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…

I am the man of a million excuses, I know. In between procrastinating and making vinegar-heavy tuna sandwiches I have failed once again to update this blog. I update now in the spirit of pain…a rather unscrupulous person has given me a shoulder injury at the weekend that had lain dormant until I tried yet more ill-fated jogging attempts.

This will be a fairly long and media heavy post, so be warned. I wish someone had warned me about the ice though…

And so my journey began, standing slightly bemused on Paddington station wondering where Connor had got to. You’ve unknowingly met Connor in a previous post- he was the blood donor more concerned about eating Wagon Wheels than saving lives (well, you’ve got to make it work for you, haven’t you?) Our train left at 10am, and admittedly quite late at 9.50am I made the decision to call his flatmate. It’s testament to the

It started out so well...

kind of man that Connor is that when I heard his flatmate breaking the grim news that his few extra hours of sleep had just cost him an extra £60 all I could hear was the word “b***cks” faintly echoing in the background because he was holding the phone upside down. Start as you mean to go on I suppose.

So the actual train bit of the journey was fairly uneventful thankfully. I sampled the delights of the “travelling chef,” which is a bit of a grandiose name for a man who is dressed entirely in mauve and whose greatest culinary achievement is a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. At the time however it did seem like the best £3.60 I had, or ever would, spend. What it did to my stomach is another thing altogether. Let’s just say you’ll find out what I mean if you are ever in the toilets of carriage B of that train…

I arrived in Exeter in the early afternoon to be met by my publicity hungry friend Lucy (who you will see far too many times in photos), and then I napped whilst she went to a tutorial about bestiality, inadvertently

The PT, Lucy and Good Jaids

drooling on her pillow. I don’t think she knows that. She’s an English student…she’ll deal with it.

Some of the nicer things in Exeter include the biggest Wetherspoons I have ever seen in my life. Ironically it’s called the Imperial, proving that all the great things in life have that name. When you have two touch-screen games machines and San Miguel for 99p you know it’s going to be a good night. So after a quick steak (which was at best lukewarm- why can nobody in the South West cook?) and a few more San Miguels we went to a place named “the firehouse,” making the short journey behind the world’s biggest wall belonging to HMP Exeter. At some point during the weekend, our minds broke and all of us began talking like London gangsters, referring to things such as “the clink” and Lucy’s angry father attacking her brother with a tin of beans whilst shouting “Whoahaha, sir, you forget yourself.” Apparently that did actually happen. As for the Eastend cockney speech and comedy shoulder shrugging a la Delboy, I highly recommend it- it made me feel like I should have been in Lock Stock.

The firehouse was a nice place; although clearly Health and Safety was never an issue back in the day with stairs like that.

The first of many, many insults to my elbow

However, the pizza was delicious and the beer reasonably priced, which is a recipe for disaster. Before I was entirely sure what had happened I had managed to insult Lucy’s friends, branding one “a political turkey” (no, I’m not entirely sure what that is either) and get myself verbally molested by a bald headed man with an anorak. I have nothing against anoraks, just the people that wear them. The problem was that the bald man’s girlfriend was a junior doctor and he was intent on discussing the finer points of MTAS/MMC with me. I’m not sure if you’ll all be familiar with this, but there’s about as much controversy in medical circles surrounding the issue as there is about, say, religious dress in state schools in the real world. I managed to approach the subject with an appropriate level of eloquence, despite using the word “tit” somewhere near eleven times.

I have awful memory lapses when drunk (a cynic would say a little too conveniently if one wanted to cut down on typing up a blog post…), and so the rest of the evening is a little hazy. I do have some memories

No words could give an accurate explanation of this caption, but it serves to illustrate my point

however. The first is trying to navigate a ridiculously icy slope whilst on the phone to my girlfriend. The next memory I have is a rather painful elbow and saying the words “Robyn, I seem to have fallen over…” This was followed by falling over. Again. The evening’s memories are punctuated by finally remembering waking up at 3.30am because Connor is roaming the corridors and grounds with no shoes on in a “Little Miss Naughty” dressing gown, in his pants, inciting people to commit criminal damage. Not to tarnish his already Sterling reputation or anything.

The next day, after a rather lazy morning we managed to walk for about an hour to find a Pizza Hut, which was actually only 15 minutes away…it’s a sad situation when your defacto guide knows less about the city than you do. In fact, Saturday had a myriad of learning curves that I would love to share with you in bullet point form:

• Eating a large Pizza Hut pizza, and then the endless Ice Cream factory results in constipation
  

  Whoops...

• Drink driving will result in me pulling a stern face
• Cigarette machines, when pushed, will fall over (although this time we got lucky and it seemed to right itself).
• I have no ability to balance: whilst standing outside the union, I somehow ended up in a bush, scraping my arm all the way down the side of the room and being photographed with a pained expression on my face. I have yet to discover why exactly the floor moved to push me over, but one day I will…one day. That makes total stacks = 3.
• Using females as supports when coming down an icy hill (referred to “Cardiac hill” due to its heart attack inducing properties) doesn’t work either. All that resulted is the both of us being on our backsides (occasion number 4), sliding down on the ice into a puddle much to the amusement of someone we had termed “Good Jaids.” Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.

No drink driving please...

Sunday morning could have been cancelled, for all I cared. The only noteworthy occurrence was my attempts to reproduce the Bruce Bogtrotter scene from the film Matilda…

It was only about 2pm that a conscious decision to leave Lucy’s room was actually made. Apparently Exeter has a wide reaching network of tunnels and caves under its surface. Despite our best efforts, running around the City centre frantically trying to find the bloody way in, we were thwarted. This was mainly due to a large clothing store unthoughtfully building an un-necessarily big outlet above them. I think what best sums up the weekend is that I was constantly being outsmarted, either through violence or logic, by rocks. Yes,

I think I was slightly upset that someone had spilled a drink on me...

rocks.

