Exams are an anomaly by Nick Brakespear

Exams are an anomaly in the education system. A component misplaced, a cog spinning but not really connecting with the greater machine.

Looking back on my schooldays, I find that I have mental blocks in place when it comes to the memories of many exams. Try as I may, I simply cannot remember what I wrote, or what I supposedly memorised in order to write. All I remember from such joyous times is the sense of utter dread as I awoke the day of major exams. The nauseating anxiety that would plague me and would leave me incapable of eating breakfast, would turn my already pale skin even paler and due to the subsequent exacerbation of my chronic illness and the impact of the stress upon on my immune system, I would be left feeling like an anvil-weight of flu had landed upon me for the next few days. So yes, I have a few mental blocks (actually, more than a few; I’ve led what you might call an “interesting” life, and it seems as though a few memories have decided to sink to the depths of my mind for the good of everyone involved) when it comes to exams.

Back home, exams have reached such a height of importance, have become such a source of stress, that it feels as though we spend more time and mental energy brainlessly memorising information to regurgitate upon the paper during the exam...than we do actually learning that subject. But then, if the only means of testing whether or not we have learned that subject is the exam, then perhaps this learning-for-exams is learning the subject?

Or perhaps it is this definition that is part of the problem: what is learning? If learning is nothing more than the acquisition of pure, unprocessed information, then computers may as well replace children. After all, computers are the ones doing the marking of many standardised tests these days (we’re not only being tested on that which we have memorised, but also our ability to conform – mark the box correctly, or the computer can’t read it and you’ll fail). Computers certainly require less up-keeping, even if they do throw nearly as many tantrums. Illegal operation? BAD PC. Quiet time for you!

My definition of learning would be the acquisition and understanding of information. Understanding is something I have yet to see tested for properly, just as I have yet to see a real test of sentience (after all, if I cannot know your thoughts, does “I am sentient” mean anything coming from another?).

In an ideal world, class sizes would be small enough for the teacher to get to know their students, and in so knowing, be aware of their level of understanding. Unfortunately, this aint an ideal world, and numbers mean the system, and the system does not deal in anything other than ones and zeroes. There is no room for greyscale in the modern world. I guess we’ve gone digital in many respects, and even though the paperwork has been digitised, it doesn’t make it any less bureaucratic.

The problem, is, without the human awareness of understanding, the understanding of what those numbers within the system actually mean...is lost. And so we have the modern British educational problem; if everyone has an A, if everyone has a degree, what is the value of such a thing?

We are faced with a generation of young people whose knowledge of the world is limited to the answers and context of a standardised test, and whose understanding is essentially...childlike.
If someone tells you the answer to 1+1 is 2, can you trust that they understand why? Or was the “correct response” simply imprinted upon their mind?

The system that we defined, now defines us, and it does not understand us. To define without understanding is to simply label. The label has no inherent meaning. No wonder we’re so confused.

Fiddling the Numbers by Nick Brakespear

Tomorrow (Friday April 11th) at about 6pm in the president’s dining hall there will be an ISO (international student organisation) talent show. I will be participating. If anyone would like to throw flowers and/or money at me, it would be appreciated. As such, I shall share with you a few thoughts on my particular talent.

I play the violin. Yes, it’s true, I am a violinist. I fiddle. I have been fiddling for quite some time now. I never practice, but I maintain a general level of gooditude (new word) with my fiddling. You could say I am a talented but lazy fiddler. I am, however, absolutely terrible at sight-reading (the ability to play music you’ve never played before by simply reading the music) and have, instead, always played it by ear.

A lot of people interpret “playing by ear” to mean “guess”, and I have been indirectly criticised before for revealing that my strength and focus when I play or sing (I used to be a cute little choir boy, before my voice broke) is this act of seemingly “guessing”, especially in the context of an Orchestra. Personally, I don’t view it as “guessing” at all, but a simple matter of pattern recognition, and a simple matter of seeing that which must fit for the sake of the harmony.

Playing by ear, for me, is akin to one of the old mathematics problems I used to do at school; listening to the greater harmony is like being presented with a string of numbers, each one connected to every other by a rule, a pattern. And there, in this string of numbers, is a gap. Playing by ear, and doing it well, is that moment of realisation extended; the moment you understand exactly what the pattern is, and thus you understand exactly which number should fill that gap.

