meish dot org: life, unfolding

In the Peak District village where I lived when I was writing my Masters’ dissertation, there was a man called Mr Binns, who ran the local newsagent. Every morning, procrastinating the writing-up process, I would walk the two miles into the village to buy milk and a paper. Plopping The Guardian down on the counter, on top of copies of the local free rag (the High Peak Courier, I seem to remember) and next to see-through buckets of sour chews and chocolate cigarettes, I’d get read to pay. Mr Binns would be standing behind the counter in a zip-up brown cardigan, with nicotine-stained fingers and strong grease in his hair – a cliche of himself, the character he portrayed every day. He would look at the paper, and then say slowly in a voice so gutteral and resonant and low that whales halfway across the atlantic would spin around and rush towards landlocked Derbyshire to mate,

“That’ll be forty-five pee, my little angel”

My little angel.
My darling cherub.
My duck.
My little love.
My little darling.
My flower.
My darling petal.

Every day, the same exchange; every day a new variation on the over-familiar.

I was buying a paper, for Pete’s sake. He probably didn’t even know my name, and yet every day I was his darling treasure or similar. But my heart didn’t skip a beat when he said it. My knees didn’t turn to jelly when he called me those things. It didn’t mean a thing, except friendliness and good customer service.

But that’s the thing about regional endearments – contexts change. Say any of those common endearments in London and you’d get a slap in the kisser, but in Derbyshire, as in other parts of the North, they make perfect contextual sense.

This random story is inspired by the news yesterday that Tesco has banned staff from using local terms for madam and sir, following a customer complaint in Lancashire, after she was called dear by a checkout assistant.

One of the joys of living in this country is the wealth of regionality and regional identity that still exists, despite overpopulation, flexible roots and shifting social environments. Just like in the cab last night, I may be from London, but my northern affiliation shows when I’m tired and happy. When I spend a lot of time with someone who has a strong regional accent, I’ll end up subconscioulsy picking bits up, the odd word, an inflection. All those things, those aspects of communication and behaviour are part of my culture, my country, but represent different contexts.

In South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, I’ve got no problem with being greeted by “ey up, me duck” but strangely the London luv makes my ears bleed. I like being hen in Glasgow and pet in Newcastle, and even chuck in Liverpool occasionally. I like the regional variations in accent, custom, culture, vocabulary. I like the familiarity of regional customer service. But when the fishmonger puts his hand on your arse, you know it’s gone too far.

When I was growing up, my relations (mostly northern) had a whole range of bizarre endearments for me, depending on circumstance and geography. Treasure. Chicken. Sausage. Petal. Hinny. Pumpkin Pie. Letterbox Mouth (don’t ask).

As years fall past, the familiar endearments used become more London and cosmopolitan, but less specific and tender. Foxy. Gorgeous. Darling. Sweetie. Honey. More words, less meaning, perhaps. How very Ab Fab.

What’s your pet name? What do you like to be called? What do you loathe? What do you call your partner/friends? What makes you squirm when someone calls you it?

You have got the wrong end of the stick entirely if you think for a moment that Smash is supposed to act like a foodstuff.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. That’s like trying to pass off Alka-seltzer as a refreshing soft drink – it’s just not. Smash is dehydrated mashed potato, and it is, in a word, magnificient. Another possible word would be bland, but let’s gloss over that for the moment.

Smash is, however, a genius hangover concept.

In my final year of uni at Liverpoool, my flatmate Charlotte and I figured out that it was clinically the only way to recover from a tequila hangover.

We spent a lot of time hanging out in a tequila bar for various reasons that year – work, friends, stress – and we had rather too many opportunities to experiment with alleviating the particular circle of hell that is created in the aftermath of a lot of tequila. We tried all sorts of things – tea, alka-seltzer, plain bread, fry-ups, all to no avail.

Eventually, however, we found the perfect remedy.

