I can't say I find Rod Liddle all that engaging a character but I take my hat off to last week's column in The Spectator in which he recalled the first time he shared a flat with a load of blokes."In the toilet," he writes, "which was never, ever, cleaned, someone — God knows who — had nailed a Birds Eye fish finger to the wall." I love these Withnail stories about just what slobs all men are during their twenties because no matter how outlandish the detail of the levels of filth and debauchery to which the writer descended, you just know that it's all true.
Next year my son leaves hall and goes into a flat. I will not be visiting.
I'm still mystified over what happened to the bathroom door in one student house. We all came back from the pub one night (via the chippie because the kebab shop wasn't en route) to find the back door forced open and the bathroom door neatly removed from its hinges. Nothing else had been taken. I lived there for another year or so and it never got replaced; I don't think we even mentioned it to the landlord because we thought he would charge us for it. For some reason girlfriends were reluctant to stay over, which is a shame because they might have tidied up the living room.
ReplyDeleteI hate to destroy the charming image you have of one of your female colleagues, David, but in my first year at university myself and my room-mate, Jenny, decided to test how long a piece of long-life Tesco Value bread would last. How did we do this? By leaving one on our mantelpiece. For three months. Those of you who wish to know how bad long-life products are for your body may want to know that the bread didn't ever get mouldy. It just went a bit hard.
ReplyDeleteWill you be 'updating' the picture of these specific fish fingers as the course of their deterioration progresses?
ReplyDeleteAnd apart from employing a recent vernacular - "Ewww..." - I will only mention in passing the curious 'Field Of Gothic Mummification' generated both beneath and behind cookers and fridges...