Your body knows nothing, but you trust it anyway, allowing it to lead you through the atria and colonnaded cloisters of your notional university. It’s part Harry Potter and part Gormenghast, but somehow it’s more early Doctor Who than either, with insubstantial walls and the implied threat of low-budget apocalypse. It may be austerity and Google, or it may be post-Trump and Brexit, but whatever the reason, you’re the only student in a department with no lecturers, piecing together a syllabus from self-help guides and the warnings from cigarette packets. Your dissertation is on hoardings glimpsed from an accelerating train, viewed from the perspective of too much coffee, too late at night, and you argue with yourself in seminars in a library you’re pretty sure is fake. There are elaborate meals in full regalia when all you eat is raw swan – a disgusting ritual, but necessary for your intellectual development – and all you drink are bulbous glasses of red dust. It’s a long time since you saw the outside world, and you’ve become inured to staircases that won’t lie still and interchangeable extras you’ll never see again. Every day more rooms are under water and you feel in need of regeneration. Your body is the only tangible artefact, and your studies suggest that the only thing separating a school of thought from a school of fish is trust in the integrity of motion.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor