What is the point of studying English or most of the social sciences. I wasted most of educational life reading novels and nodding at poetry, does it really mean I comprehend beauty with a keener eye than a biochemist?
If I had gone down the real science route I might now know of quarks, quantum electro dynamics or at least have a vague understanding of how something of infinite density and no mass turned into the universe we occupy.
As it is, I can attempt a passing critique of Dombey and Son or make the odd ribald comment about Beowulf. This weakness also means I am more susceptible to bamboozlers and charlatans with their magic crystals and water memory remedies. How would I know when Deepak Chopra talks of some quantum leap from a state of cancer to non-cancer that that is gobbledegook, Philip Larkin never covered that in The Whitsun Weddings.
Can I really look a cosmologist in the eye and declare, "well you may have a solid grounding in Kepler's laws but I bet you don't read a novel as well as I do, you probably don't even know what pathetic fallacy is".
I will leave the social sciences alone, but really, media studies should be a hobby, not a BA. Go home and read your Chomsky and note down the lies in the news, it shouldn't really take three years to prepare yourself for that.
I should have read science, I loved my chemistry set and Carl Sagan's Cosmos, but somewhere along the line, science became joyless. A series of dull classes and experiments involving the burning of peanuts to see the energy within them, where is the joy and excitement - think of Sagan telling us "we are all made of starstuff" or Richard Feynman explaining that an artist saying science made a flower a dull thing was "kind of nutty".
For the last few years, as I approach 40, I have tried to immerse myself in facts of the universe and evolution like a boy opening his first copy of Look and Learn, but my brain isn't as absorbent as it was, it takes longer than it would have to soak up the information - if only I hadn't wasted all that time on the arts.
It's not to belittle the arts, enjoying an afternoon at the Tate or reading Dickens is good, but the world's media is dominated by people who consider grammar and punctuation more important than a universe changing idea.
Now science, grab us by the scruff of the neck and shake us from this stultifying torpor.
This is comedian Robin Ince's "Thought for the Pod" on this week's Guardian Science Weekly podcast. You can listen to it on our science and literature special here. To find out where you can see Robin perform check out his MySpace page. Alsoo, this is pure genius.
