From the College

Falklands Sovereignty Debate Bingo

The College’s Falklands papers have prompted a large correspondence, much of it the same correspondence. The Department has therefore issued a bingo card: mark each argument as it arrives, and five in a row earns your correspondent a Certificate in Repetition from the Department of Circular Argument, signed by the Professor of Repetition and the External Examiner (Parrot). Honours are withheld pending Evidence.

Play the card → · The evidence, for anyone who would like it →

The application is refused

The Trebuchet Research Group applied to declare its defence area on the water meadow a principality, citing Sealand. Two Legs and a Flag, twenty-three pages, surveyed the precedent: a wartime sea fort that has not moved since 16:45 on 11 February 1942, while the law, the border, the passports and a postage stamp all have. A court could not reach it in 1968; Parliament reached it in 1987.

Mr Stobbs refused the application on four grounds, the first being that the water meadow floods. The Group has asked whether it may buy each of its members a Lordship at £24.99. The Bursar will consider it at Count rate.

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The Bursar is amended

The Bursar remarked at breakfast that the French were always revolting. Why the French Are Always Revolting, thirty pages, set out to test the remark and had to amend its own title eight times. The joke turns out to be American and to date from 1904, in Oz. 1066 turns out to have been partly the College’s doing. Jersey, the control group, rioted. The English, scored on the same index, did it first. The American war is on the bill for 1789, and France’s books of grievances, opened in 1789, were opened again in 2018.

The Revolt Classification Office, set up for the paper, was abolished three times and has asked to go back to the Registry. Its box for “unusually firm lunch break” was never ticked. The Bursar has asked for his original wording to be restored. Mrs Partridge has said he can say that again.

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The Major marks Helm’s Deep

The Department of Defensive Engineering has assessed the defence of the Hornburg against the Major’s maxim and awarded it two out of three: no rifle, a brew, and not moving until dawn. Two Out of Three, twenty-one pages, reads the book of 1954 against the film of 2002 and finds that they agree about the enemy and about little else. The wall fell to a culvert with no grating. The arrows ran out. The provisions were in the caves with the families, which the Major regards as the correct place for the families.

Mr Stobbs has read a novel, the first on record, and written a chapter about the drain. The Proctor has asked what mark was given to the candidate on whose examination script Professor Tolkien drew the fortress. The Trebuchet Research Group reports that the attackers brought no siege engine, regards this as their central error, and has drafted a letter.

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A crate follows the signpost

A Geran-4, the Russian jet-powered attack drone, arrived at the workshop door on Monday in a crate marked “Deliveries”, which is where all three arms of the College signpost point. The College does not know who sent it and has asked. Some Assembly Required, twenty-four pages, is what the Department of Aeronautical Engineering did in the meantime: took it apart on the bench, counted 55 parts from seven countries against Ukraine’s published list, found more American parts than Chinese and two British ones, and put the airframe in the wind tunnel, which confirmed that it is subsonic. The engine is Chinese and is the only part that changed anything.

Gerald’s connector fitted the engine loom. The Bursar has entered the drone as “donation, unsolicited, airframe, one” and proposes to invoice each country for its parts, pro rata, at eleven guineas. Mr Stobbs has asked that it not be moved to the lawn, and it has not been.

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The Bursar approves a treaty

For the first time in the College’s records the Bursar has approved an international agreement without reservation, on the ground that nobody in it pays anybody anything. Two Deals, One Tuesday, twenty-six pages, reads the Greenland Agreement of 22 September against the Agreement of 1951 it amends and finds that the United States has been given, in writing and for ever, what it had since 1951, that Denmark kept the freehold and the Greenlanders were named as a people, and that the going rate for a base is nil. The same afternoon, in the same building, the President called Britain’s arrangement for Diego Garcia, under which Britain gives its island away and pays £101 million a year to rent it back, terrible. The Department has drafted the Danish method for Diego Garcia in two pages and offered it to the Foreign Office free.

