University Daze

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my university days recently.  Not in a nostalgic, sepia, big hatted kind of way you understand.  It has more been thrust upon me by the indecent number of people from university who have recently sprung, mushroom-like into my life once more.  I blame Facebook.  Actually, I don’t blame it at all.  I kind of enjoy it, because I’ve always been a nosey bugger, and I just want to look at everyone’s photos and wonder how someone managed to go from turning up dead drunk at lectures on Minoan civilization to selling photocopiers in Reading and wearing a tie.

Looking back, I realise I haven’t changed that much.  I mean I have more money and I can no longer be affable about the thought of either a) pot noodles or b) sleeping on a futon, but mentally I’m still the same idiotic woman I always was.  The same things still make me laugh.  I have some of the same friends, all the ones that count the most.  I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.  I still resent the idea of having a proper job.  I still want to get paid for muckin’ abaht and having a laugh.  I still have the same indecent capacity for stuffing down hobnobs like there’s just about to be a ban.  I can’t drink as much any more, which is probably quite a good thing.  I definitely can’t get by on no sleep any more.  I’ve gone up a cup size and down a dress size, which is the way to go about things.  I’ve got more cellulite, I’ve gone blonde and I still hate James Joyce.  Hmmmm.  Not sure what that says about me really in terms of progress made.  There’s probably a quiz about it somewhere.

When I was at uni I was in a kind of a gang.  We had a lovely time, when we weren’t hating each others guts and screaming a lot.  We enjoyed our gang.  Looking back I expect we enjoyed the falling out and screaming bits just as much as the good bits.  Life isn’t real unless there’s a bit of angst in there, specially when you’re in your twenties.  Angst is de rigeur. It’s the new black.

There were five hardcore members, me, Rachel, Kate, Rosalind and Justine, and then there was Alice.  Sometimes Alice was in our gang, sometimes she was in someone else’s gang.  Alice was hard to pin down.  We were fine with that.  She could drink us all under the table.  She was a young farmer.  You don’t mess with young farmers.  You let them get on with it and stand well back during times of crisis.

The thing about our gang was that we were not at all cool.  Nobody else wanted to be in our gang.  We were fine with that.  We shared a warped, twisted view of the world, we liked muckin’ abaht, and that was it really.  We met in the first few weeks of first year and were pretty much glued together until the end.  We had fallings out and fallings in, we flirted with other gangs, we brought men along, who were mostly bemused and wished they were elsewhere until we gave them biscuits.  We were very loud.  We thought we were hilarious.  We were to each other.  We probably weren’t to anyone else.  We didn’t really care.

Being in our gang consisted mostly of the capacity to drink endless cups of tea or coffee, and the ability to eat confectionary at the drop of a hat.  We virtually stalked the local Spar and while everyone else was buying cut price Dutch Lager, we were emptying the shelves of jelly babies and hob nobs faster than you could say knife.  We drank, oh yes! We drank.  In fact we drank obscene amounts, but we also ate.  Eating was key in our gang.  If someone passed you the biscuits and you said: ‘Oh no! I couldn’t possibly have another.  I’ve already had five.’  You would be out, tied to town pump and thrashed within an inch of your life.

Apart from that we shared a rich and warped fantasy life.  We used to watch people.  It was our thing.  We knew about everyone.  In the first year, we would sit in Rachel’s room because it had the best view of the lecture hall and the Student Union, and we would spy on everyone.  We would spy on people in the library and in the Spar, and almost anywhere you care to mention.  Eventually we got to know most people, it was a ridiculously small university was Lampeter.  It was a pimple on the bum of mid Wales.  When we arrived there were less than a thousand students. My school had twice that many kids.  Really knowing people wasn’t that important though.  What we didn’t know we made up.  We created lives for people that were way more fantastic than their own.  We embroidered a mythology, a pantheon.  We had our heroes and our villains and we made them into a kind of living soap opera.  I managed to persuade Rosalind once that this bloke Bob, who we used to watch wandering around in bare feet all the time, varnished his feet to keep them tough and supple.  She believed me for ages until I confessed in a drunken stupour.  I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for that.  He was always known as varnished Bob after that.  Then I met him properly and found out that he was obsessed with Ralph McTell.  I thought that was slightly more improbable than having varnished feet and told him so.  He was very offended.  Turns out he was actually, really, really obsessed by Ralph McTell.  Apparently he’s a legend in his own lunchtime.  Who knew, apart from Ralph’s mum?