Having been asked in the past how I can play in an orchestra, how I can play my part and not be drowned and lost in the greater mass of sound, an irony occurred to me once. I have found it often to be the case that the larger the orchestra, the more complex the music (as long as it is well written; some music is difficult to play by ear or by sight, simply because it’s complicated noise, not complex music) the easier it is to see the pattern and the easier it is to play by ear. With each added voice, with each additional layer to the harmony, the fewer the possible “numbers” that could fill that gap.

The same sort of pattern recognition, I find, applies to the progression of the music as well as just each individual note. Essentially, by feeling where the harmony has been, and where it currently is, I usually have a pretty good idea of where the harmony will go next. This idea becomes more solid the further along the piece is.

Admittedly, playing by ear is not entirely foolproof, for as good at feeling the harmony as I am, I am not superhuman and I am not immune to distraction (ironically I can be distracted by the act of playing sometimes, when I begin thinking too consciously about what I’m doing)...but then the same can be said of sight-reading, for you can read a piece of music perfectly, following what is written upon the page note for note, but without listening to the harmony, without feeling the pattern even a little the end result is rather wooden and artificial. There is no escaping the organic aspect inherent to music; as much as music is about the numbers, it is also about the spirit.

In all my years fiddling and singing, I’ve fiddled and sung in some interesting enough circumstances, ranging from singing before royalty (Princess Margret to be precise) to going on tour in Belgium with the Cheltenham Area Youth Orchestra, (or CAYO for short. Excuse the childishness, but I am greatly relieved I was not a member of the Gloucester Area Youth Orchestra). Oddly enough, despite these experiences, despite having sung or played the violin before hundreds of people...I always find the prospect of playing before friends and family, or simply small groups of people, intensely nerve-wracking. I can face a full house with absolute calm, only the slightest flutter in my stomach as I approach my seat and lift the violin to my shoulder. And yet, lifting that same violin to that same shoulder with only one or two people present will turn my face bright red and give me the jitters good’n’proper.

This, perhaps, is one of the reasons I don’t practice; to practice is to make mistakes and attempt to learn from them...and I simply cannot do that while there are people around. I feel far too exposed. Besides, it’s never an enjoyable experience for them; I am rather bad tempered and have a tendency to swear and sulk a lot when the practice isn’t going well (as a child I had a strange obsessive-compulsive tendency whereby if I made even the slightest of mistakes, I would start the entire piece again from the beginning, instead of simply picking up where I left off).

So yes, I play the violin. I fiddle, from time to time. Such a time will be occurring tomorrow (Friday April 11th) at about 6pm in the president’s dining room. Be there or be indifferent.

Rambling on (into) infinity by Nick Brakespear

(Warning: Post may contain peculiar UK English spelling. Side effects of reading peculiar UK English spelling may include – the naming of Jell-O as Jelly, and the naming of Jelly as Jam.)


Here lies the story of one of the two things that have inspired me most in my writing.
Many years ago (but let us be clear; not that many years ago, for I have not that many years behind me to spend upon such terms as “many years ago”), as I sat alone in my bedroom or living room (I forget which, and it really doesn’t matter, other than to establish that I was at home and alone) in the early hours of the morning (which is why I was alone) I found myself philosophising about life, the universe and everything (and inevitably thinking “42” and smirking).

My philosophising was quite determined and focused (or at least, as focused and determined as philosophising about life, the universe and everything can be) for I was attempting to understand the book I was writing (which rather annoyingly had become so grand and sprawling a tale that I found the need to explain well...everything in the universe somehow). Limited as I am in my knowledge of physics, and attempting as I was to steer clear of quoting popular scriptures, I approached this task (of explaining the way things were, are and will be) from the perspective of pure and simple logic, on as pure and simple a level as I possibly could. I suppose the task reminded me of Algebra (or rather, what little I could remember of Algebra from the days when I was still in school and mathematics was a compulsory subject) in that I was attempting to take a vastly complex equation and simplify it down to its most basic terms. In essence, to create a logical philosophy of the universe within my story, I was trying to cut all of existence down to a simple formula of “this is, because” (which I later learned was something physicists have been trying to do for many, many years).

