Pfft, no. Of course not.
Come and join me at the new Student Blogs site over at www.imperial.ac.uk/blog/studentblogs/jaimie (yes, there is only one “s” missing in the entire address- it is a subtle difference, I appreciate, but an important one). Essentially it’s the same thing, but for some reasons my arms look massive on the homepage. I’m not complaining.
See you on the other side, kids.
Sunday morning I woke up in Cardiff with a pair of my pants underneath the coffee table.
The morning before I woke up between two sofas.
A lot has happened since we last spoke. So in a four-part special edition of Jaimie’s blog, we’re going to work backwards from now, where I am sitting in front of my laptop, poorly deodorized and almost in the dark.
You will hear in part two about my hospital based exploits, where I am now working on placement, but let’s just say for now that it has been a very long week. Life, death, blood and vomit; the works. Which might go someway to explaining the events of this weekend.
About three weeks ago I was talking to an old friend of mine, someone I know well enough to call a friend but not fantastically well. Probably about 63% well; I’m sure you know what I’m getting up. That sort of well. We were discussing her 2st birthday and her plans, and lo and behold a few days later I receive a facebook invite to said 21st. This isn’t really an interesting story at this point, I realise, unless you have an unhealthy interest in the social minutiae of other people. The curveball I will throw in though is that she is studying at Cardiff Uni.
Apparently Cardiff isn’t anywhere near London, something I would appear not to have realised when I said I would definitely be there. But very occasionally things come together in such a bizarre fashion that fate, if you believe in such a thing, dictates that you have to do it. In this scenario one of my flatmates- the slightly too tall and much too Welsh one- also had a 21st to go to but no means of getting there, and we are both on placement at a hospital which is a good way along the M4, which connects London to Wales. And sometimes, when you’re exhausted, sleep-deprived and bored, saying yes to these random things makes perfect sense. Rather amusingly, I was tasked to collect a gazebo from this friend’s house from her parents, whom I had never met, adding a whole new dimension to the surreality. “Hello, I’m Jaimie, we’ve never met but I’m here to collect a gazebo?” worked surprisingly well.
So on Friday I finished nice and early after splitting my time between running around the hospital doing various quasi-administrative tasks and trying to keep down the lambs (which I firmly believe was in fact patient’s) liver down that I had perhaps unwisely chosen from the hospital canteen for lunch. After a brief inflation of my tyres (I lead such a glamorous lifestyle) we hit the road. Of course, having a female SatNav voice I was immediately sent the wrong way and so we had a brief but altogether rewarding detour around Heathrow Airport. As soon as that small blip was overcome, we tackled the M4 head on. The M4 is the worst road in the world, compounded by the fact that there is a toll on the new Severn Bridge. I was paying the French to get into Wales. I was paying them £5.40, the cheeky gits. Still, I think they would make more money if you had to pay to get out of Wales…not sure how many people actually would pay that amount to get into Wales…
So after a solid three hours of backside numbing boredom I arrived in Cardiff, breaking my neck to go to the toilet after a perhaps unwise large coffee at some god-awful motorway service station somewhere. It made the “Hello after such a long time- here’s a gazebo” introduction a lot easier than I imagined as I belted up the stairs pretty much immediately. The Friday night quickly ended up turning from “I’ll just have a nice quiet night in” to rocking up at someone else’s 21st birthday, meeting a man dressed as Lady Gaga who keep being de-trousered (much to the annoyance of the local constabulary I should add) and my waking up the next morning wedged between two armchairs.
The next day was just as bad- perhaps worse as I travelled about 40 minutes out of Cardiff to visit my Welsh flatmate’s parents (and in the process eating my fourth portion of chips) and somehow managed to get taken shopping and (perhaps unfairly) press-ganged into buying £90 worth of, albeit well needed, clothes. I now own a hoody, which for anyone who has ever seen me in the flesh will know is an interesting change of direction given my moral objection to them. The evening turned out to be just as expensive- especially given the dangerous proximity of an off licence to my friend’s house and the sheer amount if debit card receipts in my wallet. At this point I should mention that Cardiff Uni’s union is huge- I mean, comparable to the size of the moon- and with poor mobile signal and so I spent a good proportion of the evening hopelessly lost, staggering around like a lost lamb on opiates. This probably goes some way to explaining the lack of any photos of me from the weekend- generally I spent most of it lost in some vein or another. Back at the house, the evening was rounded off by checking someone’s foot for shards of glass and offering lifts back to London to people I had never met. Nice.