In conclusion, you’ll be glad to know that my arm has finally crusted over and stopped oozing; now, sadly, my time in Wonderland is over. Normal service will resume forthwith. I’m going to play with my new iPod nano, which might well be the single best thing on Earth.

Except revision. I properly love revision.

…

Update: Sorry, I completely forgot to write about the extensive charity work Connor did during the weekend and the not inconsiderable amount of orphans he saved from the burning orphanage. Due to some techincal issues with my camera being flung through space I am not able to produce any audio-visual evidence of this, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

You may have noticed I’ve been a little quiet recently. Again. I’m going to blame this on my useless excuse for a computer and also (whether or not justly) on a very old medical school tradition: RAG week. Although you will no doubt notice that this was well over a week ago, and so I suppose that’s a pretty rubbish excuse. But wait until you see the next post…that’s weeks old. That’s dedication for you.

I don’t wish to cast aspersions on my gracious IC colleagues, but the Imperial RAG week is a little…well…pedestrian compared to the Medical School one. That’s a little unfair really, because by

I know it's blurred, but good focus is (probably) one of the many things banned on the Underground

pedestrian what I really mean is “sober.” You may have noticed the smiling picture of good natured Imperial students in London with buckets recently featured on the Imperial College homepage, and at the beginning, the medics do look a little like this as well. Towards the end, they tend not to be upright and the buckets tend to be filled with a currency of a different kind.

And so my glamorous (last) Thursday was spent on the Circle Line Pub Crawl. This really does sound as horrific as it is- and is so ingrained in the history of ICSM that the college authorities formally sanction a day off for pretty much the entire medical school. And so here is my tale of 28 stops, 14 pints, 3 meals and 1 (surprisingly minor) hangover…

Waking up on a day when you have nothing to do except drink (and of course raise money…let’s at least attempt to remember that) isn’t as great as it sounds; this is more so when you have the ever present threat of exams lurking in the background. It’s actually a skill, because there’s always the worry that you will end up getting blind drunk at about 2pm, fall asleep in a pub/friend’s house/gutter, wake up 8 hours later and have very little idea about who you are, where you live or perhaps most importantly your name. There’s also nothing fun about a hangover at 10pm, because you feel a little like a festering alcoholic.

But these woes aside, one of my flatmates and I made the walk to the Reynold’s Building to collect our charity buckets, sexy sexy T-shirts (which helpfully have a circle line map on the back in the shape of a phoenix) and the pub guide. Leaving our dignity with the RAG committee, we eventually set off, after much squabbling about the starting location and direction. One has to be careful with these things- if you go the wrong direction you can find yourself trapped in a myriad of £3.50 pints and people who don’t take kindly to merry medicals students in front of their 8 storey houses. Hence after starting at Paddington it was decided (bizarrely) to go counter clockwise, to those classically cheap areas of the city such as South Kensington and Sloane Square.

Sir Alexander Fleming was once up there, saving the world by accident

I could turn this into a review of the pubs we went to, but it pretty much boils down to the same thing- they are all overpriced and crap, with a few exceptions. The first of these exceptions is the Sir Alexander Fleming Pub in Paddington, traditional host to ICSM and with surprisingly low cost beer. Other points of interest include the second storey window where the man himself discovered penicillin. Top quality stuff.

Now officially you’re supposed to drink half a pint at every stop and a shot at the corners of the map, hence the 14 pints. What often happens is that you get split up from your friends and end up skipping stops to some of the cheaper chain-pub establishments. Either way, the method behind the madness is, I assume, to give you enough dutch courage to stand up on a tube train, announce to your captive audience that you are medical students collecting for a good charity, get their money in the bucket and all the while avoid slurring your words or falling flat on your face. This is a skill I have yet to perfect, and next year I shall ensure that I learn the name of the charity to give myself some legitimacy and not just look like a drunk who has mugged a casualty doctor.

One of the other hazards that faces a hapless medical student is TfL. I can’t say exactly what I want to say about TfL because this would probably reflect badly on the college and I’m sure I’d end up somewhere in a deep, dark corner of the legal system for all eternity, but the upshot of it is they hate us. I know rules are rules but we were collecting for critically ill babies…and yet during the course of the day I was labelled as a “beggar or busker” that “are not permitted anywhere on the Underground” so many times I lost count and at High St. Kensington we were lucky enough to receive the following personal announcement:

Passengers are reminded that charity collectors are not permitted anywhere on stations or trains and should not be given any money…this applies ESPECIALLY TO IMPERIAL COLLEGE STUDENTS!“

Admittedly that was my emphasis, but you get the point. Harsh or what? Although I do feel for the

In fairness, I'd probably be looking less than impressed as well

police…dealing with what must be upwards of a thousand severely inebriated medical students at Liverpool Street station must have got quite old quite fast. Using my honed powers of persuasion I did however manage to get a photo with an officer of her Majesty’s constabulary. Why? I have no idea.

And so eventually we ended up at Tower Hill, where we were to meet the RAG committee and exchange our buckets for new ones. So with the sun now fully disappeared behind the horizon and Tower Bridge, as did my memory. I remember very little about the rest of that evening, except for the fact that I a) managed to get home, and b) made a stop at the Reynold’s bar and couldn’t fathom out where I was supposed to be going and was escorted back by my long-suffering flatmate.

So in the spirit of apologies, I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a fuller account of what happened (despite this

Pimpin

being my longest blog post yet) and hope that the pictures explain what I haven’t in (actually a thousand) words.

Part 2, when I fell over four times in two days in Exeter, will soon to follow…

With thanks to my friends, from whom I stole the photographs.