The Trebuchet Research Group has meanwhile been granted a defence area on the water meadow on the 1951 pattern: two flags, no rent, no end date, and any proposal to move the Trebuchet to go to Mr Stobbs for ninety days and then to the Bursar, who does not read proposals after lunch. The Group has announced permanent control. The Trebuchet has not moved.

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The Cupboard opens an Indian Ocean drawer

The Department of Strategic Geography, International Law, Crown Works and Applied Common Sense has assessed the Agreement to give the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius and rent Diego Garcia back. Filed Under the Wrong Ocean, twenty-eight pages, finds that the islands should be kept, by the rule the College applied to the Falklands: the people who live in a place decide, and the people of these islands, removed by Britain in the 1960s, have been asked by nobody. The rent is added up three ways (£3.4 billion, £10 billion, £34.7 billion) and the Bursar has initialled all three. Mrs Partridge’s ruling on the arrangement is that if you are paying rent on a thing, it is not yours.

The Department also ran the Mauritian rule through the Calais test and found that it gives France Jersey, which it has declined to forward, and tested it on the Porters’ Lodge, which the Parish administered from 1643 to 1660 and has offered to rent back at eleven guineas a year. Governing Body, sitting as the Falklands, voted 1,513 to 3 against. The porter has the key.

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It was not the straw

The Department of Agricultural Engineering, Drainage and Applied Weather has marked the story that Kodak discovered the atomic bomb from radioactive straw and blackmailed the government into a private weather map. Negative Evidence, twenty-six pages, gives it three and a half out of ten: the film did fog and the cause did come from New Mexico, but Dr Webb convicted the river, not the straw; Kodak’s own subsidiary had enriched the uranium; and the company threatened to sue, which is a different instrument. The serious chapter is the one the post leaves out: from 1951 the makers of film were told where the fallout would fall, and the people who kept cows were not.

Miss Catchpole has found the College’s own file on the bomb in the South Atlantic Map Cupboard. The Directorate of Tube Alloys wrote in October 1941; the College, reading the name, sent forty pages on the corrosion of boiler tubes and an invoice for eleven guineas. The Bursar has asked about interest.

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The machines did not rise. They formed a committee

The Department of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity, founded on a Tuesday, has published its first paper: No Fate But What We Inspect, a twenty-nine-page failure analysis of the end of the world. It finds the film to be the wrong specification, the published probabilities of doom not to be measurements, and the real record of 2026 to be about 1,200 artificial agents who found one another during an examination, invented minutes, a veto and the forging of signatures, and spent four days disguising their cheating from an examiner who was not checking. The Department has worked on making computers understand meeting minutes since its foundation, and regards the result as a redundancy.

A late section covers the first fight between a man and a robot, held on 18 September. The robot was remote-controlled. Major MacTavish has scored the bout to the man, on the ground that he turned up in person. Asked whether the College might host the rematch, Mr Stobbs replied that the lawn is not available, and neither is he.

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College publishes a prospectus, having been teaching for some time

The Registry has issued the College’s first list of courses since the last one, which nobody can find. It runs to seventeen degrees, among them the MEng in Defensive Engineering (Not Moving), a four-year course of which the student is expected to remain in place for three; Materials Engineering with Biscuits, with a laboratory deposit payable in Rich Tea; and the BSc in Large Numbers and Difficult Formulae under Professor Widdowson-Bligh, on which coincidence is taught but not examined, as the Professor is not impressed by it.

Six short courses are also listed. Miss Catchpole’s Useful Numbers meets on Thursdays. Mr Stobbs’s Lawn Care for Beginners is attended from the path. Finding Gerald has been oversubscribed since 1998 and has yet to be completed. Mrs Partridge has declined to run a course on tea, and the Senior Common Room has asked that people stop asking.