And so in conclusion, I think my weekend can be summed up by the fact that I went to Cardiff with a gazebo and a Welsh Girl, and came home with two Londoners. Trade win.
You’ll all be glad to know, no doubt, that I am staying on as a blogger for another year and so you can continue following my crazy, crazy life. Oh yeah. But tonight I must dash as I am on night on-call cover at the hospital, which you shall no doubt hear about in part two of these serial adventures…
So here is another post, with the obligatory “haven’t written in far too long” type statement at the beginning. I don’t know why I make these promises I can’t keep about updating in the next few days, but I can’t see myself refraining from making them in future so perhaps we should just agree they’re a fact of life and we’ll all be happier for it.
So what’s been happening? Well, shockingly, quite a lot. The last you heard from me I was regaling you all with the story of my job and how you need several screws an entire B&Q job lot of screws loose to do it. Talking of screws loose in a both literal and metaphorical sense, have a look at this videofor a laugh. Who said the recession was causing the master craftsmen of the construction industries to become desperate? But anyway, what indeed has happened since then? Well, true to form, one of my more enjoyable activities (that being my birthday and its associated celebration) I will talk about in another post, in some perverse attempt to catch up with my own life in reverse chronological order.
I realise that sounds a bit rambly. Since I’ve been living at home my caffeine intake has dropped to almost zero which might account for this convoluted attempt at blogging.
Where was I? Oh yes, everything else. I have just (just in blogging terms, ie a week or so ago) finished administering justice in the only way I know how- on a jury. Apparently you’re not supposed to talk about it, and not wanting to end up in jail I intend to abide by that ruling. It was in interesting experience, with far too much purple for my liking, that being the apparent colour scheme of the judiciary. I will obviously talk about it in spite of the law (ha!), in this epic “the rest of my Summer” post that I seem to be planning.
So if not about birthday celebrations and courtroom drama, just what is this post about? Well, my good
Would you dine with such formally attired people?
friend Connor, who you may remember from posts such as “that one about giving blood” and “that other one” has slowly been going mad and been watching several omnibus editions a day of the popular daytime TV series “Come Dine with Me.” For those of you who haven’t been acquainted with this culinary nightmare, allow me to direct you towards these clips, courtesy of YouTube. Essentially the premise of the show is that 5 strangers take turns to host a dinner party at each other’s houses, then score that person out of ten. At the end of the week each person will have a score out of 40, and the person with the highest score wins a £1000 cash prize. Top quality programming from Channel 4, clearly.
Stereotype fail
And so, at this point we have had two “Come Dine with Me” experiences; the first being chez Connor and the second at my “previously long-suffering but recently made an inevitable quick getaway ex-girlfriend”’s house. Wow. I should write for Hollyoaks, this is top quality drama. Sadly, she is reasonable at cooking (although I’m not entirely sure she didn’t try and poison me) and so there are very little comedic tales to tell. Except, of course, that she decided on an Italian theme and whilst everyone else clearly thought Mafia, I ended up Oliver Reedmeets Ice-cream salesman. It was almost like the series “Allo Allo” with the British Airmen posing as French policemen, but even more ridiculous.
As for Connor’s Culinary Concoctions (GCSE English win here) the attire was slightly more formal, waistcoats and all. Sadly nothing, however smart, could detract from the unique style in which we were served- panicked with a garnish of disarray. The starter, scallops in a sauce of some description, was fairly good, although admittedly let down by the small number of scallops, which made nouveau cuisine look like a Super sized Maccy D’s. This was followed by Venison, which I am reliably informed was from the Balmoral estate. I however am not entirely convinced that Connor didn’t
Scallops. At least 36% delicious.
saddle up on his bicycle and go hunting wirth a spear in Richmond park.
I love you, Nigella
It has to be said, though, that the triumph of the evening was Nigella Lawson’s Ice Cream Cake, which could have only been bettered if she had served it to me herself whilst describing the ingredients that had gone into it all the while…
Ahem.