Whoever is least hungover (and that needs to be a voluntary state) – or at least most able to stand without projectile vomiting – should prepare for the other a big glass of weak Ribena light (and we’re talking vaguely violet water here) made with normal-temperature water (not cold) and a Smash sandwich – that’s slightly moist Smash on white bread, with no butter whatsoever (that’s why the Smash has to be a bit runny) and a small dob of ketchup on the side (in case, miraculously, you feel like you can handle some taste towards the last couple of bites. Usually goes untouched, though).

The Smash sandwich: completely bland, completely inoffensive, yet pads out the stomach quite well, and requires no effort for the body to break down. Even vaguely manages to wave some carbohydrates (well, stodge) near your poor abused stomach lining.

I won’t hear a word said against it.

There is a simple rule common to most student households (and for that matter, any household inhabited entirely by recent ex-students or stoners). This rule is simple in its interpretation and often extremely harsh in its execution. It is based in roots of practicality and common sense, and yet still some people choose to debate it. There is no debate. The rule is this:

IF YOU GET UP, YOU LOSE YOUR SEAT

What’s to debate?

This rule, at least in our student house in the second year, originated in the fact that there were six people sitting around listening to music and sharing a drink or a smoke in the evening, but only two comfortable seats. One armchair, which allowed the user to curl up foetally and nod off, and one large beanbag, which was uncomfortable and troublesome until the user learned the zen secret of beanbag mastery – to recline into it at 45degrees rather than pretending it was actually a chair. Sneaky.

Other seating arrangements in our living room ranged from the vaguely acceptable (institution-like leatherette bank chair) to the not-very-pleasant-at-all (floor), and so competition was fierce for the two prized pleasant places. But the rule was simple. If you got up from your seat, whether you were esconced in armchair heaven or getting a numb bum on the floor, you lost your seat – you lost the right to park your behind there, especially if someone else covetted the spot more. And that was that. Didn’t matter if you were going to the loo, to answer the door, to reach for the remote, to make a brew for everyone, to the off-license – if your arse vacated that seat for more than a few seconds, it was fair game, and someone could pounce on it. Harsh, maybe, but fair – and common practice in student households up and down the country.

One night at the beginning of second year, a bunch of us were sitting round chatting and doing basically nothing. I think there must have been seven of us there – the six usual housemates, and Lara, the slightly kooky girlfriend of one of the lads I lived with. Lara scared me, because she had man-hands and a terrifyingly earnest and penetrating glare. Since I mostly only met her at the end of an evening, when I was slightly the worse for wear, she inspired unrational paranoia and worry in me, and so I tended not to spend much time in her company, though I was sure she was a very nice girl really.

She was curled up in the armchair and I was on the prized beanbag, with everyone else on the floor or other seats, glowering at us with jealousy. There may have been a film on the telly – I can’t remember, because what happened next occupied my attention entirely, in a traumatic fashion. Suddenly, Lara piped up.

“If I go to the loo now, will somebody steal my seat?” Everyone nodded and grunted affirmatively. Absolutely. Those were the rules.

“But I really need the loo. Really really really.” We shrugged and pointed out the key seating rule again.

“But I’ve had a really hard day at uni,” she continued, “and I’m really really comfy in this chair…” No sympathy was forthcoming. Sam, her boyfriend, pointed out kindly that if we hadn’t been about to steal her seat before, we most certainly would do so now.

She pouted. She pleaded for a bit. She asked again. Nothing doing. We were utterly unsympathetic and all equally ready to pounce the moment her bum left the chair, especially now she’d made a fuss about it.

She glared at us, reached for her pint glass of water, which she drained while fixing us with her cold eyes. We looked on, unmoved.

And then, unthinkably, she crouched on the chair, unzipped her jeans, pulled them down and proceeded to pee in the pint glass, right there, perching on the armchair, with all of us watching incredulously, a defiant gleam in her eyes.

