or if the multiple choice answers were still to follow. "None of the above?" he ventured nervously.

Carnivorous Cow rolled her eyes dramatically and recounted a long and complex story of yet another relationship gone wrong, the fall-out from which was clearly wasting altogether too much of her limited sympathy reserves. "Besides," she added, "it was never going to work. He's younger than she is!"

Gramsci looked up, startled. Whatever did that have to do with anything?

"There's a reason that the older male - younger female pairing is socially acceptable in a way that the older female - younger male pairing is gossipworthy," Carnivorous Cow explained patiently. "Different biology. Different programming. Men go for surface - and, typically, pretty equates with young. Women go for substance - and, typically, substance only develops with experience - which takes time, hence age."

"But..." Gramsci began, "I read recently on-the-internet-so-it-must-be-true, that older women are better..." he blushed deeply. He wasn't altogether sure how old the cow was, under all that leather, and didn't want to cause unnecessary offence given the difference in their size.

"Of course!" exclaimed Carnivorous Cow. "But that doesn't mean that younger men are in a position to recognise that fact, or - even if they did - to deserve access to older women. Who wants something so gauche, so green, so self-obsessed, so... needy?"

Gramsci said nothing. He was thinking that not all younger men were needy - Mark Shuttleworth, for one, seemed quite well-off? But this was possibly not what the Cow had in mind.

But something else was bothering him. "What happens," he asked, "to all the older women when all the older men are out pursuing younger women? And the even-older men are all tied to their colostomy bags and zimmer frames and rocking chairs?"

Carnivorous Cow fixed him with a beady eye. "Their platinum cards still work, don't they? A nip and a tuck and who says she's an older woman?"

Carnivorous Cow is by no means a gym bunny. Variegated leather doesn't look good in lycra, and besides, there's not an awful lot to perv at in a gym. Your eyeballs can only take so many whales in speedos before they explode, and your ears can only take so much Black Eyed Peas before the eardrums burst. Five seconds, I believe, at that kind of volume.

Recently, though, Carnivorous Cow had to concede that paddleskiing was not the best fun in winter storms, and that perhaps exercise-induced asthma wasn't an outright allergy to any form of physical activity, and that perhaps joining a gym wasn't *such* a moral compromise if one thought about it. After all, one merely had to swipe one's card; once inside, one could happily sip cappuccinos and read the weekend papers and watch others build up a sweat, or surf the internet for _real_ hot bods to try to restore ones faith in human evolution.

But no one warned her of the obvious. Which was that colleagues one expended vast amounts of effort avoiding on Campus, could - and would - appear without warning on the bicycle alongside, or plop down next to one in the sauna, or sneak up as one was dripping out of the shower. And that the scariness of these colleagues would be exponentially increased by dressing them in lycra. Or draping them in a wet towel. Or nothing at all.

Perhaps, Carnivorous Cow sighed to Gramsci, it was simply the Universe's way of righting itself. Inasmuch as coffee reportedly increased sexual activity - see "more", below - going to the gym quashed any libido that might have reared its head, so to speak. Perhaps they should simply make gym attendance compulsory, and then they wouldn't have to worry about more dark nookie nooks after all?

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Carnivorous Cow was distressed to read recently on IOL that "coffee drinkers are more sexually active than non-coffee drinkers."

Given the length of the coffee queues on Campus, Carnivorous Cow can only deduce that there's an awful lot of sex going on somewhere. And, given the space constraints, she's concerned that this information reaches the relevant DVC so that it can be factored in to the Campus Guide Plan for the next 5 - 10 years. Already the "silent study area" in the Library, widely reported to have been used for practical biology among students, has vanished. The compactus has been known to result in close encounters becoming closer than planned, and the stairs down to level one get occupied pretty quickly. Even the stairs down to the archaeology rock dump in Beattie have a queue. Is this perhaps what the SRC has in mind with the creation of a "Day Houses" portfolio?

Staff, if they're among the "active", are perhaps better provided for, in that most staff have offices, and many of these are private, with doors that shut. However, rumour has it that four-window offices will soon become two-window offices in an attempt to create more habitable space, which means that free carpet space will vanish and requests may start coming through for upholstered desks.

But Carnivorous Cow somehow doubts that staff are contributing to the statistics. Given the toning benefits of aerobic exercise of this nature, one would expect the most active to strut around with airbrushed bodies... and despite looking really really hard, she's seen altogether too few of these. Among students too, come to think of it. Could the article be wrong?? Surely not - it appeared on the Internet, so it must be true!

But it seems that the University faces a serious planning challenge - either more secluded nookie nooks have to be created, or the coffee outlets need to be closed down... or their produce mixed with copious quantities of Copper Sulphate...

Carnivorous Cow stomped through the Macdonalds wrappers to her office, and rolled her eyes dramatically. Bad enough that Macdonalds existed at all, offending her bovine sensibilities, but that their wrappings should find their way onto Campus defied her. Not just that someone actually went and bought a Happy Meal (sic - or perhaps, sick) off-Campus and dragged the rubbish up here to throw onto the steps, but because.... well, how did they know which bit to eat and which bit to discard? Surely, since it all tasted the same, the brightly coloured box would be the better bit to eat - lower in cholesterol, for one?