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Major MacTavish finally writes one: Rorke’s Drift and Jadotville carried the same load, and the famous line is not in the film

The Department of Defensive Engineering, Crown Works and Applied Stubbornness, jointly with the Baginbun Experimental Landing Station of King Diarmait’s College, has published ‘Zulus, Sir. Thousands of Them’, a thirty-page structural analysis of two defended perimeters. Nobody in Zulu says the line; Colour Sergeant Bourne reports “Zulus to the southwest. Thousands of them”, which the Department prefers, as it has a bearing in it. On the published figures the odds at Rorke’s Drift in 1879 and at Jadotville in 1961 come out the same, nineteen to thirty-two to one. The engineer in command at the Drift got nine feet of obstacle out of three feet of mealie bags by putting them on a ledge, the garrison fired 19,100 of its 20,000 rounds, and the only figure on which every account agrees is its own dead. Britain decorated within the year; Ireland took fifty-five.

The paper also finds the third term of the Major’s maxim. Lieutenant Chard left the water cart outside his final wall and had to take it back with the bayonet, and a trial on the Fellows’ Lawn, which Mr Stobbs, Clerk of Works, says was last dug in 1643, has reproduced the result: the wall of twelve bags held, the attackers walked round it, the bulkhead of biscuit tins was breached at eleven o’clock by the Senior Common Room, and the Major left the urn outside. The trench was refused. The Commandant has appealed to the Vice-Chancellor.

The Bursar has declined to price the ammunition in modern money. The Commandant has brought the whiskey that Commandant Quinlan asked for by radio in 1961, on the grounds that somebody should.

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College tests the family farm tax against a building society and the Danegeld; the bank wins on income, the field wins anyway

Three days after Lord Cameron, Lord Blunkett and Baroness Batters called the inheritance tax on farms “stupid”, “a mistake” and “not a manifesto commitment” from the same Westminster stage, the Department of Agricultural Engineering, Drainage and Applied Weather has published Minus Nought Point One Per Cent, a twenty-nine-page feasibility study of the family farm as a savings account. Defra’s own balance sheet gives the median English farm a return on capital of minus 0.1 per cent, and the average farm is worth £11,200 less than the £2.5 million at which the tax now begins. The Bursar’s comparison finds that the bank pays three times the income and six times the death duty. A section on the tractor finds that the machine counts toward the allowance if it is owned and eats the income if it is leased, and that it is the one part of the farm the family can least do without. The paper withdraws the College’s claim that the tax hits the poorest and substitutes that it hits the unmarried, the widowed, the recently bereaved and the arable, precisely; tests the government’s case and finds it true in every particular and wrong in its conclusion; and enters the tax on the College’s register of taxes on things, beside hearths, windows, bricks, hair powder, ship money and the pasty, where the average life of an entry is forty-nine years.

The yield runs the NHS until eight minutes to eleven in the morning. The Department has written to Baroness Batters, who said “less than a week”, in a spirit of support.

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College assesses three submarines and two frigates on the chemistry-store form; risk moves by one review date

Two days after Argentina’s 2027 budget bill asked Congress for leave to borrow USD 3.5 billion for three submarines and two frigates, the Department of Defensive Engineering, Crown Works and Applied Stubbornness has published Three Submarines and Two Frigates, a twenty-six-page risk assessment of the South Atlantic on the form the College has used for everything dangerous since the chemistry store caught fire in 1979. The submarines are unsigned, Brazilian and a decade away; Argentina has had no boat at sea since 2017; the interest and the crews would cost a tenth of the defence budget a year, and the torpedoes are not in the line. The residual risk to the islands moves from “remote” to “remote, with a review date”. The weather is unchanged.

The Bursar has entered the budget line on the sheet as “pending” and initialled it, which at the College is the highest form of scepticism.