I’ll move on rapidly. The evening being a predominantly gentleman’s affair, this was of course followed by lashings of Whisky and the occasional toast to a printout of Her Majesty the Queen’s face. From this point, things seem to
God Save the Queen
get a little hazy. My memories stretch to Connor’s Mum arriving at some stage of the evening to deal with the clearing up; Singstar at 2.30am which dealt a rather crushing blow to my ego with my inability to get above 300 points (as an aside I’m pretty sure my microphone was broken); and then waking up in the morning with no trousers on crammed onto a sofa end piece measuring about 60cmx80cm with my legs in the air.
And that, ladies and gentleman of the jury, is the case for the defence.
Somehow I always end up like this. Don't ask me why, because I don't know either
So, once again, it has been a while. Once again, I have a thousand excuses as to why this is; some of these are genuine, others are plausible but the majority are laughable. Still, let’s jump straight back into my life.
I sit here absolutely knackered. It’s certainly been an eventful month. So, let’s work backwards. Today I found myself in a river- peer pressured by my mother boss (which are, worryingly, one and the same)- with a bodged hockey stick litter picker type implement. I use the term “boats” loosely; the majority of them looked (and indeed were) as if the owner of Ritz crackers had a funny turn and decided to take a dump on all their boxes with PVA glue and toilet rolls.
So why did I find myself in such a predicament, dodging leptospirosis and the odd Ribena carton, you ask? Well, I work with children; I wasn’t trying to retrieve a drowning child (or even trying to drown one, sadly) but it had fallen to me to act as the chief facilitator for the annual boat race, the culmination of “water week.” Water week is the week long programme of events that is in reality just a loose excuse for the children to beat you down with fluids that you can only pray are indeed water.
To me, “working with children” has been the excuse I have given for the disruptions to my life, which include, but are not limited to:
Everyone has to pay the piper, and everyone has to earn cash, especially students during the summer in these difficult economic times. So whilst there could be more mundane jobs, such as office clerking or working in any leading high street retailer, I work for an “anonymous childcare setting.” It’s good fun in one sense- I keep amused by making sarcastic comments to myself that fly straight over the children’s heads or by attempting to recreate the Circle of Willis out of clay before it is involuntarily assimilated into something that I can only assume to be a dinosaur with disabilities (I think that’s the politically correct term, anyway).
But as this is an update (and I am once again shattered) I will keep the “talking shop” brief. As I have another three odd weeks or so there I’m sure you’ll be hearing lots more comedy stories about how I have been covered in paint or god knows what else.
So before that, I went to the Algarve. It’s beautiful there, and I would highly recommend a visit. Well, I think I would anyway. It wasn’t so mucha holiday in the second week as it was being on firms in a crummy Portugese hospital not having any idea what anyone is saying. This was because my step-dad broke a vertebrae in his back (L2, if you’re interested). Whether Humpty Dumpty fell or was pushed is anyone’s guess. Luckily he’s up and about now, not paralysed etc- and if I am completely frank, milking it a bit. This is a whole story in itself, but as a taster it includes the following topics: Transit van ambulances, language barriers, removing seats from two Air Portugal flights, a hospital with guards on every door, insurance agents that sounded more frightened than we were, a nurse called Gavin and a bag of Cheetos.
And funnily enough, tomorrow is my birthday (cheques can be sent to me c/o Imperial College London Communications Dept.). So expect debauched pictures and late night phone calls- if I haven’t gone insane with the stress of finding a new house whilst dealing with letting agents who talk as if we’ve been old friends for years. Although some of them are apparently attractive, and have a nice voice. Which is why my executive decision making powers are no doubt going to be vetoed by one of my other flatmates. Something about “clouded judgement.” Pfft.
So this is it. The end of the year.
The last few weeks have passed in a haze of what could quite happily be expressed as some of the most
Who says alcohol can't count towards your five-a-day?
stressful weeks of my life: alcohol, working, relationship woes, mild depression, letting agents and all the misery associated with utility companies, and kebabs. Glamorously, it has ended up with one of my flatmates in the South of France, the other in Wales, and me…well, obviously I’m sitting in this godforsaken oven of a flat whilst a man who speaks very little English cleans the flat for a king’s ransom. Honestly, he should be wearing a mask and a striped jumper.
Don’t rent property kids.
But I digress. This having been the forth attempt at writing a post over the last month, I will hopefully succeed in attempting give you a whistle-stop tour of what’s been happening.
