Half The World Away

I've been walking for a week.

I got the bus to Glasgow and walked back home along the West Highland Way (about 96 miles). I tried this last year, but about five days in I felt my foot Slide Away and my knee gave up the ghost so we had to abandon.

This meant there was some unfinished business and we put together The Masterplan to come back and best our (mostly my) demons.

All of which is to say that I have been largely off the internet for the past seven days, and it seems like a lot has happened in my absence.

Keir Starmer wants to ban smoking outside pubs, which will reduce the amount of Cigarettes and Alcohol being consumed in conjunction. Novak Djokovic lost in the 3rd round of the US Open for the first time in 18 years - I guess he's slowly figuring out that his tennis career won't Live Forever.

And Oasis reformed, after a decade and a half of the Gallagher brothers insisting that they hated each other and would never reform. Some Might Say that it's a cynical money-grab, fuelled by a £20m divorce settlement (looks like someone is no longer Married With Children), and they'd probably be right.

They're going to make a boatload of cash from these shows.

Especially given the fact that some of the tickets, thanks to Ticketmaster's ingenious dynamic pricing system, sold for nearly £500 to people who had been in an online queue for hours, expecting to pay just north of £100. It's greedy and callous, but Don't Look Back In Anger, because they're Rock'n'Roll Stars, so surely it'll be worth it.

But will it?

Would it even have been worth it at £115?

Could anything ever live up to the hype of this musical Lazarus?

Or will it be a half-assed schlep around stadiums full of bandwaggoners and the old faithful, coming together in a futile attempt recreate a moment already lost to time?

A doomed attempt to bottle nostalgia and inhale it with cocaine and Instagram stories. D'you Know What I Mean? (sidenote, I just listened to this track, and realised it used to scare the shit out of me as a kid - the helicopters at the start are freaky, man. So that was a fun little blast down memory lane)

Another thing I missed this week was episode 3 of University Challenge, so Don't Go Away, we'll get to that now.

Listen Up, here's your first starter for ten.

This match saw Gonville and Caius, Cambridge facing Bristol - if you want to watch the episode before reading the review you can do so here.

G&C, Rajan tells us, have reached the quarter-finals on 8 of their 11 appearances, which is an incredible ratio. They won in 2015, thanks to the monumental Grand Final performance of Ted Loveday (Mr Hapax Legomenon, in case the name doesn't ring any bells).

Bristol were runners-up in 2023, their best ever result, with their previous peak seven quarter-finals in the Paxman era.

Both sides have bears for mascots, but only the Bristol bear is wearing a top hat. It remains to be seen whether this matters.

Warner kicks things off for Bristol with Lise Meitner, and they follow this with a full set of bonuses on New York cities. Noble hit back for G&C who managed two bonuses of their own, before a second starter for Warner won a set on words starting with s-o-r-r.

Qureshi takes his first starter with theramin, an instrument that hasn't featured on an Oasis tracks, as far as I'm aware.

The first picture starter shows the cerebellum, and Bristol's Flanagan is quickest to use his own one to press his buzzer. Rogers keeps up their momentum with ECG, and Watts puts them into three figures with Caster Semenya. They're going Supersonic, and G&C need to Stop Crying Their Hearts Out or they'll Cast No Shadow in the later rounds of this competition.

No one gets the music starter, which is bloody typical when I've spent the whole time mucking around talking about music, but Watts wins Bristol the bonuses with aufbau on the replacement starter - She's Electric.

I can't quite believe how well that She's Electric line just worked. I hope that people haven't stopped reading because of all the Oasis puns because this one makes it all worth it. And it fell onto my lap, completely unexpectedly. The Shock of the Lightning, as it were (which is apparently another of their singles. This keeps getting better and better).

Bristol are well into the 200s now, but G&C Soldier On, although all Noble can manage is to lose five points with an incorrect interruption. G&C scored 305 in the opening match of their 2015 title run, and it looks as though they are going to be on the receiving end of a triple century here, but Bentham finally stops the rot and brings up a consolatory 50 for the Cambridge side, who are Going Nowhere.

Tompkinson buzzes on the next starter, but his captain Noble is the first to shout out ragu, which Tompkinson then parrots. Feeling sorry for them, and recognising that it won't make a difference to anything, Rajan allows this discretion to pass unpunished, and Tompkinson makes up for it by losing five on the next starter anyway.

Watts (She's Electric. Yeah, I'm using it again, Whatever) brings Bristol closer to 300, and Warner takes them over it - what a performance from this quartet (as one Oasis fan may say to another at Wembley next year).

The gong sounds (I'm Outta Time). Gonville and Caius are put out of their misery, and Bristol celebrate with a Champagne Supernova (probably, I'm not really sure what that is).

G&C 80 - 325 Bristol

So I just looked Champagne Supernova up, and its actually very helpful for explaining the indifference of these working class lads towards the ordinary people they're fleecing.

It's about when you're young and you see people in groups and you think about what they did for you and they did nothing. As a kid, you always believed the Sex Pistols were going to conquer the world and kill everybody in the process. Bands like the Clash just petered out. Punk rock was supposed to be the revolution but what did it do? Fuck all. The Manchester thing was going to be the greatest movement on earth but it was fuck all. When we started, we decided we weren't going to do anything for anybody, we just thought we'd leave a bunch of great songs.

We weren't going to do anything for anybody, we just thought we'd leave a bunch of great songs.

It's been there from the start - so in a way they've not betrayed any of their principles, because they decided not to have any.

So congrats to Bristol on a monstrous victory, and commiserations to G&C for having fallen victim to such a monstrous victory.

As for me, I've finished my big hike back from Glasgow, but I'm still going, slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball.

PS - I did try to fit Wonderwall in, but its an entirely made up word so I struggled, and I'm chuffed enough with the She's Electric bit that I feel alright about it. Shakermaker proved too difficult, too. If I'd managed Bonehead's Bank Holiday I'd have deserved the Pulitzer.