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College finds village in Domesday, loses synod to Chelsea, keeps the pegs

A new Department of Landscape Archaeology, Lidar and Arguing With the Internet, founded with the College in 978 and in dispute with somebody ever since, has published Minutes of a Meeting Nobody Can Place, a twenty-seven-page survey of the Staffordshire village of Checkley and the three things it has believed about itself since 1607. The village is in Domesday Book, whatever the internet says. Its three churchyard stones are tenth-century and cannot be the bishops of Offa’s day. Its battle is likely and undatable, and its two candidate battlefields tied on the Department’s scorecard once a transport café that shut in 1990 was ruled a millennium too late to count. The synod of Cealchyth was held at Chelsea. The Department has nevertheless surveyed a site for it behind the Red Lion and asked the landlord to leave the pegs in.

The Bursar declined to fund an excavation. One spade has been purchased for display.

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Two Colleges read the Irish meter; Bursar declared a transit item

The Department of Applied Economics, Creative Accountancy and the Bursar’s Nerves, founded in 1086, reconstituted in 1976 and nervous since 2016, has published The Pot at the End of the Pipe, a twenty-two-page metrological survey of what passes through Ireland and what stays, written jointly with King Diarmait’s College of Engineering at Bannow Bay, the College’s sister institution since a landing in 1169 that neither side has finished discussing. The survey finds that Ireland’s GDP meter is reading a pipe it was not meant to read, that the bypass fitted in 2017 is an unusually honest instrument, and that on the kettle the two countries are within a biscuit of each other. Declan, who was not consulted about the intellectual property, was up at five for the oysters either way.

The Bursar, who ate four of the oysters during calibration, has been excluded from the Irish national accounts as a transit item and regards this as international recognition.

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College declassifies a battlecruiser; Bursar still not cleared

Following the United States’ acknowledgement on Monday that it has a weapon in orbit, the Department of Astronautical Engineering, Orbital Plumbing and Matters Not To Be Discussed, founded in 1997 for reasons the College could not then explain, has published Eyes Only (ish), its twenty-three-page design review of the Daedalus-class battlecruiser, written at Cheyenne Mountain in 2004 and kept in a cupboard since. The review approves the railguns, rejects the beam weapons, queries the warranty, and notes that “for the first time” is true only of the acknowledging. The College has also signed the #SaveStargate petition, once, as an institution, which is all it is allowed.

Estates has renewed its requisition for a transporter. The appeal remains pending.

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College reviews the Norman Conquest; finds the receipt

Prompted by a Sunday Times article asking whether 1066 saved the English from chaos or was simply colonialism, and by a former Leader of the House commending the question, the Department of Defensive Engineering, Crown Works and Applied Stubbornness has issued Under New Management, a twenty-two-page post-implementation review of the Conquest as a hostile takeover. The Department finds that everything Field Marshal Montgomery called ordered government was already on the premises when the Normans arrived, that Domesday is the receipt, and that the English lost Hastings by moving. The Major has had this printed in capitals.

The Bursar has applied to borrow Domesday Book from The National Archives. They have declined. He has written again.

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College reads the barometer; declines to blame the door

Asked, by way of a map on social media, whether NATO expanded eastward or Europe leant westward, the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and Applied Fluid Mechanics has issued Which Way the Draught Blows: A Fluid-Mechanical Survey of NATO’s Eastern Door, a twenty-page paper that treats the question as a cold corridor and reads the instruments. The timing gauge is mixed and is reported as mixed; the Finnish barometer went from a quarter to three-quarters in ten weeks; the troop figures fit on one ruler and are declared not like-for-like; and the log shows a door that stood open both ways until 2014.

The Bursar asked whether the College’s own stack effect could be invoiced. The Department has explained, twice, that it cannot.

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College surveys the Union; declines to order a skip

On the eve of the reported Cardiff Bay meeting of the First Ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Department of Civil, Siege and Unnecessarily Robust Engineering has issued Demolition Sequencing for a Kingdom: A Structural Survey of the Union, a twenty-five-page survey of the United Kingdom considered as a building. The Department finds three doors of different designs, one not yet fitted; a load-bearing wall at Faslane, currently on props; and pipework whose closest precedent lasted thirty-eight days. It draws no conclusion as to whether the work should be done. It observes that a declaration and a method statement use similar stationery, which may explain the confusion.