But while musing about the prospect of buying trash off-Campus and consuming it, or dropping it, on Campus, she couldn't help remembering another recent incident.

She'd always wondered who actually *bought* the Daily Vice. Someone must, or it would have joined ThisDay in newspaper valhalla by now. Her wonderings were answered recently when she spied a copy being drooled over in the Leslie Building. The pixellated, grainy, only vaguely recognisable as topless, Page 3 Girl was getting rapt attention from - yes, the same category of Middle Aged Male Academic who really ought to know better.

Despite a hurried fumble at page turning, ostensibly to resume the article begun on page one and continued on pages two, four and five, it was pretty clear what the selling point of the tabloid was for the reader. Carnivorous Cow was rather saddened at the discovery... Was our bandwidth really *that bad* that MAMAs had to resort to buying their "one-handed literature" in hardcopy?

Carnivorous Cow stomped into her office, caffeined up, and rolled her eyes indignantly. "Honestly!" she sighed, and Gramsci dashed for cover. "Men!"

Gramsci peeked out from behind the PC speakers nervously. "What now?" he asked, "Did someone hold the door open for you again?"

Carnivorous Cow snorted. They'd been through that countiess times. But she wasn't about to become distracted now. "Men are such, such... girls! Honestly! They hit middle age, and they go rushing off to the gym to develop six packs, and put themselves on diets, and spend their lives on bicycles trying to develop desirable bodies, and for what? They're too tired to put those bodies to good use with their wives or their girlfriends or both, and their conversation skills evaporate in a cloud of kilojoule counts and next they start using words like 'ecru' and 'cigar smoke' - referring to colours - and their reading matter shrinks to Cosmopolitan and Men's Health!"

Gramsci looked perplexed. Surely men reading women's magazines was a good thing? Wouldn't they now have something in common to discuss? Perhaps even a common discourse?

Carnivorous Cow threw her head back dismissively. "The trouble is, she continued, they don't read these things with the remotest trace of irony. They _believe_ that women *enjoy* shopping, and that it's every woman's dream to be reincarnated as Imelda Marcos - or at least to own her shoe collection! They _believe_ that women aspire to deep, meaningful relationships with men, based on equality and shared domestic responsibilities. They _believe_ that women believe the stuff they read about themselves in women's magazines! They haven't yet decoded the practice of 'ruling from below' or manipulation through faking it!"

She snorted derisively again. "It's only a matter of time before _The Lancet_ reports its first study of middle-aged male anorexia. They've *become* the teenage girls they should be bedding!"

Gramsci felt rather ill. It may have had something to do with the cockroach he'd just consumed - he suspected from its radioactive glow that it had achieved its great size feasting on slapchips from the Leslie - but he thought it was more likely due to a realisation that Carnivorous Cow had a point. Instead of last-gasp-of-testosterone Porsches and Lamborghinis lining University Avenue, there was a disconcerting array of Mini Coopers... and bicycles.

"Perhaps," he ventured, "if they took their cycling less seriously, and stopped shaving their legs.....?"

The professor peered closely at the pictures on the wall, and sighed. The exhibition commemorated Five Decades of Protest at UCT, and everyone's favourite game was playing "check your mate" on the photographs. The professor, however, had something rather different in mind.

"Just look how neatly our students were dressed back in 1959!" he cried.

A professorial colleague concurred. "Indeed," he agreed, "I look around the residence frequently and think, it's time to institute a dress code!"

Carnivorous Cow blanched - which is rather difficult for a cow that is already white in patches. To whom, exactly, would this dress code apply? She could certainly see an argument for asking students to _dress_ - based on aesthetic rather than moral grounds; too much exposed, untoned flab was such a sexual disincentive and if students didn't have that pastime to look forward to, how else would they amuse themselves? The thought of yet more bodies trying to cram themselves into limited spaces like the Library, or the coffee places, or the sunny steps outside buildings, was too unsettling to contemplate. Health and safety regulations relied on students finding dark corners or the lower reaches of the Beattie staircase to engage in carnal recreation, freeing up space in passages outside offices for people to walk through and space outside buildings for them to congregate, should fires or bomb scares require it.

But the thought of a "dress code" was a little disturbing. it smacked of conformity, regulation, uniformity, in a way that didn't resonate comfortably with the anarchic space necessitated by such noble notions as "academic freedom" or "autonomy". Would staff now be required to ensure that the length of their tail tufts was within a certain range, or that their udders were discreetly hidden from view?

She rushed back to her office to share her fears with Gramsci the spider. Gramsci was altogether more pragmatic about the idea.

"At least," he mused, "it would make it easier to identify specimens of the sought species, or even the sought gender. Currently, if one looks at them - " he gestured with a random leg - "who could tell? They might spend their entire evening buying drinks for and chatting up a prospective partner, only to discover it was in fact a new addition to the University's art collection or a floor polishing machine."

Carnivorous cow had to concede that point.

