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 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.

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:

• An absolute (literal) rinse-out on the Park’s tamest ride (see below).
• Naomi getting her head bashed in by Saw. It transpired that on some of the ride cars they actually video record the ride experience. So for a mere £12 I could have cherished forever the video of Naomi gaily smiling and laughing, followed by her strangely oblong head ricocheting between the restraints and then looking like she would cry. To this day I regret not having invested that money.
• Eating Burger King (or products from any other well known fast food retailer, for that matter) before being launched 200ft in the air at 80mph is never a good idea. Ever.
• 

  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.

• My smugness re the previous point quickly disappeared when I didn’t get off the ride fast enough and was promptly soaked by another passing boat. Fail.
• I saved the day for some charming fellows who had run the battery flat. Oh yes lads, always carry jump leads.

And so I leave you with the promised video of it all going a little bit wrong on a lamentably slow ride…enjoy…

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.

Aha, good quality humour, as always.

The majority of you will probably not be wondering what I actually sound and look like in motion; although I will accept (sensible) answers on a postcard.

But for those of you that are, here is the first ever video piece where I talk to the camera about jogging, of all things. Normal service will resume later this week.

(I apologise in advance for the production quality; the actual talking bit is not easy, as you will see- and I only had Windows Movie Maker to work with).