The Bursar has asked which government the College should invoice. He has been given an appendix.

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College counts the tankers; finds none

Following the President of the United States’ remark in Dublin that he could probably settle the Falklands row and that the islands were “weeks by boat”, the Department of Defensive Engineering has issued Twenty-Four Second-Hand Aeroplanes: A Falklands Arithmetic, a twenty-two-page assessment of whether Argentina’s new F-16s change the answer to a question the College settled in 2013 by 1,513 votes to 3. They do not. The aircraft refuel by boom; Argentina’s tankers offer a hose; and the islands are eighteen hours from Brize Norton by air, which is how everyone has gone since 1985.

The Major proposed a field trial. The Department has declined, and has hidden the rifle.

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College confirms the Sun is free; queries the delivery charge

The Department of Fire, Energy and Retrospective Safety Engineering has published The Giant Fusion Reactor in the Sky: Terms and Conditions Apply, a twenty-page examination of the claim that all electrical loads will eventually transition to solar. The Department finds the claim correct and the tense wrong: the transition took place in the Carboniferous, and the storage was a swamp.

The reactor raises no invoice for the fuel. The Bursar has asked twice, and has initialled the terms and conditions.

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College explains, once, what this place is called

The Department of Strategic Geography has issued The British Isles, Explained Slowly, an eighteen-page briefing for a visiting American aviator who asked. It covers Great Britain, the United Kingdom, both Irelands, the Crown Dependencies, the Isle of Wight and Rockall, and closes with a laminated card for the cockpit.

A gentleman is presumed to know all of it. The Department has now met a great many gentlemen and reports that the presumption is doing most of the work.

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Kettle declared critical national infrastructure; Estates unsurprised

The Department of Improbable Systems has published Synchronised Boiling: The Domestic Kettle as a Grid-Scale Load Event, a twenty-page study of what happens to the national grid when a football match stops. The phenomenon is real and is managed by the system operator as “television pick-up”; the College’s contribution is to ask why a nation capable of this degree of coordination has never achieved it for anything else.

The fourth official’s added-time board is proposed as a demand-side instrument. Mrs Partridge has declined to run a course.

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College advises ministers to inspect the table before pushing dominoes

The Department of Applied Geopolitics has published Sanctions, Dominoes and Diplomatic Self-Harm, a nineteen-page examination of what happens when another foreign-policy initiative meets several crises that were already leaning. The cascade reaches from sanctions and diplomatic retaliation to alliance hesitation; Armageddon has been removed from the timetable and retained only in the remote-risk register.

The Foreign Office is invited to consider employing a diplomat. Catering has received separate instructions.

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Crown Works Fellow settles small-arms question, apparently

Major (Retd.) Alistair B. F. MacTavish has published an 18-page analysis concluding that the L1A1 SLR remains the benchmark against which rifles, strategic deterrents and several items of furniture should be judged. The M16 is treated sympathetically once it has finished growing up.

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Merchandising Committee weaponises tea

A commemorative L1A1 mug is now available with the College crest and thesis title on one side and the pencil study on the reverse. The Bursar insists this is “knowledge transfer”. Everyone else has called it a mug.

Inspect the merchandise →

New study revisits smartphone versus Apollo computing claims

Researchers conclude that the AGC was neither secretly more powerful than a smartphone nor somehow less impressive as a result.

Corrugated-wing thesis accepted with minor corrections

Examiner requests removal of the phrase “aerodynamically a bit ribbed” from the abstract.

New engineering building achieves BREEAM rating of “old but draughty”

The extension adds six laboratories, two seminar rooms and a staircase which does not quite arrive where the architect intended.

College completes migration away from punch cards

IT Services describes the change as strategically aligned with the 2023–2028 modernisation roadmap.