Given that, in the story I was writing, I had created a place beyond or beneath what we would define as reality (although let’s try not to get into definitions of reality, given that it has been widely accepted that perception defines reality from a philosophical, and in my mind logical, standpoint) I was then attempting to create a point of origin, from which causality would reach out and eventually touch this place, giving it a sort of history that I didn’t actually need to fill out in detail (by providing two points, I could imply the line between them).

It was this point of origin that had always plagued me. It is the eternal question (or perhaps the question of eternity) that has plagued many (probably since the dawn of time, if there is such a thing. Odd, isn’t it, how people use “dawn of time” to refer to somewhen so far back they can’t be bothered to actually place it):

What Came Before?

If we work on the assumption that the old theory holds true, and that our universe began with a “Big Bang”-like event (I’ve always wondered about the bang part. Given that the universe was supposedly exploding out into a void, would there have been a bang? This in turn always led me to thoughts of Nebulae – if you were in a dense Nebula, would you hear faint sounds? After all, sound is born of vibrations in your surrounding environment, be it water or air...why not a great cloud of gas? What strange sounds would you suddenly hear, were you to enter an immense gaseous formation, birthplace of stars, suspended in the void?) then we inevitably must ask that question. For anything to “bang”, what did it “bang” from? What made it “bang”? It seems rather difficult to believe that nothingness itself could suddenly explode (and given that, as I said, I was attempting to avoid quoting scripture, I could not simply fall back on God as an answer).

This reasoning drew me to a theory that has been offered before by both physicists and science fiction writers; that our universal formation is a pulsing thing – erupting, spreading out, losing momentum, succumbing to its own forces and collapsing in on itself, only to stir up enough energy to explode outwards again (such a theory always made me consider that perhaps our universe has a pulse, and we tiny beings live out entire existences between each beat).

But of course this theory is not an answer (or rather, it is an answer leading into a question) for if our universal formation is cyclic, what began it? What could end it? What lies beyond it? In another case of answer leading to question, I thought of the theory of a multiverse; that our universe is merely one of many, and that just as there is an ocean of stars in our galaxy, and an ocean of spinning galaxies in our universe, there could well be an ocean of pulsing universes.

This was once again, not a real answer and could not assist me in my attempts to simplify everything (for even with the establishing of a multiverse, the questions of before, after, beyond, beneath, remained). It suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at the problem from entirely the wrong angle. I was trying to find the specific numbers, instead of the formula. I was, in essence, simply dividing the same number down and down and down into recursion (when I should have been examining the act of division itself, the concept rather than the detail).

The thought came to me in the end, that existence is infinite. It is a fractal (and this, perhaps, is nothing new, but it led me somewhere so allow me to lead you there too if you will). Pure and simple logic (from my perspective at least) would appear to dictate that there could be no point of creation. A point of creation obviously implies a point before which nothing existed. If nothing existed before said point, then everything that exists beyond it is quite simply made of nothing. If everything is made of nothing, then nothing exists. And as we are apparently here, existing, this would seem to imply that there was no point of creation, and that existence is infinite (though many times since, I have attempted to comprehend the existence of something beyond infinity, outside of infinity, that might have caused infinity to be...you know, infinite. In the end though, I return full circle to the impossibility of a point of origin and my head begins to swim.)

Working on the assumption that existence is infinite, I considered, what is the probability of any given event happening? When probabilities enter the realms of infinity, they generally seem to fall apart and we are faced with, the way I see it, two perspectives. One; that the probability, in an infinite existence, of anything happening is zero. Nothing exists. Since we are here, we are faced with the opposite; that the probability of anything happening is one. Everything has, is and will happen (of course in later years I considered the possibility that existence is somehow in a state of flux, incapable of existing or not existing, shimmering between the two, unable to exist, incapable of not existing).

This is one of the two things that inspire me to write. If the probability of any given event happening is one, it means that anything we dream, anything we imagine, anything we write, any series of events that we could think up...has, is and will happen somewhere out there in infinity. Our dreams, our nightmares; every permutation, every scenario, everything is.

As such, by writing, I am writing existence (and as such, perhaps the imagination and its ability to transform our experiences is life’s way of comprehending infinity).
Or perhaps I’m simply mad. Who’s to say?

Certain Concepts by Nick Brakespear

(Warning: Post may contain peculiar UK English spelling. Side effects of reading peculiar UK English spelling may include - regular usage of the words “posh” and “pillock”, along with a very different understanding of the term “pissed”. Yes, today’s disclaimer was brought to you by the letter P.)