My jaw dropped in astonishment. Sam turned bright red. Mike muttered “bloody ‘ell” and the rest of the room was silent, save for the ongoing noise of liquid tinkling into a pint glass, which seemed to last for an unnaturally long time.

When she finished, she zipped herself up and placed the brimming glass on the mantelpiece beside her chair, settling down again to watch the film, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

We looked at one another with raised eyebrows. What. The. Fuck?

A moment later, Sam got up, shaking his head. Lara grabbed the glass, and profferred it towards him – “Sweetie, could you empty this for me?” – he gagged, visibly, and shook his head before he left the room.

One by one, we followed him, drifting off to our individual rooms, no longer interested in the film or the stealing of seats, still vaguely shaking our heads, trying to dislodge the mental image which remained of a girl, clearly barking mad, relieving herself in our glassware.

I still find it difficult to drink out of pint glasses at home.

In 1995, I was in a Bolivian riot. That is to say, I was walking down the Prado in the middle of La Paz in October when the riot began all around me – campesinos throwing stones at the police, who threw tear gas back. I was suddenly caught in the middle, eyes streaming, coughing from the gas and fumbling for the kerb and something to put over my eyes – a sleeve, some bottled water. I found refuge in the post office.

There was a lot of rioting the year I lived in La Paz, for one reason or another – by the students of the national university, the coca-growing peasants, the workers’ union and the lorry drivers, to name a few. They always began the same way – a sudden stone’s throw and them BOOM everything kicked in. An hour later and the whole thing was over, as if on schedule. The most disconcerting thing about the riots were that they always seemed scarily organised and polite, as if responding to rioting regulations. Odd.

The students had been on strike for a long time when I arrived, months, even years, and had set up a fairly good protest rioting arrangement with the city police. Every afternoon, at 4pm, the riot would begin, outside the main gate of the Universidad Mayor de San Andres – I know this becuase on my second day in the city, I headed for the university to make myself known to the dean of the faculty of humanities (I was supposed to be a research fellow there for year – that never happened) and found myself facing two hundred pissed-off looking students. I turned on my heel and went in search of a cup of coca tea. I know when I’m beaten.

I found a cafe on the third floor of a building on a slope overlooking the university, from which I had a strangely voyeuristic vantage point over the proceedings – like watching a bunch of Sims characters revolting. Sitting in the cafe during the riots became a habit for me – especially once I started working on the Bolivian Times, the city’s English language newspaper, where my responsibilities rarely extended beyond translating small filler items from regional papers and writing the odd movie review, but which sometimes extended to trying to put a new spin on what was seen as old news – the riots, poor literacy rates, ex-pat culture. But I never got a byline. Oh no. That was a medal to be won by drinking a lot, backslapping and backstabbing, and being North American. Ah well.

So anyway, at 4pm, the riot began – a few stones thrown, the road siezed, traffic stopped, and at least one car tyre set on fire. At 4.15pm, the police would fire the first rubber bullet, usually into the sky, but sometimes into the crowd. The students would throw stones and bricks at the police, across the road. The police would fire bullets and launch cold canisters of tear gas into the fray. The students would scatter, regroup, and throw more stones.

And so the riot would continue for another forty minutes, when as if on cue, the students would slowly and sulkily slope off to tend to their wounds and collect stones for the next day. Rioting monday to friday, except on bank holidays, with all the punctuality I could never expect from the Bolivian (or British, come to that) train system.

Except one day, five o’clock came, and the students didn’t slope home. They carried on throwing stones, to the startled quiet of the facing policemen. The police, it transpired the next day in the news coverage, had been dealing with this rioting lark for such a long time that they were given a daily quota of rubber bullets to use during the hour’s proceedings. And that day, when the students refused to stop, they had run out.

So they looked at each other, under a hail of stones and bricks, shrugged, and as one, stopped to the pavement to pick up the stones which had been hurled at them by the students, and flung them right back. For another hour, the students and police threw stones at each other, like mean children in the playground, and I watched, incredulous, sipping my coca tea.

