Just Being Friendly

Bryan has been pipped to the post in the running for 'A Major Award' - that of best 'Resident Advisor' for the fraternity he...lives with in a kind of supervisory role. Unlucky Bryan, huh.

I was thinking yesterday about a time which cannot help but make me laugh whenever it pops into my mind...in reality and my mind it is a facial expression and a waved newspaper that cracks me up...but you need more information than that.

In the first year of university, I lived in one of seventeen great little houses on campus. Each of these houses had twelve rooms and a large kitchen and open social area....like this.

They were the cheapest accommodation on campus, but the arrangement of the rooms around a central area and kitchen made them great student houses. They weren't very big, but hey. The equivalent to Bryan's 'Resident Advisor' in our case was 'Mum', a fourth year student doing a PGCE and living in the flat next door. She seemed okay as a person - perfectly reasonable and amiable in her outlook, but to begin with she was a hardline disciplinarian. After a night out once she came round to find three of us sitting around in the lounge talking; Matt had a can of lager, and the radio in one of the rooms opening into the lounge was on, just above the threshold of hearing so as not to disturb the others in bed. My visiting sister was in the kitchen making toast.

This 'party' as she called it resulted in us successfully appealing against £10 fines each, and me trying and failing to get my semester-long ban on guests repealed. My hellraiser sister and her late-night toast of decadence.
Honestly.

Anyway. It was about halfway through the year. I was sleeping off the effects of the night before after a morning of lectures...an afternoon nap, if you will. There was a knock at my door and I opened it, bleary-eyed, to find 'Mum' standing leaning against my doorframe with a smilingly confused face, waving a rolled-up copy of the student newspaper - The Warwick Boar.

"Ah. Hi," I said.
"Hello Stuart. Um."
"Yes. I know."
She smiled and frowned at the same time.
"Is it...I mean...is it true?"
"Kind of."
"But...how? How did that happen?"
"Well, it just sort of did. They weren't here very long. It was too crowded."
"You realise that the largest number of people you can have in the flat due to fire regulations is 24."
"Er, yeah."
"And it says here that you had...over 250?"
"Only for a while."
"But how did they fit?"
"They just kinda...did."
"Emily says that you came in and asked if it was okay if you had a few friends in from the gig, and then they just..."
"Hah, yes. I thought it would be better to, uh, ask."
"Two hundred and fifty?"

The article in the student newspaper was at the bottom of page three, detailing the account of the comedy gig of the previous Sunday. Ross Noble, up and coming comedian extraordinaire was doing a gig in one of the upstairs nightclubs in the Union, when a unusually noisy Society Fair was happening on one of the lower floors. Having been narked by the noise, the original plan had been for Ross to descend the stairs after the gig with the audience in tow, go up to the 'Let's Play Dungeons & Dragons' society (or Action Role Play Society, as I believe they prefer to be called) and claim to be a real wizard. On the receipt of some scorn we would all pile out of the stairwell and pretend to be under his wizardly control.

The fair had finished, so there were 250 aimless people in Bar Cholo, looking for something to do. Rallying well, Ross Noble raised the cry to head to the nearest petrol station to buy all their tic-tacs, but after leaving the Union building the word was floating around that the Tesco Garage had closed at ten.

Picture 250 marginally inebriated comedy fans, on the tail of a bit of fun, milling around looking crestfallen, and one extremely disappointed comedian.

And I couldn't just leave them there.

After finding out about it through the paper, 'Mum' was less involved in what went on in Whitefields 7, unless it was glaringly obvious.

We even got off quite lightly for the missing door.