Town and Clown

The dreary round of Capping activities is shortly to be upon us again.

Last year's stunts were in such bad taste that one hopes that any suggestion of repetition will not be tolerated. For Gerard Curry to arrange for a grand piano to be dropped from a height onto the back of an American convertible car and then to drive the whole ("like a mad man", the Magistrate said) down Manners Street during the lunch hour was at the height of bad taste. To assert, as Mr Curry did in his defence, that this grotesque performance was intended to constitute a "witty assertion of the irrelevance of material values" was to be devastatingly naive about the tenuous nature of town/gown relations.

Reference to two other stunts perpetrated in recent years will, I am certain, convince readers of the futility and essentially tasteless character of most Capping stunts. The first of these was the infamous 'Paper-mache President' hoax (Code name: Doug White) of 1968; a silly, unfunny stunt, drawn out far beyond any term which could possibly be justified by its perpetrators. The second stunt to which I will refer was perhaps the most deplorable incident in which students are ever likely to be involved. This was the establishment in 1956 of the 'Security Service'. This stunt got quite out of hand. Reminders of it persist until this day as other would-be humourists masquerade as 'officers' of the 'Security Service', tap 'phones, and operate 'agents' on campus, employ people who are currently undertaking degree courses to 'spy' on their fellow students, examine ballot papers in order to identify people who vote for the Communist Party and so on.

This year, far from involving themselves in stunts as in past years, members of the Executive must act with the decorum which we have a right to expect of our representatives. They must, in fact, go further than this: they must take a strong hand in controlling stunts. As to the stunts themselves, I suggest that someone put some green dye in that bucket thing in the Mall. That would be most amusing.