I think there are certain things humans were not built to comprehend, or simply haven’t evolved enough to comprehend. Certain concepts and scales of thought that we cannot fully process. As we stand upon a hill, looking out across a world glowing with the last dying embers of sunlight, watching the colour in the sky fade into a deep blue, the closest we ever get to comprehension of the sight...is a peculiar sense of longing. We try to assign words or images or sounds to such a moment, but they inevitably fall short of capturing the essence of that moment.

The same, I have found, is true of travel. At least it is for me. To travel across the ocean, to stand in a strange land and look up at a strange sky, the moon and stars tilted at the wrong angle; such an experience should have resulted in a sense of awe and wonder. To put it simply, a moment of “wow, I’m actually here”. A moment of true realisation.

I fought with my boredom and managed to cling to what was left of my sanity during an eleven hour economy class flight. After two hours of standing in line, I made it out of LAX in one piece. I survived four days of sleep deprivation and incessant paperwork. I endured all the inevitable days of illness and homesickness. And so here I am, an Englishman in California, melting in spring weather that resembles English summer (but without the flooding), all settled in for the most part. I’ve been here about a month now, and yet it still hasn’t really hit me.

During my recent adventure in San Francisco, it suddenly dawned on me that I was referring to La Verne as “home”, and yet as suddenly as this realisation had dawned on me...I couldn’t actually pinpoint the moment this change had happened. At what point did this strange little place in this strange massive land beneath this strange tilted sky...become not so strange? Stranger still, at what point did I stop noticing the strange accents all around me? Somewhere amid those days of endurance, exploration and excitement, my mind was acclimatising to this place and I didn’t even feel it happening.

It’s all in the details. Today I was searching through my belongings and found a ten pound note (worth approximately twenty dollars). As familiar as the rectangle of paper was, I looked at it as if it was an ancient relic from some long forgotten land that doesn’t really exist anymore. Yesterday it occurred to me that I was picking up my girlfriend’s Americanisms. A couple of weeks before that, I began referring to the “bin” as the “trashcan”. Thankfully, my stereotypical English accent remains, but whenever I stop and look behind me, I can see long streamers of debris I’ve started dragging along with me, and it appears to be growing exponentially.

The thought comes to me that perhaps my opening comments were inaccurate. Perhaps humans are capable of dealing with such drastic change and unusual experience...perhaps we just take it piece by piece to avoid breaking anything. And perhaps, as a result, each small piece changes us irrevocably.

Before I left England, my mother began prophesising about my time in the US and in what shape I’d be when I returned (she said I would return fat, and I’m starting to agree. I blame the donut shop.). With these recent realisations about the baggage I’ve been accumulating I find myself doing the same thing. If after a month I’ve settled in, if after a month I’m picking up American terminology, how will I be, what kind of person will I be when I return “home” in five months? In the sci-fi television series, Farscape, the lead character is taken on an epic adventure through a strange and utterly alien part of the universe. When he eventually finds his way home to Earth, he realises that he is no longer the same man he once was, that definitions of “home” and “family” have changed, and he returns to the great unknown.

When this adventure of mine reaches its conclusion and I am once again sitting in my room, staring at the grey clouds outside, will I give my bed, my desk, the old apple tree in the front garden...the same gaze that I gave that ten pound note? Or will I look back upon my time here in La Verne in much the same manner as one might look back upon a vivid daydream?

Who knows...in the end, the only certainty is that tomorrow we will not be the same people that we are today.
Alright alright, there are two certainties. The other is that when I return to England, I will be fat. Curse you Americans with your donuts and bagels!

Thursday is a typo.

(Warning: Post may contain peculiar UK English spelling. Side effects of reading peculiar UK English spelling may include - the all-pervading melancholy of a fallen empire, the ability to see flaws in the most perfect of situations, and nostalgic memories of when BBC 2 was worth watching.)

As I sit here on a sunny Sunday afternoon, having stayed up until 4am the night before and having slept until midday, I find myself thinking about Thursday. Bear with me; I'm going somewhere with this.

