From: willimsa@unix1.tcd.ie (Gavin Williams)
Subject: My favourite quote
Organization: Trinity College, Dublin
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 15:24:42 GMT


I'm not exactly sure about copyright on this, so understand that this is 
a quote from Grant Naylor's 'Red Dwarf' book 1. It starts on page 61.

Reminds me of *my* revision timetables! :-)
begin quote --
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                    Quoted from RED DWARF p61


     Rimmer was sitting at his slanting architect's desk, under the
pink glow of his study lamp, with a tray of watercolours, making
out a revision timetable in preparation for his astronavigation
exam.
     In all, he'd taken the exam eleven times.  Nine times he'd got
an 'F' for fail, and on two occasions he'd got an 'X' for
unclassified.
     But he persevered.  Each night he persevered, under the pink
glow.  Each night he nibbled away at his skyscraper-high stack of
files which stored his loose-leaf revision notes.  He nibbled away,
trying to digest little morsels of knowledge.  Little morsels that
stuck in his gullet, that wouldn't go down.  It was like trying to
eat wads of cotton wool.  But he persevered.  Rimmer wanted to
become an officer.  He ached for it.  He yearned for it.  It wasn't
the _most_ important thing in his life.  It _was_ his life.
     Given the opportunity, he would gladly have had his eyes
scooped out if it meant he could become an officer.  He would
happily have inserted two red hot needles simultaneously through
both his ears so they met in the middle of his brain, and tap-
danced the title song from _42nd Street_ barefoot on a bed of
molten lava while giving oral sex to a male orang-utan with dubious
personal hygiene, if only it meant attaining that single, elusive
golden bar of an Astronavigation Officer, Fourth Class.
     But he had to do something much more demanding, much more
impossible, and much more unpleasant.  He had to pass the
astronavigation exam.
     Born on Io, one of Jupiter's moons, thirty-one years earlier,
he was the youngest of four brothers.  Frank was a gnat's wing away
from becoming the youngest captain in the Space Corps.  John was
the youngest captain in the Space Corps.  Howard had graduated
third in his class at the academy and was now a test pilot for the
new generation of demi-light speed Zippers at Houston, Earth.
     '_My boys,_' his mother would say, '_my clever, clever boys. 
Johnny the Captain, Frankie the First Officer, Howie the Test
Pilot, and Arnold...Arnold, the chicken soup machine cleaner.  If
you could sue sperm, I'd sue the sperm that made you._'
     '_I'll do it Mother.  One day, I will become an officer._'
     '_And on that day,_' his mother would say, '_Satan will be
going to work in a snow plough._'
     If Rimmer hadn't been such a dedicated anal retentive, he
would have realized the simple truth: he wasn't cut out for Space.
     He wasn't cut _out_ for it.
     He would have realized that he wasn't the slightest bit
interested in astronavigation.  Or quantum mechanics.  Or any of
the things he needed to be interested in to pass the exams and
become an officer.
     Three times he'd failed the entrance exam to the Academy.  And
so, one night after reading the life story of Horatio Nelson, he'd
signed up with a merchant vessel as a lowly Third Technician, with
the object of quickly working his way through the ranks and sitting
the astronavigation exam independently, and thereby earning his
commission: the glimmering gold bar of officerhood.
     That had been six years ago.  Six long years on _Red Dwarf,
during which he'd leapt from being a lowly Third Technician to
being a lowly First Technician.  In the meantime, his brothers went
for ever onward, up the ziggurat of command.  Their success filled
him with such bitterness, such bile, that even a Christmas card
from one of them - just the reminder that they were alive, and
_successful_ - would reduce him to tears of jealousy.
     And now he sat there, under the pink glow of his student's
table lamp ('Reduces eye-strain!  Promotes concentration!  Aids
retention!' was the manufacturer's proud boast), preparing to sit
the astronavigation exam for the thirteenth time.
     He found the process of revising so gruellingly unpleasant, so
galling, so noxious, that, like most people faced with tasks they
find hateful, he devised more and more elaborate ways of not doing
it in a 'doing it' kind of way.
     In fact, it was now possible for Rimmer to revise solidly for
three months and not learn anything at all.
     The first week of study, he would always devote to the
construction of a revision timetable.  At school, Rimmer was always
at his happiest colouring in geography maps: under his loving hand,
the ice-fields of Europa would be shaded a delicate blue, the
subterranean silica deposits of Ganymede would be rendered,
centimetre by painstaking centimetre, a bright and powerful yellow,