Carnivorous Cow looked at the clock in the corner of her screen. 07h32. Still fully half an hour - though more realistically, forty minutes - before the coffee place across the road opened. She'd already been here forty minutes, and it felt far too long to sit through another forty without coffee. A movement in her peripheral vision - see "more", below - alerted her to the presence of Gramsci, the spider.

 

"Why don't you blog?" he asked, nervously. After all, she was a _Carnivorous_ Cow. "I'm sure Marion is just dying to know what you had for breakfast!"

 

Carnivorous Cow's four-in-one stomach rumbled loudly. "Breakfast will happen," she muttered, "once the @#$& coffee place opens!"

 

"Then tell her what you'd _like_ for breakfast?" Gramsci suggested, slipping underneath the keyboard of the vestigial PC.

 

Carnivorous Cow thought long and hard. She remembered the old days, when she still squatted in the building across the road. By seven o'clock there would be a small cluster of cars in the parking area, and not all of them white Toyota Camries bought on the car scheme either, parked in their habitual spots. New arrivals would take note of who was already there, and within seconds phones would ring with invitations for early morning coffee.

 

This wasn't whipless caffe moccha from the coffee place, which didn't yet exist. This was plastic coffee in those awful white ceramic cups filched from the Dean's Committee Room in years past, whitened - for those as did - with lumpy Cremora and sweetened with sugar sachets collected from local restaurants and takeaways. It tasted like mud, mostly, but it contained sufficient caffeine to do the trick, and - Carnivorous Cow admitted sadly - it wasn't *really* about the coffee, anyway. It was about the company.

 

Taking a few minutes out, before the day really got underway, to connect with colleagues and catch up on critical issues, kvetch, or speculate wildly about what nefarious scheme Bremner might be hatching next to prevent teaching and research from actually taking place, went a long way to making the day easier, somehow. Carnivorous Cow missed that. Better tasting coffee didn't make up for the loss of time in people's diaries to connect with each other and with what it was that brought them here each morning - and by that, she reminded Gramsci, she wasn't meaning that fleet of Camries.

 

DFERTASRTY NMSARTYIOOP{NBM, typed Carnivorous Cow, which was her best attempt at "Dear Marion". She paused. "Breakfast has yet to happen, but what I'd really like for breakfast, is company."

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"Why the moniker 'Carnivorous Cow'?" asked Gramsci the wolf spider, cleaning his maxillopeds. Carnivorous Cow looked across at him, getting lost in his spidery eyes. Literally - eight eyes are easy to get lost in, without GPS. "Trust Google," she muttered to herself, "by they time they get GoogleArachnid up and running, it's sure to work on a Windoze platform only, and not on my Mac!" Mac, she hastily added, being short for Mackintosh, and not McDonalds, that happy haven so beloved of cows. Which brought her back to Gramsci's hanging question.

Gramsci, she thought to herself - since it remained difficult to think to anyone else - would make the perfect lover, were it not for his size. (see "more", below... Parental guidance advised, SVLN).

"Carnivorous," she answered slowly, "because although I was once herbivorous, I became anaemic and my doctor advised me to review my diet. It's not very PC for a cow to be carnivorous, I know," she shrugged, "but then neither am I."

"And cow?" Gramsci asked.

"Cows, as you know," she snorted, "are clothed in 100% genuine leather. Nothing artificial at all. Although that means that we're not too happy out in the rain - water is not good for leather, unless you Dubbin it regularly, and who's got the time to do that nowadays?

"Although reputed to have four stomachs, it's really just one," she added, "but no one has to know that until after you leave the restaurant. Otherwise they might mistake you for a pig, when you tuck into that last bowl of cassata.

"And cows can take a lot of bull!"

Gramsci had to agree that this last factor was highly advantageous in Carnivorous Cow's working environment.

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Carnivorous Cow looked out of the window of her office. Thick grey clouds - another gloomy winter's day....? Nope, just Supercare on a tea break. Through the haze she could barely discern the Arts Block, with students sitting in a circle on the grass for a tut. A tutt-tutt, more like it, she muttered darkly - that one forgot to put on anything over her underwear this morning. And that one - eish! One swallow doth not a summer make - she'd need to have drunk a whole crate of Archers to be so impervious to the cold!

Where are Trinny and Susannah when you need them? Did nobody teach these kids you're supposed to dress to show off your best assets, and hide your flaws? So what is it with fat chicks and hipster jeans, anyway? Do we really want to know that they're earning their way through varsity by participating in Morgan Spurlock's latest experiment?

Turning back to her monitor she noticed that she'd just missed the gap - by the time she grabbed her money the lecture would have ended and the coffee queues would stretch longer than a piece of string. Curses - another 55 minutes without caffeine! She wasn't sure she could hold out that long. The hydroboil upstairs was an option, but all her stash held was salmonella tea. She ripped a page off the latest Faculty Bored minutes and tore it into an 8 cm strip. Grabbing a Honey and Vanilla teabag, she emptied the contents into the strip and rolled it expertly - which, considering the size of her hoofs, was quite a feat. (Yes, that is a pretty weak pun, but it's only Tuesday....) She stuck the end in her mouth and started ruminating thoughtfully. Perhaps, she thought, it was time she started a blog...

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