Sinister: A moral dilemma of Hollyoaks proportions

[Kieran Devaney]

Dear Sinister,

To the person that is having trouble sleeping, read on.

I seem to be apologising all over the shop today and here is no different – 
you’d think that Christmas and being back home would inspire me to write a 
big truckload of lengthy shambolic one paragraph posts (haha – I think I 
might’ve already told you this but one of my tutors used the phrase ‘garden 
path sentences…’ when describing my writing style) and, well, it sort of 
did, the inspiration was there – I was going to write a big ‘2002 in review’ 
post about all sorts of things from last year, I still might actually, but I 
share a room with my brother at home you see and though I wuv him dearly he 
1. Never shuts up and 2. Always has the telly on, which makes writing pretty 
difficult, especially after having spent a term in relative seclusion where 
I can sit quietly at the computer and stick Stars of the Lid on the 
headphones and have nothing distract me, which is what I’m doing now. Or 
more or less anyway – because I do have a couple of motives that would best 
be described as ulterior when it comes to this post. The first is yer 
classic work avoidance tactic, and the work I’m avoidancing this time is 
revising for an exam on Thursday, I’ve never been good at revising really, 
holding a thought to the end of a sentence is difficult enough, but I’m sure 
I’ll muddle through. The other, more interesting, motive d’ulterieur (as the 
French say, possibly) is a moral dilemma of Hollyoaks proportions (caveat: I 
have never seen Hollyoaks, but one of my friends always uses it to describe 
stuff like this) which I will now relate. But first a short preamble to sort 
of set the scene – I arrived back in Sheffield just over a week ago, on the 
Sunday, to find the people on my floor in unusually high spirits, having 
drunk, as they had, an unusually high level of spirits. Oh ho ho ho. I 
suppose this was fair enough considering it was their first day back 
together after a month or so of absence, so I went off for a walk and left 
them to it – I have a nice camera to play with now so I’ve been taking 
moody, pretentious black and white snaps of all sorts of things – I finally 
got round to photographing the gate with wall behind it to which I devoted a 
whole Sinister post last year. However, despite the week being exam week the 
partay didn’t stop, much to my chagrin – grinning I wasn’t - and by 
Wednesday I had had enough and so off I went back home (I had to go back 
anyway since I’d forgotten a bunch of important stuff, and I also wanted to 
see the Spring Heel Jack gig, which was wonderful by the way, them doing 
improv with a bunch of jazzers - Evan Parker, William Parker, Matthew Ship, 
Han Bennink and your man from Spiritualized, there’s still a couple of dates 
left, so if you get the chance it’s well worth it). I arrived back yesterday 
to find a ‘newsletter’ had been shoved under my door detailing all the 
damage done to the Hall during this first week back, now I’m not 
particularly easily fazed, as those who know me will attest, but the sheer 
amount of stuff that had been broken, smashed, thrown out of windows or, 
ahem, smeared along walls *was* a genuine shock – and the floor that I’m on 
was among the worst, from what I hear the couple of nights that I was away 
were really raucous, culminating in a bin being thrown out of a window (and 
we’re on the ninth floor here), nearly hitting someone and, for about the 
fifth time that week, the fire alarm being tripped. The dilemma is this – 
today at dinner an someone told me that the above, and other things which 
have yet gone unreported, were both done by the same person – he also told 
me that a meeting is going to be called sometime soon for our floor, 
which’ll basically amount to a big telling off (we’ve had them before, 
including an impromptu one at 8am one morning when the slightly mental head 
warden, or whatever she is, hammered on all our doors, virtually dragged 
everyone and then shouted at us for more than half an hour while we stood 
bleary-eyed) – fair enough, and, and this is the crucial part, that if they 
find out who threw the bin out of the window they’ll kick that person out of 
the hall in one of those ‘as a warning’ type things. Fair enough. Well now 
the person in question isn’t exactly top of my list of friends, in fact I’ve 
hardly said a word to the guy since, well, since forever, and while he 
hasn’t really done anything bad directly to me beyond the odd ‘not quite out 
of earshot’ snide comment I do find him really offensive. He struck me right 
from the start as being one of those kids from middle England Daily Mail 
reading families who, sent to university to study some Noddy course (to be 
honest I haven’t a clue what he’s studying – I think it’s something to do 
with computers actually, but no offence to anyone reading that does stuff 
with computers, actually I’m digging myself into a bit of a hole here, so 
retract that bit) who, fresh from the cloying arms of his family (actually 
his family came up to visit one afternoon last year and he was talking in 
the lift with them about all the fantastic stuff he’d done, such as setting 
off fire extinguishers and things – they laughed, so perhaps I’m a bit off 
here) who takes rebellion a bit too far and, ideologically is stuck 
somewhere in the Daily Mail letters pages having expressed sentiments 
encompassing racism, sexism and homophobia – sometimes all in the same 
sentence! Naturally I took measures to try to avoid him after the first 
week, but since he’s in the room next door that’s a bit difficult, 
fortunately he doesn’t seem to want anything to do with me either, which is 
good, but I am constantly surprised by his backwards thinking whenever I 
come into contact with him. All that in mind my first instinct at dinner was 
that I should go and tell the relevant people and thus be instrumental in 
his being expelled from the halls (all reportings like that are treated 
anonymously of course), you see, I think it *would* work well as a deterrent 
– nobody wants to be kicked out of where they live and if that curbs the 
annoying/destructive behaviour (and means that I can get a decent nights 
sleep) then mores the better. So great! I grass him up and one of my least 
favourite people on the floor has to leave and potentially everyone calms 
down a bit. But that is precisely the problem, see, had it been someone else 
then the thought wouldn’t have entered my head really and while throwing a 
bin out of a high window is an incredibly stupid thing to do, when I first 
heard about it it only affected me in relation to all the other stuff I was 
hearing about i.e. I didn’t think all that much about it over all the other 
stupid stuff. So if I was to go and report him then it would be almost 
entirely self-motivated and for the wrong reasons – I’d be doing it because 
I think he’s a prick, not because he threw a bin out of the window, 
basically I’d be abusing the system. Not that I’m particularly keen on the 
system, really, and that’s another thing – I’m not sure I’m comfortable with 
the idea of myself as a grass, I don’t want to take sides on this, and so 
far I’ve managed not to but since the hall authorities, quite naturally, 
seem keen to stamp out all this damage I can see it landing me firmly in the 
“and you’ll let us know if anything else happens, wont you?” stakes. That 
sort of internal politicking is the last thing I want to get involved in. So 
my question to you, Sinister, is ‘ what should I do?’ – despite my new years 
resolution being to try and concentrate more on the ‘faire’ part of 
laissez-faire I am leaning towards doing nothing, for the simple reason that 
it’s easier (both in actual terms and on my conscience), which irks me 
slightly, but… I’m really stuck on this one. I’m not expecting Sinister to 
come up with some sort of definitive answer really, though advice would 
certainly be welcome, writing this is more for me to try and pin down the 
pros and cons, which I suppose it has done, though I’m no nearer to making 
up my mind at all. Oh well. I’ll get back to you on what I ended up doing 
whenever I next post, which, given that I’m back here will probably be 
fairly soon.

- Kieran

ps My address isn’t all that long is it? Is having a long address a social 
stigma? I fretted for at least ten minutes when I read that mine was the 
longest, oh dear.
pps The Tupperware party is over.






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