There was a great story someone told me about protest in Bolivia, and although I’ve never seen any evidence to corroborate the story, I hope it is true. I’d like it to be.

Apparently, in the early nineties, a group of twenty thousand urban and peasant women set out from the beleagured Chapare region, which up until a few years ago had Coca as its main crop. They wanted to walk to La Paz to protest that their families were starving because of harsh US-influenced rulings on coca-growing, and their livelihood was being destroyed.

They got as far as Cochabamba, when they were met by the national guard and thousands of police, who ordered them to turn back. There was a stand off for a couple of days, and then the women turned around and went home, leaving behind a group of very smug officials slapping each other on the back and congratulating each other on succesfully diffusing the protest.

Or so they thought.

Ten weeks later, ten thousand women descended into the city of La Paz, all bowler hats and long plaits and colourful dusty skirts. After leaving Cochabamba, half of the women had gone home, and the other half headed for the mountains and the forests, where they followed ancient Inca trails to get to La Paz.

When they arrived, no-one was expecting them, and the law-enforcement agencies were too dumbstruck and/or embarrassed to respond quickly to the surprising situation. The women marched into the centre of town, where they occupied the square outside the government buildings for a week.

I like that story. Belligerence and surprise combine well.

In 1996 I was living in a tiny community in Bolivia, doing fieldwork for my dissertation. That�s another story in itself � if not a whole book � but not for now. This story concerns itself with learning valuable cultural lessons, dancing on the roof of the world, and the reason I will never have a second helping of potatoes ever again as long as I live.

During the second month of my fieldwork, as the local foreigner, I was invited to the inaugural blessing of a new tree nursery in a tiny hamlet about four hours drive into the mountains called Inka Katurapi. With foreign aid, the village of about fifty people was experimenting with planting trees to prevent harmful erosion of the topsoil.

I didn�t think they were going to feed me when I got there so before I left my fieldwork site, I had a hearty Andean breakfast, consisting of potatoes. Now, potatoes in the UK come in three basic types: new, medium and baking. Potatoes in Bolivia however come in about 39 variations, with different colours and sizes and even tastes. Yes, amazingly, all potatoes do not taste the same. Anyway, beans (or even potatoes). I scoffed about a pound of potatoes before I left the village because I figured that would last me until the next meal (whenever that was going to be).

Driving over the Andes towards the village took about a couple of hours (there was impressive scenery, there were llamas). When I got to the village, nestled high in Los Valles, the party was about to kick off. This was not a fiesta, the other typical kind of Andean celebration, which involves drinking so much chicha (maize beer) that you go blind and waking up in a pool of your own (or worse, someone else�s) vaguely maize-smelling vomit three days later limbs aching from dancing the cueca, which is basically the Bolivian equivalent of Morris dancing and involves a lot of hanky-waving. This celebration was to be a rather more staid affair. There was to be a visit to the alpaca herd, a look at the nursery, a feast and then some speeches, they told me as soon as I arrived. Woah, hang on a minute, did someone say feast? Even though I�d eaten a few hours ago, appetite in the Andes is a funny thing and a little goes a long way, so my breakfast of potatoes was still weighing heavily on my stomach. A feast sounded like something I wasn�t prepared for, in an appetite kind of way.

So off we went to look at the alpacas and then at the nursery (yawn) and then there was the feast. In the middle of a muddy field on a steep slope, the entire village of about 45 people gathered around, bringing ingredients for the picnic. One person from each family brought an aguayu (a woven cloth used as a sort of backpack, if you tie it right (ask me to demonstrate sometime)) wrapped neatly around their contribution to the feast. Laying them down in the middle of the circle, one by one, they were unfolded to display the yummy contents within.

Quick caveat: I swear I am not making this up. Everything here actually happened, and I still have the scars (mental, physical and emotional) to prove it. Oh, and the photos.

