Writing a bad review isn’t a particularly pleasant experience—one is confronted by an uncomfortable guilt: no matter how awful something was, a number of people have put in valuable time and effort, attempting to make something worthwhile. So the above star is in recognition of that effort. Unfortunately the niceties must end here.

It’s rare to have the feeling ‘what the hell am I doing here’ in a gallery or concert setting—but this feeling permeated the entire (thankfully fairly short) evening experiencing the offerings of the Queen’s College art festival. Arriving in time for a concert entitled ‘Synaesthesia’ in the gratuitously opulent Old Hall, I was greeted by a quantity of bedsheets strung haphazardly to form a screen. Behind, illuminated by some coloured lights and appearing in silhouette, were some musicians, who preceded to give an excruciating (there is no other word) performance of Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’, lacking a full basso continuo, as well as the required musicality.

The lugubrious Fauré piece for flute and piano that followed was little better, and this was accompanied by some spectacularly banal out-of-focus video footage beamed onto the aforementioned bedsheet screen. (Rather hilariously, the a/v people had miscalculated how long the music would last, and before the musicians were finished, the video ran out, leaving us staring at three desktop home-screens.) The only good thing about this concert was that it was over quickly.

The exhibition of art and photography round the corner was at least as awful, if not worse. A ballerina in acrylics (might as well have been poster paint); garish photography of, amongst other things, some cupcakes; and a litter of godawful life drawings that—surely—the artists couldn’t have been all that happy having exhibited.

Actually, it was like being back at school—it was the sort of work that students are ‘forced’ into making and exhibiting. There seemed to be no aesthetic understanding lying behind any of it, it was all so empty. I felt embarrassed for the students who had produced it, and yet they milled around serenely with their free wine.

Maybe they thought that what they were doing was worth something—maybe the musicians thought they were being adventurous and ‘bringing classical music into the twenty-first century’. In any case, one could understand why these student artists had given Foundation and music college a miss and been parcelled off to Oxbridge.