Good Times

I’m having a bout of insomnia as I write, and, thanks to Twitter, I’m feeling nauseatingly nostalgic for my university days. The reason why Twitter is to blame is because one of the trending topics is #GoodTimes, and it got me thinking about the fun I had when I was at uni (University of Kent at Canterbury) and thought I’d share some of my flashbacks of my good times. I’ll try to make each as brief as a ‘tweet’ – fleeting moments of my memory.

One of my professors was disabled and whizzed around in an electric wheelchair. His name is Dave Reason, and he is a LEGEND. He introduced himself in my first ever lecture by whizzing into the unlit lecture theatre, announcing to the darkened room ‘Greetings, students… I am Dave, and I am a Cyborg’ and switching on all the lights. Absolute Legend.

Another would mutter half-to himself, half to us as he paced back and forth at the front of the lecture theatre. When he got to one end, he’d scratch his head, when he got to the other, he’d cough.  Every few laps he’d stop in the middle, look up at us, and swear loudly. Then repeat the procedure.

Going to ASDA at 3am in my PJs with my housemate to do some late night ice-cream shopping, and being highly amused by a man in the dairy aisle who was yelling at the yoghurts to stop talking to him.

Revelling in smugness when my evil housemate (in first year) decided to throw a roast dinner party for her gangster friends and the first thing we knew about it was when black smoke was billowing out of the kitchen door.

Having christmas dinner at  a friends house. I peeled 24 potatoes and we made gravy in a washing up bowl. xmas dinner with all the trimmings for 7 people. I was very impressed with my friend’s culinary skills and our creative use of kitchen utensils.

flicking  Jelly out of the window of a 3rd floor flat because we liked the ‘splat’ noise it made when it hit the ground. If it hit a Christchurch student, we got bonus points (Christchurch were the ‘scum at the bottom of the hill’ – the friendly rivalry between my uni and the other uni in town which had only recently achieved ‘university’ status having previously been a polytechnic, and therefore an inferior ‘not real’ uni)

Getting off a bus after my first weekend home in my first term of uni to be confronted with about 20 naked guys running round a roundabout while one person squirted them with washing up liquid and another squirted them with a hose.

Going into a gay bar in halloween dressed up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, being harassed by a giant chicken trying to convince me to take up smoking, and totally not getting what being a ‘friend of dorothy’  actually meant. I thought people were just being nice to me.

 

 

Going into another bar opposite the gay bar the same night, and coming face to face with a stranger dressed as Scarecrow. We hugged, we laughed. It was a beautiful moment.

walking home from uni in my stockinged feet because it was raining and i didn’t want to ruin my shoes when i jumped in puddles

Pulling one of my many all-nighters to get an essay in on time, and drinking about 9  cans of coke to keep me awake… then remembering in a panic that i’d seen a documentary that showed that if you drink too much coke your stomach can actually explode. Immediately went onto google to find out just how many cans qualified as too much.

waiting for over 2 hours for a cab in the pelting rain after the summer ball (my friends wouldn’t let me walk home alone at gone 2am because i really didn’t wanna wait around indefinitely for a cab in that horrendous weather), I wore a red dress and the dye was running down my legs and i looked like Carrie. got home and stood fully clothed under the shower to warm up. i figured as i couldn’t possibly get any wetter it didn’t matter. by the time i dried off and had packed my bag, it was time to leave the house to embark on a 13 hour bus journey up to Glasgow via Edinburgh to see Liza Minnelli in concert at the Armadillo

Finding my friend drunk and asleep in a tree in the middle of artsfest.

finding a ditch in the field behind my student house that had tadpoles in and grabbing a few handfulls and putting them in a bucket to transfer to the pond in our garden, then watching them grow up into frogs.

Making ‘Beanpole’ the 6ft3 skinny snowman.

just a few memories there to add to the ones on twitter…