Every single person brought potatoes. Every single one. Okay, a few people had also thoughtfully brought some llahua which is a scary foaming spicy tomato and chilli sauce that looks like the kind of spit you only ever see after a long dental operation, and tastes like burning. But aside from that, potatoes and lots of them. About twenty blankets worth. That, in case you hadn’t figured it out, is a lot of potatoes.

As the village guest, I got the village chair while everyone else sat on the ground. When I moved to sit with them, the head of the village, a man who wore a symbolic whip tied diagonally over his shoulder, shouted at me and gave me a guirnalda (a stiff floral garland that fits around the neck and over the shoulders and makes it impossible to move your arms from elbows up). So I sat on the village chair, higher than everyone and feeling uncomfortable. One of the women gave me an empty tin plate and indicated that I should help myself from the blanket. I quickly cottoned on that no-one was going to start on the food before I�d at least made a token effort so I headed over to the blanket, grabbed a few smallish spuds and a bit of red-spit sauce and plonked myself back down on the chair. My plate was immediately whisked away and the next time I saw it, mere seconds later, it was piled high with potatoes of every shape and hue.

There is one kind of potato in the Andes which deserves special mention here. Its name is the ch�uño and it is pure evil. It�s basically a freeze-dried potato which starts life sort of medium-sized and juicy and via a lengthy process of freezing and thawing in the open air, becomes a small black nugget which keeps for up to three years, usually in a sack in the animal shed, and tastes rather like the insole of a particularly sweaty hiker�s boot. It�s the kind of food that could only make sense in a region where shortages are common and something that is cheap, filling and easily-reconstituted is a valuable commodity. But it still tastes like shit.

My plate was piled high with ch�uño, of course, and I valiantly picked my way around them, trying to smother their minging taste in dentist spit as best I could. Like the polite girl that I am, I struggled but eventually managed to finish everything on my plate though I felt dangerously heavy. Bear in mind that there was also nothing to drink: no liquid to wash down the massive quantities of starch that were currently coagulating like a large boulder inside me.

They say that it only takes a pound of potatoes to kill a baby but I reckon you�d have to throw them very accurately indeed. Feeling full to bursting, I wondered what the equivalent starch tolerance level was for an adult female. I felt I was rapidly approaching that level. In fact, I FELT LIKE I HAD ROSEMARY�S POTATO BABY GESTATING INSIDE ME. Gah.

I turned to the head honcho with a strained but satisfied look on my face (I always was a good actress) and said, �Que rica! � most delicious� When I turned back, there was a woman standing in front of me holding a plate of potatoes dotted with ch�uno and red sauce. Hang on a minute. Is this Groundhog Day? Whatthefuck? I took the plate with a smile and a bilious lurch and started to eat. Again.

I did the best I could. All I can say in my defence was that as a well brought up young lady, my mummy taught me to eat whatever I was given. And so I did, even though I thought the effort would kill me, if the starch didn�t cripple me first. Once you�ve eaten a pound of potatoes, you feel full. Once you�ve eaten two pounds of potatoes, you begin to think you�ll never move again. By the middle of the third pound, you�re starting to wonder whether it would be easier to try and swallow one whole and choke yourself to death.

I handed the clean plate to the honcho, said �Thank you, but if I eat any more, I�m going to explode.� He laughed, took the plate and said words which I struggled to translate, but which I was sure involved the words �next course�. Sure enough, there was a second course � another traditional Andean dish � potato and pasta soup, which is basically another way of saying boiled potatoes and boiled pasta with the water left in the pan. They handed me a shallow bowl. I took one bite and blanched (no pun intended). I put the plate down on the ground, unsteadily and apologising profusely to everyone around. I�m sorry. I cannot eat another thing. I�m so sorry.

The relief on the faces of the villagers was obvious. I was confused, then suddenly, it clicked. In the UK and much of the western world, it�s considered polite to finish everything on your plate. In rural Bolivia however, if you lick your plate clean it implies that you�re still hungry, and so out of courtesy they will keep feeding you until you stop asking for more. The head honcho nodded at my apology, said sagely �You must have been very hungry indeed,� and then proceeded to give a lengthy speech in Quechua about the new nursery and all the benefits it would bring. I was extremely glad that the political tradition of long speeches was upheld equally in the Andes because it gave me a chance to digest.

