Philosophy Class

I show up ten twenty minutes late for Philosophy class, which is held in a sort of basement room reached through confusing and windowless corridors. And crashing in the door puffing and tired, but also ruddy and confident, I breezily announce that I got lost. This is a big statement, fresh in the stale, confined atmosphere of the windowless seminar room.
The room is divided into two sections, where two groups of tables have been placed and discussions are already under way, but loose and desultory discussions, with bored and non-compliant students.
I'm glanced at semi-irritably by the tutors for showing up late. The main tutor is Alice, in charge of the whole programme and school,  an American lady in her forties, very bright, open and positive, Californian to a fault. She calls me by my Christian name and, observing social niceties, introduces the other tutors and tries to get me settled into a discussion group. A level of discipline beginning to gather under the tone of an old hippy.
But the other tutors are peculiar and must be recent graduates or trainees. Young and louche and non-committal, they lounge at their tables, barely looking me in the eye. One is a semi-goth and has a light sprinkling of kohl around his eyes, which makes them look bruised.
Also in the class is a black-headed goth girl, who sits motionless in a mask of make-up, her arms in a web of lace, frivolous plastic trinkets at her neck. The other tutor has a mop of brown hair in his eyes and is monolouging on his travels in the west of Ireland, slowly and laboriously, in a boring brogue.
But I see, amongst the detritus beneath the table, the edges of a photograph, torn from a newspaper, downloaded or scanned or photocopied: It shows a snub-nosed blonde girl, grinning for the photo, in a première frock, busty and vacant. Strange to see these little scraps of glamour in brown philosophy rooms, the grin of the glamour model, one of those girls who achieve a sort of notoriety on those latenight shows.