After weeks of being completely un-enthused by the prospect of another exam, matched only in its banality by it’s pointlessness, I ended up working 12+ hour days in the study/social space of the library. It’s quite good in there, although I am entirely sure that people are permanently living in there. So good in fact, that ole David Cameron decided to pay us a visit and lecture various assembled dignitaries about things that will have less impact than stealing our study space. Still, it remains that there are certain enclosed off group study areas that always have the same person or their belongings in them24 hours a day. In fact, thinking about it, I should probably have checked that they weren’t dead. Maybe I’ll go do that in a minute;
Classic inebriated Jaimie pose
they’ll still be there. The more I consider it, it is a brilliant scheme for avoiding rent and letting agents (you’ll hear so much more about that soon, I assure you). So after an exam where I wrote a 7 page essay and said absolutely nothing except “sepsis is bad,” essentially, there was the medic’s end of exam bop.
Another fail to add to the list. Where the first two years had finished their exams, and a good percentage of Imperial deciding to come along for the ride, it appears that someone forgot to tell the SU that it might get a little busy. In fact, I have seen refugee camps that are less dense than the Reynolds that night, and refugees that are less determined to get supplies than students hungry for alcohol. Although the bar staff were about as overwhelmed and unable to cope as the UN (aha, go satire!).
Quite. This was followed by a period of working; then followed by going out every night to get absolutely hammered. I have never been an advocate of binge drinking, at least not in an open forum when I’m sober, but one turns to two, turns to three, turns to a ham and cheese sandwich being sprayed across Haymarket by a very drunk friend, who didn’t quite get the notion that screaming at the top of her voice whilst I was trying to hold her from straying into the middle of a 3 lane road might look a little like I was being less than gentlemanly. All I will say about that is that if you’re ever bored at night in Central London and can find nothing better to do, watch some of the big clubs refuse entry to people, especially if they’ve already been inside the club. I actually saw a man clutching a handful of bar receipts yelling “I only went outside quickly, I’ve got receipts! I’VE GOT RECEIPTS!!!”
And again...
Well, you might not find that funny, but there is something fantastically desperate about the whole situation that you almost end up wallowing in it yourself. Try it.
The next, and perhaps most recent event, was sadly another washout. Last year, my friends and I went to the main Imperial College Summer Ball, and in the interests of fairness we decided we’d go to the Medic’s version. In a desperate cost-cutting drive (I think that was the reason; everything that ever happens now days can either be traced back to the credit crunch or swine flu anyway) we went for our own dinner in Waterloo, which was great fun and delicious. You can probably see that for yourself, because no doubt if you look close enough in the photos I will have remenants of dinner plastered around my face. I never was any good at aiming. I’ll post something a bit more detailed about that in a bit.
Now I am back in my room at “home home,” which looks as if someone has gone into the archives of the university, picked
If this man didn't know so well, clearly I would have been sectioned
up every medical related text they could find, a skeleton and a few items of dirty laundry, strapped it to a hundred kilos of plastic explosive and let rip. Moving back from the flat was an interesting experience. Luckily I enlisted the services of my father as a “man and van” type affair to send most of the bulky items back, leaving what I thought was only a few small things to ferry back in my car.
Aha. Life is never as easy as it seems is it?
You see, according to experimental physics (and this is the bit that shocked me) no matter how much stuff you have, the transport vehicle/suitcase/crate will shrink to a size slightly smaller than the combined volume of the stuff. Technical, I know. The practical implication of this was me straddled over the boot of my car in a near headlock with the wheels of my desk chair, desperately trying to get it to fit; all the while looking like I was partaking in something that should probably have been banned under the Sexual Offences Act (for the record- looked- I don’t have any feelings towards desk chairs except hatred). I think the car was at a safe working load…although it did struggle to get up the multi-storey ramps.
But at the end of the day, it can get a little much even for the best of us
So it is with a sense of wistful sadness that I complete this post. This year has been one of many changes, trials, tribulations and I fear that the worst is still to come on Monday when the results are released. I’ve been home for approximately 24 hours and already the “honeymoon period” where my mum is pleased to see me and will let any misdemeanours slide has expired, leaving the house wide open to vehement arguments about folding laundry. Moreover, as much as I hate to admit it, I do miss my friends and flatmates.
No, just kidding. I don’t (in case they read this).
But fear not, kiddos, this will not be the last you hear from me (unless Imperial have had enough of my sporadic, lengthy and somewhat acerbic updates); I have the medic’s ball to tell you about, my upcoming Jury service- assuming of course I don’t find myself in contempt- and I am off to Portugal somewhere I think, so there will no doubt be more hilarious situations I can regail you all with.
