The Boar Likes: Coventry University

It might seem a little odd for an edition of Warwick University students’ newspaper to dedicate an entire column to praising Coventry University, our sworn enemies. Particularly given that if you pay attention to the Warwick Memes page (although your life and exam prowess will be much improved if you don’t) Cov is attended by nincompoops, hapless malingerers and probably the Devil, which will at least significantly improve their chances at Varsity this year.

Whether or not it is also attended by the evil, vengeful ghosts of Warwick drop-outs is yet to be determined, but on the whole, things don’t look good for inter-university harmony right now. But the sad, pathetic thing about this rivalry is that no one at Coventry actually cares. It’s a pre-emptive hatred, wholly one-sided, based on the baffling expectation on our part that they MUST hate us.

“But we, using our outstanding genius, got into a better university!” you might say. This is forgetting that the kind of person who thinks that who-did-better-than-who-in-which-two-hour-episode-of-their-life-based-on-their-ability-to-write-memorised-information-quickly-within-a-time-limit is a fantastic indicator of their worth as a human being is two things. A) the kind of person who tries desperately hard in those two hours and might get into say, Warwick and not Coventry, but also B) a bit of a dick and probably not the kind of person you’d want to talk to at a party. He probably lurks in the kitchen and eats smelly crisps, loudly.

Then there’s the Your Dad Works For My Dad, approach of some of the more avid Coventry-bashers. But while you personally might be an Eton-spawned Oxbridge reject desperate to feel better than someone, anyone, the rest of us at Warwick really aren’t, and in any case the student loan is a great equaliser. Once you’ve blown the whole lot on booze in the first week and have to live off value noodles for a month, you’ll find it much harder to feel superior than someone who already understands the dark art of manipulating said noodles’ soy sauce content until they are something approaching edible (three bottles should do it).

The fact is: Coventry students are nice. When I was lost and bewildered en route to my accommodation this year, it was a Coventry student who gave me directions. Yes, perhaps he did get his rights and lefts confused and I ended up halfway to Daventry, a place that is exactly the same as Coventry but inhabited solely by men called Dave, but it’s the thought that counts. Especially considering when I called a certain Warwick graduate he laughed at me for ten whole minutes and then asked how anyone can get lost on a ring road.