and the regions of frozen methane on Pluto slowly became a
luscious, inviting green.  Up until the age of thirteen, he was
constantly head of the class in geography.  After this point it
became necessary to know and understand the subject, and Rimmer's
marks plunged to the murky depths of 'F' for fail.
     He brought his love of cartography to the making of revision
timetables.  Weeks of patient effort would be spent planning,
designing and creating a revision timetable which, when finished,
were minor works of art.
     Every hour of every day was subdivided into different study
periods, each labelled in his lovely, tiny copperplate hand; then
painted over in watercolours, a different colour for each subject,
the colours gradually becoming bolder and more urgent shades as the
exam time approached.  The effect was as if a myriad tiny rainbows
had splintered and sprinkled across the poster-sized sheet of
creamwove card.
     The only problem was this: because the timetables often took
seven or eight weeks, and sometimes more, to complete, by the time
Rimmer had finished them the exam was almost on him.  He'd then
have to cram three months of astronavigation revision into a single
week.  Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he'd then decide to
sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of
another timetable.  This time for someone who had to pack three
months of revision into five days.
     Because five days now had to accommodate three months' work,
the first thing that had to go was sleep.  To prepare for an
unrelenting twenty-four hours a day sleep-free schedule, Rimmer
would spend the whole of the first remaining day in bed - to be
extra, ultra fresh, so he would be able to squeeze three whole
months of revision into four short days.
     Within an hour of getting up the next morning, he would feel
inexplicably exhausted, and start early on his supply of Go-Double-
Plus caffeine tablets.  By lunchtime he'd overdose, and have to
make the journey down to the ship's medical unit for a sedative to
help him calm down.  The sedative usually sent him off to sleep,
and he'd wake up the following morning with only three days left,
and an anxiety that was so crippling he could scarcely move.  A
month of revision had to be crammed into each day.
     At this point he would start smoking.  A lifelong non-smoker,
he'd become a forty-a-day man.  He'd spend the whole day pacing up
and down his room, smoking three or four cigarettes at a time,
stopping only occasionally to stare at the titles in his bookcase,
not knowing which one to read first, and popping twice the
recommended dosage of dog-worming tablets, which he erroneously
believed to contain amphetamine.
     Realizing he was getting nowhere, he'd try to get rid of his
soul-bending tension by treating himself to an evening in one of
_Red Dwarf_'s quieter bars.  There he would sit, in the plastic
oak-beamed 'Happy Astro' pub, nursing a small beer, grimly trying
to be light-hearted and totally relaxed.  Two small beers and three
hours of stomach-knotting relaxation later, he would go back to his
bunk and spend half the night awake, praying to a God he didn't
believe in for a miracle that couldn't happen.
     Two days to go, and ravaged by the combination of anxiety,
nicotine, caffeine tablets, alcohol he wasn't used to, dog-worming
pills, and overall exhaustion, he would sleep in till mid-
afternoon.
     After a long scream, he would rationalize that the day was a
total write-off, and the rest of the afternoon would be spent
shopping for the three best alarm clocks money could buy.  This
would often take five or six hours, and he would arrive back at his
sleeping quarters exhausted, by knowing he was fully prepared for
the final day's revision before his exam.
     Waking at four-thirty in the morning, after exercising,
showering and breakfasting, he would sit down to prepare a final,
final revision timetable, which would condense three months of
revision into twelve short hours.  This done, he would give up and
go back to bed.  Maybe he didn't know a single thing about
astronavigation, but at least he'd be fresh for the exam the next
day.
     Which is why Rimmer failed exams.
     Which is why he'd received nine 'F's for fail and two 'X's for
unclassified.  The first 'X' he'd achieved when he'd actually
managed to get hold of some real amphetamines, gone into spasm and
collapsed two minutes into the exam; and the second when anxiety
forced him to deny his own existence, and he had written 'I am a
fish' five hundred times on every single answer sheet.  He'd even
gone out for extra paper.  What was more shocking than anything was
that he'd thought he'd done quite well.
     Well, this time it was going to be different, he thought, as
he say carefully colouring all the quantum mechanics revision
periods in diagonal lines of Prussian blue on a yellow ochre
background, while Lister stared out of the viewport window.

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