Thanks for reading up till now, and all I can do is but to wish those of you facing results the very best of luck.
Until next time,
Jaimie.
If you’re interested (and this is definitely not a filler until tomorrow whatsoever) I’ve written an article which has been published in the newly created London Student Journal of Medicine. You can have a read at the website or the pdf version is linked below. Enjoy…
So as you hear, when one has spent a week of their life with proverbial matchsticks in their eyes surrounded by friends who, although once human, have morphed into some horrific insomniac hypertensive psychopath secondary to Pro-plus overdose, one needs some life relief. The place to go for such tom-foolery is obviously Thorpe Park, where one can be hurtled through the air at unspeakable speeds and
Harriet and the world's best driver head off along Fulham Palace Road
ridiculous Gs for (I’m sure) a reasonable price. I wonder if Imperial are going to think I’m advertising for the Merlin Entertainments group? I’m not. Although if they want to pay me I have no objections…
And so last Friday at about 8am, which Imperial had the good grace to give us off as part our amazing four day weeks and half days (all well deserved), I woke up an desperately attempted to fight off a hangover. Two hours later, due to some impromptu XBox playing and fry ups, we set off in my beautiful Ka and Geoff’s (somewhat smug) Prius. Having contended with the horrific Fulham Palace Road traffic- and more worryingly Geoff’s shocking driving- we hit the motorways. This phrase was almost more literal than I would have liked; it seems that most drivers have a telepathic ability to transmit the fact that they wish to change lanes at 90mph, thereby rendering their indicators entirely obsolete. My only skills, unfortunately, consist of a working knowledge of the Highway Code, which sans indicators, is a about as useful as an inflatable dartboard. Pile up hilarity ensues.
The weathered gates of Chav City
Eventually, we arrived at the not so pearly but more could-do-with-several-licks-of-paint-y gates of Thorpe Park. It might put the rest of the day in context if I mention that the evening before I had a substantial curry dinner accompanied by lots of beer at Guildhall in the City. As fun as that was, I was having a serious disagreement with my bowels. So whilst my friends queued up to buy the tickets I acquainted myself with the toilets. In a curious twist of fate I found some “buy one get one free vouchers” on the floor- lucky when you consider that Geoff had massively cocked up by bringing completely useless tickets.
So despite the pathetic pleas of my friends demanding a warm-up ride before hitting the big ones we headed
The site of Naomi's epic fail hurtles past in the background
to Saw. I would chronicle all of the rides but once again I fear I might sound like a complete anorak- or even worse, like my doppelganger, Will Mackenzie from The Inbetweeners. Therefore, aside from the pictorial evidence I present for your delectation here is a run down of the day’s events:
That's right, I'm the po-lice mo'fo'
Despite the weather being at best overcast and at worst bloody miserable we still decided to go on the log flumes, including one which no-one comes off dry. At all. Except me. Win.
And so I leave you with the promised video of it all going a little bit wrong on a lamentably slow ride…enjoy…
I HAVE MY LIFE BACK!
It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten how to write on this thing. It might have something to do with being temporarily stunned by the blitz of fame I had, along with the other student bloggers, on the Imperial home page. Or it could be that I just had my second year exams and was scraping every second from every day in order to revise.
Although, for the most part, it didn’t quite play out like that.
Unfortunately what was generally happening was that I woke up with every intention to revise but my consciousness ended up disposed of elsewhere. Where exactly is anyone’s guess. In order to find the answer to this question, and to provide some light relief to the numerous others who are going through the godforsaken minefield of second year exams, I have documented the start a typical day from the last month I spent back at home trying in vain to revise…
7.00am Alarm set on phone goes off, approximately on time. Cannot for the life of me work out what is going on, nor where I am, as am still half asleep. Not entirely sure why it is necessary to be up this early. Decide to award myself a temporary snooze in order to allow coherent thought patterns.
7.06am Clearly this has not been long enough for me to effectively “snooze,” and so I’m not sure why my alarm has decided to go off at this particular time.
7.12am Hrrrm. I think I see a pattern emerging.
7.18am Suddenly remember that I had inexplicably set the snooze period on my alarm for six minutes. Throw phone at wall.
