The A-Z of two weeks of University

Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking. Tom has forgotten us, he’s stopped blogging forever, he thinks he’s too GOOD for us now he’s going to Oxford, he has forgotten the people who put him there.

And yes, that is what I think. Now I go to Oxford and study English, frankly I should be charging you to read this blog and I think that the fact that I’m condescending to blog at ALL is something that you should all be grateful for. Anyway.

Well.

I have been at Oxford for two weeks now and frankly too much has happened. I can’t even begin to fit it all into some sort of coherent exciting narrative that encapsulates everything. So I won’t try. Instead I will just do what I did about a month ago and write a badly-formatted A-Z of random things that have happened to me and continue to happen to me. And then you can read it and think highly of me.

Alcohol
Right. Now I’m a student, I have decided that it is my god given right to drink alcohol and act like a bit of a tit. YOU CAN’T TAKE THAT RIGHT AWAY FROM ME NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU TRY. So yes, I admit, I’ve fallen off the wagon and have taken up the demon of alcoholism again. It doesn’t help that my college has its own bar that sells drinks at very affordable prices. It gets to the point when I reason with myself “With drinks this reasonable, I would be LOSING money if I didn’t have another one”; so then I do. To be fair, I haven’t gotten embarrassingly drunk yet, unlike my new friend Max who was so wasted the other night he was squatting in a gutter, gnawing on a kebab like the little ratboy he is and shrieking “IT’S KOSHER, IT’S KOSHER” at the top of his squeaky little voice. The most drunk I have been was on about a Tuesday ago, a night that shall forever be termed “The Eve of the Eight Sambucas”. But don’t think that the eight sambucas were all that was drunk; they were also balanced out with beer and WKD and other narcotic fluids; but at the club we kept looking at each other and doing that ‘glass tipping’ motion thing and going to the bar and ordering sambuca and then drinking it, except one time when Max bought the round and then dropped his on the bar and instantly began lapping it up off the bar surface like a fucking little mongrel dog. This anecdote doesn’t really go anywhere, but I want to just let you all know that yes, I have been drinking and no, I haven’t woken up face down in the middle of the back quad with a cone on my head. Yet.

Big issue
Oxford is full of tramps. I don’t know why. Maybe they are ex students who fell on hard times and figured that they might as well beg next to their old stomping grounds. Maybe they are thought vampires who gain strength off the cleverness of the students… actually on second thoughts, that’s a stupid idea. Thought vampires? Retarded.
In order to get them to leave me alone, I bought one copy of the Big Issue and now I carry around with me; every time someone offers it to me I hold it aloft and kind of shrug apologetically, as if to say “Listen, yeah, I’m on your side but I can’t be throwing money away; I’m not a lunatic… anyway, I’m off to read the thought provoking articles about homelessness and the plight on homeless people and on about the fact that not having a home is a bad situation to be in” and then they wink and high five me.
Actually, that’s a lie. I didn’t buy the original copy. My friend Rose bought it and then left it in my room and I figured out that I could somehow turn the situation to my advantage.

Clubbing
I think I’ve been to pretty much every club in Oxford now; they are all uniformly dire. The problem is, they are too small. In fact, no, that isn’t the problem. The problem is that they play shite music. After about ten minutes of R&B, perhaps the DJs will kick it up with some Bon Jovi before taking it down town with about an hour and a half of cheese. I get it, people like to dance ironically to the Spice Girls. On the aforementioned Eve of Eight Sambucas, I would say that my moment of epiphany came when I realised that I was arm in arm with five or six other people, in a small huddle, singing along to “Don’t Stop Me Now” and lurching left and right to the tune of the music.
On the other hand, at the club last night, the DJ was doing shout outs and we got him to go “Happy Bar Mitzvah to Max! Good on ya Max!” which was pretty funny, as it wasn’t even Max’s Bar Mitzvah that day (obviously, as he is 18).

Dough
“Dough” is a colloquial term for “Money”. I have spent a fucking lot of money so far. For the first week, I tried to keep a record of my expenditure on Excel (check out my steez, this is student livin’). Between the 1st and the 10th of October, I managed to spend a total of £324.70!!!!! That’s like thirty two quid a day!!!!!! Insane. I bet Jay-Z did the same thing when he first went to Gangster University.

English
I study English, which is a better subject than Maths or PPE. I will do a full rundown of my fellow English students in a later blog.

Friends
Is it wrong that I already like the people at University far far FAR more than I like anybody at home? No offence guys but you are mostly shit.

Girls
Oxford is a place full of geniuses. Or genii, as might be the correct plural form. I DON’T KNOW. But this means that the girls are all highly brainy, which means that they either have superior DNA to everyone else OR they are social rejects who have no friends and thus spent their childhoods reading. So thus, in conclusion there are three basic classes of female at Oxford, all of whom cause varying reactions in me.

Class 1: Unbelievably hot

Class 2: Ugly as sin

Class 3: Lucia


Hall
We eat our dinner in a big hall that looks like the Harry Potter hall. It is nice and wooden and we are surrounded by portraits of wise looking men in wigs. Nothing more to add.

I…
… can’t think of anything to go in the “I” letter slot.

