If I am to be completely candid about my experience as a Trinity student, I must admit that the college has its downfalls. Don’t get me wrong, Trinity is a fantastic place to study – but some issues are perpetual. And no, I’m not directly referring to Academic Registry – there are, in fact, less pleasant aspects of the institution to be confronted.
I believe it is time for students to take a stand against the most blatant struggle we must face every time we extend past the facade of Front Gate. Merely entering campus equates to going into a warzone full of evil and life threats lurking around each corner, each shadow, above your head – seagulls, that is.
Thus, I aim to start a movement which is aimed at ensuring our protection and safety by exerting pressure on Trinity’s management to tackle our seagull adversaries. Below is a Nobel-worthy, in-depth analysis of the petrifyingly miserable state of our fancy little medieval town and a revelation of the stress-inducing strategies of seagulls. We must unite against this barbarism.
As the saying goes, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Thus, I have taken up the courage to risk my life in familiarising myself a bit with our lovely seagulls. Strategically attracting them within a 100-metre radius with the piercing, crisp-clear sound, I unwrapped my packed sandwich on one of the benches overlooking College Park. Havoc arrived.
I aim to start a movement which is aimed at ensuring our protection and safety by exerting pressure on Trinity’s management to tackle our seagull adversaries
Either they either travel faster than the speed of light or they can teleport themselves. Or both. We do not yet know to what extent their powers reach. This is paired with their formidable sensory abilities which extend to hearing and sight of being able to locate a potential target. If you doubt me, then try to tell me where the seagulls arrived from and in what way – exactly. You cannot. This makes my observations sound within the physical laws of nature whereby we will not observe an object travelling faster than light or be able to see it materialise right before our eyes.
Seagulls are cunning. They do not want to betray their paranormal capabilities. You might see them arriving with a contentious flapping of their wings, but that is mere deception as to their true means of travel. Step two comes in the form of their own observations of us. Yes, they do their own little empirical studies on us, and, quite frankly, we are becoming slaves to their method. Mere bodies to be manipulated and exploited. If you were to draw the food chain, seagulls would appear above our own humble species.
Years of research in Trinity has delivered immense banks of knowledge to the seagull population on how to approach us humans. They proceed very tentatively, analysing the potential food supply and calculating the odds of success in succeeding to obtain it. They will give you curious glances, but never long enough to the point that you ponder whether or not they are flirting, thereby causing you to evacuate and awkwardly walk off.
The seagulls will initially take wide arcs around you, moving from right to left and back, trying to give the appearance of being uninterested, merely searching for worms in the grass. But the real worm it wants is you, or rather, your sandwich. And so, the bird grows imperceptibly closer and closer as the arcs become more and more narrow.
Seagulls are cunning. They do not want to betray their paranormal capabilities
All of a sudden, you are trapped. There is no way out of it. You have to face your king/queen and pay your rent. Your College Green bench landlord is here and they want their dues. You have been careful and thrifty enough not to allow any scraps to be dropped onto the ground and the seagulls are, to put it extremely lightly and newspaper-friendly, ballistic. They have been subtle and nice so far, but you have pushed them to their limits.
This is the intimidation stage, and your last warning. The pacing of the seagull becomes direct and frantic, superseded by a sudden jump onto the bench you are attempting to occupy with your friends and sustain a civilised conversation. You possess an approximate mean of 18 seconds (with a standard deviation of six seconds) to either stuff the remainder of your sandwich into your mouth, run or challenge the seagull (a scrap for scraps, in other words).
If you start to believe that some sort of panic-induced hallucination is making the seagull appear ferociously large with spread-out wings, oscillating between big and small as it moves in and out of your face, then I must confront you with a hard truth – it is very much real. This includes the terrifying manner with which their eyes turn into a crimson red colour (the hypothesis of seagulls having laser eye capabilities is yet to be tested). Perhaps, the eyes offer a small snippet of where in hell you will end up if you do not meet their demands.
Just a little disclaimer that I believe may be necessary at this point, all of my research is 100 per cent factual. I can provide medical certificates relating to the marks I have received from the three-inch iron claws across my scarred body and my pecked-out eye (I now wear a black eye patch, which has proved quite a fashion statement across campus).
All of a sudden, you are trapped. There is no way out of it. You have to face your king/queen and pay your rent. Your College Green bench landlord is here and they want their dues
After 86 trials, I have found the most effective method in evading the wrath of the seagulls is to unsatisfactorily stuff your food into your mouth before your grace period is over. However, this may be difficult to pull off and, in rare cases, may infuriate the seagull even more, leading it to take jabs at your face.
Thus, I come back to our need to take a stand against these creatures of the campanile vicinity. Personally, I propose a Trinity air defence system to target these cold-blooded creatures. The missiles will swerve around campus, constantly harassing the seagulls (because they probably will not be swift enough to hit the targets) and keep them in a constant state of self preservation.
However, until the case of such implementation, we must remain vigilant. It is essential that we watch the tell-tale signs of seagulls’ tactics. Knowing what you do now, you choose to eat your lunch on one of College’s many benches at your own risk.
Or, perhaps, we could just accept the natural order of things, take the second place spot in the natural hierarchy and pledge to worship the seagulls from heron. A not so fun fact to conclude on: Seagulls can live for up to 40 years, and their survival rate in cities is 95 per cent. If this is not petrifying, then I do not know what is.