7.24am Alarm goes off again. Realise the tactical error in throwing the phone to the other side of the room, as it necessitates getting out of bed to silence the damn thing.
9.00am Awake in a bizarre half-asleep dream where I have successfully broken the record for the longest mobile phone based snooze pattern, to an audience of well wishers and a Guinness Book of Records adjudicator. Slowly wake up, slightly scarred by the whole experience.
10.15am Have now been sitting in my pants staring at a page of anatomy notes whilst being distracted by facebook and emails. Decide that eating pate on crumpets with orange juice was not my stomach’s first choice for breakfast. Brain is overwhelmed by memories of orange juice increasing iron absorption, and stomach decides enough is enough.
10.16am Hurriedly head to the toilet.
11.36am Still there.
11.45am Leave toilet, and feel that a shower may motivate me.
2pm Have spent the last two hours machine gunning down innocent bystanders on the playstation. I sincerely think that my brother could not have worse timing when it comes to purchasing video entertainment equipment. Still, there is something rather satisfying about taking a tank and steaming through virtual streets, destroying anything and everything in sight.
2.11pm Somewhat concerned about my mental state. Relocate to the garden. Watch cat play with butterflies. After being sufficiently calmed, crisis of career looms. Not entirely sure I want to be studying life this for the rest of my foreseeable life, with the added bonus of bodily fluids and late nights.
2.20pm Finally start revising the joys of psychology. Take an online test that tells me I have an ultimate male brain and am therefore on the autistic spectrum. Tell a friend who promptly laughs at me. Consider starting legal action against them under some obscure disability legislation.
So as you can see, completely productive. For the rest of the afternoon I did manage to get a few solid hours of revision in, powered mainly by strong black coffees, a whimsical sense of bravado whilst staring over the horizon into Croydon, and listening to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” somewhere in the region of three hundred and eighty seven times. It is a strangely rousing song.
And so now I am back in Fulham, and the regular trials and tribulations of student life have started once again in earnest. In order to recoup the bank holiday weekend at Easter I lost through revision, I took a detour out to a club in Piccadilly, with the rest of the year. I almost didn’t go because I was so tired. I woke up the next morning with an empty pocket, a hateful stomach, a splitting headache and the grim realisation through photographic evidence that I am losing my hair at a rate previously unknown to man. Half-price Champagne cocktails, it seems, are always never a good idea.
Although I am now on four day weeks and half days, I still don’t have it in me to concentrate. This is partially down to the fact I brought my old school XBox up to the flat, which has brought forth a new era of destroying aliens and watching two of my (female) friends try to fling the controller around in all directions in a vein attempt to stop the onslaught of bullets hurtling towards their character. I’m going to try and record her strangled screams, it’s a noise never before heard by man. Aside from that and the occasional trip to the dry cleaners I don’t really know where the time goes. Answers on a postcard.
And so normal service in my life resumes. Tomorrow shall come a post regarding a well known supermarket chain, and how close I came to headbutting the scanner on their automatic tills. I’m going to get some sleep; that is if my flatmate can stop burning her pork chops for long enough to stop screaming and setting the smoke alarms off for the tenth time.
…although that may be wishful thinking.
Unfortunately at the moment I am forced to contend with Second Year medicine end of year exams, a concept devised by the devil and personally approved by Imperial College. My life has take a tumble into doing nothing but revising and despairing, which accounts for the lack of posts on the blog. I have one half written, so if I can snatch an hour away from the jaws of Neuroscience I will try and get it posted for your reading pleasure.
In the mean time, I’d be grateful if you could wish me an inordinate amount of luck for next week- because by God I am going to need it.
So at precisely this moment I should be revising. I should be in the library learning the 200+ drugs (what possessed someone to come up with those names), innumerable lectures and what feels like every other piece of information ever conceived in this world, the next, and every other world that ever has or ever will be in existence.
As the more astute amongst you can probably tell, I am not in the library. I am in fact sitting semi-clothed and freezing in front of my computer. Don’t read too much into that.