My speech was not quite so lengthy and relied almost entirely on the artful use of sign language, stilted Quechua and a smattering of burps. No-one in the audience spoke English, and only a few spoke Spanish, which made orating problematic � though I think I came up with a crowd-pleaser when I rubbed my heaving stomach and declared �Mmmm � potatoes yummy�. Everyone smiled. On reflection, perhaps they were just relieved that I’d finally stopped eating. More speeches were made and then the honcho summoned for the band to start to play.

Have you ever heard an Andean band play? No, not those guys with the bright ponchos and the pan-pipes playing �El Condor Pasa� in Leicester Square � the real thing. Paul Simon wouldn�t recognise it, I can assure you. The village band consisted of five men with flute-like objects (quinos), one bloke with an enormous bass drum and a small child with a snare drum and a bad sense of rhythm. They played breathless synchopated tooting to a pounding rhythm. Everyone listened.

Then suddenly the head honcho stood up and said something in Quechua, waving in my direction. I fought my way through the layers of starch that had invaded my brain to translate it. Now�our visitor�.to dance�future gerund�reflexive first person plural�.

No wait, that can�t be right. I must have got that reflexive bit the wrong way around. Bloody grammar. He must have said, �Now we will dance for our visitor�. Surely. Surely. Oh god. Please. No.

He gestured again and indicated that I should stand up. Ah. Apparently my translation was right the first time: �Now our guest will dance for us�. And so, on wobbly legs and full of potato, I did the universal embarrassed uncle/Nelson Mandela dance, aided by the tight garland around my upper arms, making it impossible to move too much, and accompanied by sharp tooting and an urgent drum.

Thankfully, once the laughter had subsided, the women of the village got up to dance too, dragging me with them.

The dance consisted of holding hands in a circle and running round in a clockwise direction, then suddenly changing direction and running the other way for a bit. Meanwhile, two women would get into the middle of the circle and spin each other around. I was breathless, being 12,000 feet above sea level; full, having eaten three pounds of potatoes; thirsty, having not drunken anything since breakfast; and most of all clumsy, although that may have had something to do with the fact that we were dancing on a 45 degree ploughed field. The dance continued this way for a good ten minutes. Suddenly, I was grabbed by a short, fierce-looking woman in a bowler hat.

Now, many Bolivian women wear felt bowler hats, and some are fierce looking. But almost all of them are beneath five feet tall. I am not. I�m 5�9� and I towered over this woman as she grabbed my hands and we started to spin each other, one arm over the head. Because she was so short, spinning her presented no problem, and her wide colourful skirts spread out into a bell shape and brushed my legs as she span. But every time she tried to spin me, I ended up being smacked in the face by my own forearm. Repeatedly, with every turn. Not very graceful. And all to the sound of complex, breathy music, which after a while, sort of made sense.

So picture the scene. I was 12,000 feet up in the Andes, full to bursting, vowing never to eat another potato as long as I live, being smacked repeatedly in the head and tripping over my own muddy boots in a field full of people I could barely communicate with. I was breathless, dizzy and dancing on the roof of the world. I wouldn�t have missed it for anything.

In February 1996, I was visiting my friend Richard in La Paz for a few days over a weekend, when the government suddenly declared a state of emergency because of widespread civil unrest in the country.

A state of emergency meant complete paralysis for a few days – no buses or trains, roads closed, shops and markets shut up for the duration, and a curfew – although there was little point in going out of the house anyway, because a) there was nothing open and b) there was a very real possibility of getting caught up in a pitched battle or riot, ending up running back to the house choking on tear gas, eyes streaming. I discovered this the hard way.