There are many things that could be done on a Thursday. Laundry is usually a good idea, especially when you have a three-week build up of dirty clothing that is threatening to evolve into a new form of life. Homework is also a good idea, especially when a trip to San Francisco and subsequent stinking cold result in a backlog of essays and readings. Failing laundry or homework, the third and most realistic option is sleep.

For someone such as me, with the short term memory and attention span of a drunken five-year-old, being sleep deprived is a dangerous thing. Leaving aside the obvious difficulties with functioning in the real world while your mind has long since given up, it becomes rather tricky to write something cohesive. Oh, there is little doubt in what remains of my mind that being “not all there” brings me closer to the guttering candle that is creativity, and in that strange state of limbo between dreaming and waking I have seen sights that have both inspired and terrified me. But imagination without restraint is madness, and while I would argue that anyone creative has to be at least a little insane, a bit of sanity is required to make your writing actually...you know, readable.

Thursday. I’m not sure I approve of the concept. A day before the last day of the week? Piffle. The way I see it, the week should just end; we shouldn’t have to get through an entire day of almost the last day of the week. What exactly are you supposed to think about Thursday? You can’t see it as the middle of the week; that title is reserved for Wednesday. If you get all excited about the end of the week, you’ll just disappoint yourself when you wake up on Friday morning and realise that you now have the actual last day of the week to survive.

Thursday is a day of displacement, of displaced excitement; do you look towards the weekend, or focus on reaching the end of the week? Thursday is a day of displaced priorities; do you pull a Friday excuse on the things that need to be done and leave them until Monday on the basis that it’s almost Friday? Thursday is a day of displaced fatigue; you’ve worked three days, you’re on the fourth day, you don’t have the buzz of the fifth day, the chemical surge that carries you to the end of Friday. Thursday is simply an incorrect day; a divine typo. Do you know why the universe will end one way or another? Because of Thursday. Thursday upsets the universal balance. It’s a scientific fact. Probably. Don’t quote me on that. I mean I’m usually right about this sort of thing, but the scientific community might not have caught onto this yet, so give them a few more years and I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Ahem. So, of all the things that could be done on a Thursday, I went to California Adventure. Don’t judge me; it was Thursday’s fault, and I regret nothing. Besides, thanks to the amazingness (yes, that is a word, because I say so) of my girlfriend, it was completely free. Much hilarity ensued. By the way, wouldn’t it be funny if that was how all stories were written? For example:

He felt a sickening crunch as flesh was crushed between metal and bone, the impact reaching into his body and filling him with dread. Conscious thought was silenced by fear. Fear was drowned in adrenaline. He leapt to his feet, tearing himself from his pain, and stood face to face with his assailant. Far below them, the crowds of the theme park flowed and divided like a river delta. His assailant stood in perfect stillness, dark silhouette before dark sky, darker than the night, blacker than his own shadow.
“Now do you understand?” the shadow asked him, the voice deep and calm.
“Yes,” he replied, standing his ground.
The shadow sprang towards him, and much hilarity ensued.

I dislike theme parks. I’m not sure what it is exactly that I dislike about them; the cold-hearted corporate mentality behind them that charges $2.75 for a bottle of water, or the forced joviality they use to hide it. Perhaps people in animal suits creep me out. All I know is the very thought of going to them fills me with such gloriously black cynicism; they make me want to write something terribly satirical and cutting. They make me want to let loose with all the deadpan bitchy comments I can possibly come up with. They make me want to smirk at all those doomed individuals clad in Mickey Mouse ears.

Unfortunately, and disturbingly, I felt the magic while I was there. I’m not sure you can comprehend how unnerving it is for me to admit this, but it is quite true. There is something in the air at such places (although it wouldn’t surprise me if this something is in fact chemical in nature, and pumped into the air by the park owners to create this magic feeling). Sitting upon a bench and watching the crowds, listening to horrible Beach Boys covers drifting through that surreal world from unseen speakers, bearing witness to the bizarre artificiality of it all, leaning back and embracing this alien environment...as I sat there, all I could think was; I wish I could be locked in here over night. I wish I was alone here, in this strange place, so that I could explore and have peculiar adventures that would defy sanity. To be alone with all the automation, all the lights, all the dark corners and hidden maintenance passages.

And so here I am, filled with thoughts of writing surreal fantasies and horrors set in theme parks, even though I know such a setting has been used many times before by such genres. The idea of writing something so conventional fills me with self-loathing, and yet I can’t shake this urge to do it anyway. I feel as though I have been infected by Disney...what a ghastly thought.