The reason for this wholly depressing image is because I’ve just had a set-to, in a major way, with my boiler. I love my boiler; it really does have such an amazing sense of humour. There’s nothing funnier at 8am in the morning when you get up, blindly meander to the shower, switch it on, and wait for it to warm up, with the hilarity truly beginning when it then hurtles through the temperature scale, ending roundly in something I can only describe as “******* freezing.” And so what is the end point of this game? Me, standing
Public Enemy No. 1 (the boiler, not the delicious Fruit & Fibre)
dripping wet, covering my modesty with a towel, attempting to pass through as an impromptu heating engineer. I like to think that I am relatively technically minded; I can make toast, set the clock on video recorders and get my laptop to work again after I’ve spilt juice on it. Boilers, however, apparently need some kind of savant-like acumen to be used correctly (and judging by the social skills of the engineers we’ve had round, most probably are). Sometimes you can trick the boiler into working by switching on the central heating and overwhelming it such that it forgets about trying to kill you; not this time sadly, as it’s got wise to that as well. Off and on at the mains, the mainstay of technical advice? Nothing. And so it came to something I was reserving for the most dire of situations- the small red button on the front of the boiler, with no label except a rather ominous diagram of fire. It turns out that it might as well have been a Smartie glued to the front of the boiler, as that did nothing either.
In desperation I took the decision to just have a cold shower. Bravely standing there, waiting for the metaphorical axe of ice cold water to fall, may well have been the single most poetic situation I’ve found myself in for a long time. All I needed was “Rule Britannia” or some other rallying composition playing in the background. Of course, at this stage the boiler got bored with toying with my pathetic excuse for an existence, shuddering in the shower, and produced hot water. Really hot water.
Pain.
So yes, these are the joys of student living… It comes as quite the shock after leaving halls; for all of their faults (living with people who think the word “hygiene” means throwing eggs in the sink rather than on the floor; 3am fire alarms and builders working at 7am on a Saturday) it is a relatively problem-free life. You pay your money at the start of term and everything is taken care of: if there is no hot water, you just pop down to the little office at the front of the building and sure enough a man in a hard hat and fluorescent jacket knocks at your door. He then makes the problem worse, but does eventually fix it. I lived in Southside and what with it being a new construction the frequency of this was a little…unnerving, I suppose. In contrast, technical support in my flat, as you’ve heard, involves a slightly damp student in a towel with a spatula giving some “percussive therapy” to the appliances. So yes, that part of halls is missed.
But it is a lot of fun; you really do have free reign to do what you want. If you’re lucky enough not to have neighbours then parties until 4am with the music on full are fine. If you don’t do the washing up, you don’t have to trawl through the bins to find your frying pan, nor will someone else have used it to descale the fridge- it will be there waiting for your return, as will some unhappy flatmates. Your room is yours, and there is no threat of walking in on roommates getting things together…and the toilet equally so. I have heard tales of things that have not made it into the toilet that made my blood run cold…
What else can I tell you about where I live? Well, in a show of what can only be described as shameless ego-satisfaction, I allowed the College to come round and film my flat to show to the freshers in their Private Accommodation Talk this year…
Oh yes, look at my eyebrows go…
What the video obviously can’t show you is the temperature of the flat, maintained at a cool -4°C at all times. Why? Well, it’s probably got something to do with wooden floors, no adjoining houses providing insulation and old, rotten windows the size of Spain. We’ve been trying in vain to use the central heating (ha!) to heat it up, but this has just resulted in frustration and a gas bill which would probably pay off the national debts of Sub-Saharan Africa.
You’ll also not notice the following joys in the film: the toilet door has trapped everyone in the toilet for several
Look at this joker, filling up with four day old dishwater! What a funny guy...
minutes at least once, because it randomly gets stuck; the toilet blocks so frequently we’ve left a bent wire coathanger behind it as an emergency fish hook type structure (and as I’m the only man in the house feminism conveniently goes out the window and it’s my job to unblock it); each kitchen appliance is either from Woolworths or the year 1973- a whole slice of bread won’t fit in the toaster, the washing machine spent the months leading up to Christmas filling with putrescent water from the sink with it being anyone’s guess as to why this happened, the fridge frequently decides to switch itself off and the microwave has a timer calibrated by a man with an apparent penchant for riddles. Oh, and there is no light in the hallway and the steps to the kitchen are all different heights, which together leads to comedy moments spent on the floor, legs bleeding, hunting for the kitchen light switch.
But is it really all that bad? In a word, yes. But I probably wouldn’t go back to halls, not now I can watch the Apprentice, eat fajitas and snore without fear of reprisals.
And so now I have sufficiently dried, it’s back to metronidazole and third nerve palsy for me…