When you weren’t drinking, or in lectures there wasn’t a lot else to do, being that we were in a Welsh village, miles from anywhere.  It was one place where the old adage of ‘making your own entertainment’ really came to the fore.  We took this to heart.  We all liked mucking about with writing and drawing and glueing and sticking, so we would make magazines featuring stories about our favourite characters.  We created secret clubs within secret clubs, some of which I have mentioned in previous blogs (the Banana Band and the Jelly Baby Mutilation Society) and enacted bizarre rites of passage.  It helped to pass the time.  We were, as also previously blogged, totally obsessed with Take a Break Magazine, which was our holy grail.  We hunted down pictures of Jeremy Beadle and Chesney ‘Cheese’ Hawkes.  We sent them to each other as billets doux.

In our first year we decorated our entire corridor with pictures of our student union president’s head which we had cut out and stuck onto various festive figures.  We made strings of Father Christmas’ and snowmen and snowflakes.  I think we were going for festive.  We ended up with macabre.  Our president that year looked a lot like Jesus with a twirly, circus ring master’s moustache.  Imagine him leering out of a jolly santa and you will see where we went wrong.  We thought it was quite endearing.

At halloween we couldn’t find a pumpkin for love nor money.  Someone assured us that swedes would work just as well.  We all gathered in my room for this endeavour.  My room was the hub of the creative process.  I don’t think anyone else wanted glitter on the carpet.  I didn’t care.  I was sorry about the root vegetables though.  We had a swede, a parsnip and something else that was hideously odiferous.  Only one of us had a sharp knife.  Her name was Charlotte.  She was a member of our gang in the first term until she ran away to Paris and never came back.  I expect she was repelled by the swede.  Charlotte’s knife was about an inch and a half long and slightly sharper than a dinner knife.  It was disastrous. Rosalind, as our most artistic member, drew the faces, we took it in turns to whittle.  It took hours.  The smell of swede was totally overwhelming.  We all had blisters and were sick to death of it by the time the swede was done.  We abandoned the rest and went to the bar.  When we came back drunk, we decided to light the swede.  I can tell you with hand on heart that the aroma of warm, sweaty swede and candle wax after six pints, really does make you feel quite unwell.

Then Fran, another member of our gang who left after she got chicken pox from a girl called Splasher at the Christmas party, got some jumping beans.  They were real jumping beans with real little jumpy maggoty things in.  We loved them.  We named them after members of the English Department and used to race them about the corridors.  Lawrence got ill and died, so we had to go in mourning for him and would stare sadly at the real life Lawrence in lectures wondering if he knew how well he had jumped and how much we were going to miss him.  Much more than the real life one actually who we had decided was actually Nosferatu because he had very long, slender fingers.

Other things we did included making full sized paper mache models of a man and woman eating a christmas dinner, which we hoisted onto the dining room roof in time for Christmas Dinner day.  I was particularly proud of the turkey, which I modelled on back episodes of Tom and Jerry.  We also dressed the statue outside the chapel in a pinafore one year, which nearly killed us.  It takes a lot of hard work to steal a twenty foot ladder and run across a boggy field with it.  I liked dressing up like the Milk Tray Man more than I liked stealing the ladder.

