A Panorama

The university in whose scholastic catacombs I am presently immured is remarkable only in its complete lack of remarkability.

Grey edifices, formed entirely of reconstituted Weetabix, stand in obese defiance where they please, blotting out the sky with their asbestos-ridden, carcinogenic vastness. Strange balconies stud their haunches like arrows, transforming the masses into insipid pagodas.

Below the concrete imperium, a small, artificial lake bubbles with the rasp of a faulty iron lung. A slightly manic woman stands nearby, eyeing the scene with impossible interest. Her bag is prised open open with a discomforting adroitness, signalling to all around that, were she so inclined, she could perform a similar strike upon a human head, opening it like a squashy clipboard. Out of this bag is conjured a limitless torrent of bread particles, which perforate the water like tiny howitzer blasts. Ducks then swarm, eager to unseat the explosive material before civilians are harmed. An immense clamour ensues as farinaceous artillery is scooped out of the battlefield and, quite valiantly, into the rapacious gullets of the bomb disposal unit, where it might be subjected to weapons testing and, ultimately, turdification. Within seconds the hubbub has dispersed and, much like Poe's Conqueror Worm, an enormous priapic fish vomits itself out of the water and, finding its launch unsuccessful, falls back to the earth, conflagrated in its own fishy juices as it reenters the atmosphere.

Ducks circle the perimeter of the water, in a fashion I imagine to be synecdochical of the border control of the nation as a whole. Acidic sunbeams tangle themselves in the threshold of reeds, fizzling as they sear the water, resolving in fugues of nacreous tendrils. 

Some quiet bird wobbles along. What the hell is that thing, a quail? It looks like an animated vegetable. But surely quails only exist in egg form, this is common knowledge. Perhaps this was a quail's egg which has been left out too long, in gross disregard of supermarket labelling. 

A man walks past the scene, entirely oblivious to its mania, buried in his cup of shit coffee. This man has never seen anything so fascinating as heated, mulchified coffee beans - he has found the meaning. This is it. This is his calling.

Above all this, a grotesque chimney broods over the entire landscape, a foul parody of the chimney of Willy Wonka's factory, grooming prospective students with promises of Scrumdiddlyumptious bars but, two years later, presenting only fudge-coated coprolites, exhumed from the nearby burial ground in the name of nutrition.

But now I am seized from my reverie, when I realise the small woman who stood so innocently mere minutes ago to my left has now vanished from all sight. The ducks hiss furiously, and I understand immediately that this woman has been returned to nature, stripped to the bone by the chimaerical creatures of the lake.

The ducks turn to me, mandibles snapping, expecting food. This fact, augmenting that of my lack of food, induced a fight or flight response in my brain. I had no chance of gentlemanly combat with these brutes, not least because half of them were juggling flick knives between their exquisite pennons (ducks can boast, I have found, an incredible plumage which they hide as best they can, and a remarkable stripe of aubergine paste beneath their wings). Therefore I ran, dear reader. Heroism is terribly overrated.