Jew
My new friend Max is Jewish. When he first told me this, I was like ‘cool’; because he isn’t like one of those orthodox jews; he eats non kosher meat and doesn’t seem to do many Jewish things. Of course, after about a day and half, every single conversation between me Max and Matt revolves around the fact that Max is jewish. For some reason, jokes anti-semitism has become the order of the day. I don’t even know how it starts, but last night concluded with me and Matt solemnly informing Max that we didn’t accept his religion and offering him some leaflets to convert to Christianity, or “Y’know, any other religion”. Can I say that this is not bullying as Max usually starts it. Like, he isn’t even that Jewish but he’s started drawing Stars of David all over the place. Just to get back at us.

Joke’s on him though, because he looks like the Cat in the Hat.

Kebab
HEY GUY’S LET’S GO TO HASSAN’S KEBAB VAN AND GET A KEBAB.
The other night I was drunk and I was so hungry that I had two kebabs in a row. About ¾ of the way through the last one I started to slow down. And I was like “WHY AM I EATING THIS?” but then I ate it anyway because I’m now a student and I can’t afford to just go about wasting money.

Latin
Everyone speaks Latin here. It’s like Spanish in Spain. What a fucking trek.

Milk
There’s no fridge in my corridor, so when I arrived with my big bottle of milk I just left it on the window sill to dry. Two weeks later it was yellow with a huge bukkake of white goo at the bottom. I eventually threw it away when I realised that it was making the whole corridor smell like Dairylea.

NO SPLASH NO GASH
This black dude in the toilets of Oceans & Collins (nighclub… shit… dancefloor smells like vagina) loudly sings this song to whoever comes in. It goes like this:
NO SPLASH NO GASH
NO SOAP NO HOPE
That’s pretty much it. Then he sprays me with perfume and asks for a quid but I’m like go to hell. But then I gave him 50p and took a lolly.

Old English
We have to study Old English, or as I call it, Ye Olde Englishe (because I’m funny). Here’s an extract from the notes that I made. I actually wrote this down:

“long stemmed dissyllables eg sawol 'soul' and ceaster 'city' take 'lar', but lose medial vowel in trisyllabic forms. Some abstract nouns ending in -pfu and -u can remain unchanged in the oblique cases (ie any other than the nominative)"

I have eight pages of that shit. I’m meant to understand it. Nuff said.

Poetry
We study it.

Queen’s
Another college in Oxford. Rose goes there.

Rave
Our first “bop” was of a “rave theme”. Note: it wasn’t a rave. It was a raved theme bop. That is an important distinction. I wore a yellow wifebeater, a pair of bright blue Primark jogging trousers with I LOVE LA on the bum, big sunglasses, a big necklace, rave face paint and A FLUORESCENT JACKET. Which I’ve now lost. Shit.

Smiths
Good band. I got into them because my friend Matt played then in his room and I was like woah. So in conclusion: Good band.

Toast
A staple of my diet. I have a toaster in my room and in the past few days I must have eaten a couple of loaves of bread’s worth of toast. It’s fucking good. When I first tried to toast something in my room it set off the fire alarm. Fact. But I managed to waft the smoke away from the alarm and now I only toast stuff out of the window. This is true.

Unintentional racism
We’ve already covered the anti-semitism. That’s in the bag. However, since I’ve arrived at Oxford I have apparently turned into one of those accidental racists that you see on TV. For some reason I am completely unable to get the names of any of the Indian/asian students right. It’s not me being a twat, it’s just me being forgetful. Or assuming. I don’t know. Here are some examples:

At the first night at the bar, me and Matt were wondering around meeting people, and then there’s this Indian guy called Andy. And neither of us could hear anything as it was all noisy. “What’s your name?” asked Matt. “Andy!” said Andy. “Mandeep?” asked Matt. Then I walked up. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Andy!” said Andy. “MANDY?” I asked incredulously. Thinking about it, his name was unlikely to be Mandy but at the time I didn’t know that, I was pretty much going on the basis that he’s Indian lookin’, he could pretty much be called anything.

At formal dinner, the head of the college said – as he is a JOKA - “Everyone has to swap round seats so you can get to know each other better”; so naturally I ended up sitting next to Matt, who had two glasses of wine. I was also sitting opposite two white dudes and an Indian looking guy. “Can I have some of that wine?” I said to Matt. “No way,” he replied, “My mate Hassan gave it to me.” I turned to the Indian guy and said “Hassan, can I have some of the wine?” … he was like “WHAT my name isn’t Hassan its Kieron.” At that point I could have just cut my losses, said ‘sorry, mistook you for someone else’; but instead I gesticulated madly at the three people sitting opposite us and said “LOOK AT THEM… OF ANY OF THEM, WHO IS LIKELY TO BE CALLED HASSAN?” Later on in the conversation, to prove that I wasn’t racist, I told the Mancunian guy that I couldn’t and refused to try to understand his accent; and then told the other guy that his hair was shit. In other news, everyone now calls that Kieron guy Hassan, so really I come out looking prettttttttttttty good.

There are these two Indian looking girls called Nehaal and Sanam. I call both of them Shanam. This isn’t an affectation; they think I’m joking, but I honestly just do it by accident. Like I see them and my brain freezes up. Maybe its not a racial thing; maybe it’s just a ‘weird name’ thing. I mean, there’s this other girl called Signey at the college and I started calling her Shaznog, Shigely, or Shatner. Hmm.

Vibrating floor
THE FLOOR OF MY BEDROOM IS VIBRATING. Nobody knows why but when I put a glass of water on my desk it looks like the approach of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. Fact.

Work
Haven’t done any. It’s getting to be a worry.

Xylophone
No.

Yes…
… I have lost interest in this endeavour.

Z
What’s black and white and eats like a horse?
A ZEBRA