We weren’t insular.  We mingled, we partied, we gatecrashed other people’s bedrooms and stayed until dawn.  We socialised and vomited into other people’s shoes.  We were not exclusive, but we always drifted back in the end.  We weren’t the only ones doing odd things.  At the end of our first year, someone invented a game called shoe golf.  You had to play it in the dark and the course was laid all over campus.  Kate and I used to wander around for hours chatting to the golfers, who were all dedicated to their art.  I remember discussing in great detail the possibility of launching a Lampeter olympics.  We were going to have shoe golf, obviously.  Also walking across the pipe which spanned the stream from the Student’s Union.  It had to be done drunk or it was no fun.  We had previously played extensive games of football with bara brith and thought that something could be done with that if we could get a more dense cake recipe.  It was going to be good.  Somehow it just never happened.

Someone painted pink spots all over a very pretty white house where a lot of the religious studies students lived one night.  That was good.  A bloke called Ralph used to have a wind up gramaphone which he dragged through the halls sometimes playing The Teddy Bears Picnic.  A chap called Bart used to run a coffee bar and jazz club in his room, all night, every night for several years until the holy spirit found him for a sun beam.  I once had a fascinating conversation about a halibut for several hours with someone at Bart’s place.  One year he lived in one of those mobile cabins they called a terrapin.  You could lift up the roof tiles and climb through into people’s rooms.  You’d be sitting there, innocently talking about fish, when the roof tile would pop out and someone would leer down at you.  It was a bit unnerving.

Other people were way more ambitious than us.  There were a group of people who regularly stole and decorated shopping trolleys in different themes and left them in people’s gardens.  There were people who had access to re-enactment costumes and would wander about dressed as Cavaliers playing odd games with bits of wood.  There was a bloke called Max who was a great friend of an ex boyfriend of mine who liked dressing as a Franco Prussian Military dictator and blowing things up.  There were fictional societies which were on a much grander level than ours. My particular favourite was The Pickling Society which had a stall near us at the Fresher’s Fair in second year.  They dressed in brown shopkeeper coats with hankies on their heads and demanded a joining fee of tuppence for the purposes of pickling things throughout the year.  Oddly I never did receive my copy of pickling news, first for pickles…

I found being there a great relief after the initial shock had worn off.  I didn’t think that there were many people like me in the world, and then I went to school with several hundred of them.  It changed towards the end.  It got more accessible.  Serious people started coming and it turned into a proper university, which was a shame.  When I went there it was just a playschool pretending to be a university.  People still worked, people still got degrees, but they really knew how to mess about.  I loved that.  I still do.  I still look for those kinds of people in the world.  People who wonder who asks the Queen if she isn’t getting a bit above her station.  People who think, ‘I wonder if I’m ever going to spot the transvestite alien in Glenfield Co-op?’  They’re my kinds of people.

Where are we now?  Alice died of breast cancer a few years ago, leaving a very small son and a step daughter, a distraught husband and family and lots of very sad friends.  Justine has always been notoriously bad at keeping in touch.  The last time we met her was about five years ago.  The last time I spoke to her was about three years ago.  She lives somewhere in Surrey and was working as an archivist, something she had wanted since Uni.  As far as I know she is not married, or with child, although with Justine anything is possible.  She was always really quiet at uni.  When we shared a flat in our second year, our landlady used to feel sorry for her.  She thought that we oppressed her and would run up the stairs of our flat calling ‘What have you done with Jacinta?’  and tearing the place up.  Of course, we had no idea who she was talking about, because she insisted on calling her Jacinta, so we just thought she was mental.  We ignored her and got on with things.  She would eventually find Justine, usually in her room, reading the Guardian, eating Rich Tea biscuits and drinking endless cups of tea, and would throw her arms around her and say things like: ‘Oh! Jacinta! I’ve been so worried about you.  Are you alright?’ whereupon Justine would blink at her in total bewilderment, wondering who the bloody hell Jacinta was.

Rosalind lives not far from me.  She’s still married to the guy she met at uni, and they have four children.  I see her quite often.  Kate has three kids, Rachel has three kids, they’re both teachers.  We still see each other and all our kids play together.  We still eat a lot of hobnobs.  We don’t have as much time to muck abaht these days, but we’re passing the skills on to the next generation.