And I owe it all to Thursdays.

Inspiration is shy, don't look it in the eye! by Nick Brakespear

(Warning: Post may contain peculiar UK English spelling. Side effects of reading peculiar UK English spelling may include - a tendency to call pants "trousers" and an inexplicable thirst for something called Scrumpy Jack)

When someone tells you not to be so superstitious, kick them in the shin. When you tell someone not to be so superstitious, seriously consider kicking yourself in the shin. This is a lesson I have learned time and time again, though being the polite Englishman that I am I never follow through with the violence. This is something I bitterly regret.

We could delve into the philosophical intricacies of reality, its definition and the perception thereof, but it is far simpler to say that for the sake of everyone involved you do not tempt fate. Douglas Adams suggested in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, that the trick to flying was to jump and be distracted a moment before hitting the ground, thus completely forgetting that gravity and physics should be acting upon you. Superstition, for me, works according to a similar concept; awareness is a bad idea. If you observe the way something is, you observe the way it could be, which is usually the way you don’t want it to be. If you notice the time you have to reach a destination, if you notice the state of the weather, if you notice that you forgot an item and tell yourself that it doesn’t matter, that you probably wouldn’t have needed it anyway...stop. Touch wood, hold some item you consider lucky, cross your fingers, do something, anything.

It isn’t a matter of magic, nor is it a matter of religion. It isn’t paranoia; it’s simply common sense. While I’m not suggesting that you leap into the air and attempt to forget about gravity, I humbly suggest humility. We don’t know. And leaving aside your belief or disbelief about such things, you can always look at it this way; if you say, as someone recently did to me, that you have plenty of time and yet you end up missing the bus...you become the focus of much ire.

Being an Englishman currently residing in La Verne, standing in a Greyhound station in San Francisco at night, flapping your arms in an attempt to act out the title of the movie The Butterfly Effect, might seem a peculiar situation to some people...but in the end, everything is a matter of perspective. To me, at the time, it seemed like a perfectly logical thing to do.

Yes, we missed our bus home. We missed it so completely that our rush across the city was almost comical when I realised that we had in fact missed it by ten minutes more than I previously thought. And yet as we, a group of eccentric foreigners, camped amongst our luggage in the waiting room playing charades - badly - I was filled with neither frustration at the knowledge that I would not reach my squeaky bunk-bed for a good night’s sleep until 9am the following morning, nor was I smirking at the ridiculousness of us and our predicament. As I stood there, flapping my arms wearily, all I could think was; why has nothing formed?

Let me explain. For the past nine years, since I realised that writing was my passion, I have heard one lesson repeated many times; that you must experience to write. That through experience, you are inspired. That you can only truly write what you live. And so there I was, an Englishman in San Francisco, having seen things and endured more than many of my fellow students back home, standing weary yet strangely satisfied, full in fact; well fed on the memory of recent event and emotion. And yet not a single story was forming in my head.

I had seen characters in the flesh that would defy a literary definition of realism, I had travelled further than I had ever traveled before, I had seen a city I had dreamed of seeing for many years...and yet inspiration was nowhere to be found. Suffice it to say that I was not best pleased.

As I sit here now, still longing to do nothing but sleep and catch up on the many hours I missed during my recent escapades, I find myself wondering if inspiration too, like fate, is all about awareness. My most unusual, most interesting of ideas seem to come to me when I am thinking about or doing something completely unrelated to my writing. Indeed, it has become a rather unhealthy habit of mine to stay awake until the early hours of the morning, simply to capture the creative result of being semi-conscious and scrawl notes that end up making only a little sense the following morning. Conversely, staring at the ever-impatient blinking text prompt at the beginning of a fresh Word document in a perfectly awake and focused state of mind...results in absolutely nothing creative whatsoever. It reminds me of the times I’ve inflicted insomnia upon myself, simply because I tried to notice the exact moment I would fall asleep and in so doing kept my brain too consciously active to do so.

Perhaps then, the answer is to grasp life, experience everything you can...but never try to look inspiration in the eye. It’s a little shy. Or perhaps I am, as people like to observe, a little strange.

Well...would you look at this; I managed to write something. Who knows if it’s any good though; I wasn’t really paying attention.