Richard’s girlfriend and children from her first marriage had unfortunately been out of the city on a daytrip to Lake Titicaca when the state of emergency was declared, and so they were stuck there for the duration, just as we were stuck in their home overlooking the city, with nothing to do, and no way for me to get back to my fieldwork site in the countryside, with all the roads closed.

So what did we do? We did what any reasonable person would do under siege conditions. We played Nintendo.

For three and a half days, and all the intervening nights, we played Super Mario World on the SNES – a present to the son of the family from some American missionaries. I’d never played before – my most recent computer gaming experience had been Frogger for the Spectrum – but I learnt fast and played all night.

There way nothing to eat in the house except for cream crackers, jam and philedelphia cream cheese. We ran out of beer on the first night, cigarettes on the second and coke on the third. And still we played.

We found every hidden world, every secret level, every power-up and skill there was to be found. We racked up hundred of lives, thousands of points, millions of milliseconds staring at the screen. We listened to Deep Forest on repeat, because the only other CDs were Michael Jackson and infernal pan-pipes.

Our thumbs ached, gloriously, every moment. And still we played.

When the state of emergency lifted, and the roads re-opened, I emerged blinking into the bright sunlight, and made my way back home.

Funny the things your mind throws up, isn’t it? Your body remembers things that your brain forgets – like how an aching thumb is related to the taste of jam and cheese on the roof of the world, and the sound of Deep Forest, five and a half years ago. How odd.

Went to see LOTR at the Odeon Leicester Square. Our arrival was heralded by a sparkle of paparazzi flashes and a huge cheer from the waiting crowd – although it later transpired that they were actually waiting for Joshua Hairnet and crew to show up to the premiere of Black Hawk Down. Ah well.

I’ll save my mumblings on the movie for another time – suffice to say for the moment that it was visually spectacular, and there was a lot of it. An arse-numbing three hours, in fact. There was also a lot of it in the sense that there was just loads going on all the time – lots to take in, but I think I managed, mostly.

However, let me take this opportunity to mention that I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a mobile cinema, or at least, not for years.

In 1993 I visited New York, and at a movie theatre somewhere on Broadway, went to see Pulp Fiction. There were probably twenty people in the cinema throughout the performance, and by gum they were fidgety. Probably every person in there (except me) moved seats at least once during the show, and most moved a good deal more frequently than that. Perhaps it was too cold for them in the theatre, or too hot, or they couldn’t see properly, or they had ants in their pants, or something, but every couple of minutes throughout the movie, you’d see a head bob up, wander to the left or right, or climb over a seat, and then bob out of sight again. Like going to the cinema with a bunch of meercats or prairie dogs. Most odd.

A couple of years later, I had a similar experience in a cinema in Cochabamba, Bolivia – I popped into a cinema one afternoon to see a matinee double bill (Roadhouse and Congo – truly dreadful) and only stayed for twenty five minutes for two reasons (aside from the sheer awfulness of the movies themselves, which would have been reason enough to leave).

One, the projection of the film onto the bathtowel-sized screen was so painfully out of focus it made my eyes throb.

Two, it took me that long to realise that

a) The cinema was usually a porn cinema in the evenings,

b) oh so that’s what that funny smell was,

c) I was the only woman in the cinema and

d) everyone else at the performance was taking it in turns to sit in the row behind me and make moist flubbling noises with their cheeks. At least, that’s what I hope they were doing.

So the audience was perpetually on the move, which made it difficult to concentrate. I bailed.

Last night was pretty similar – though not in a seat-swapping or surreptitious wanking way. The Odeon Leicester Square probably seats three thousand people, and I swear at least a third of them must have got up and gone to the loo/to get some more popcorn/for a wander/to make a phone call/whatever. Who goes to a movie and then three minutes after the credits thinks “Oh man, I really need the loo. Let me just disturb my entire row and squeeze out….”?

Maybe I noticed it more because we were at the front of a seating block, beside the exit, and so every time someone from the right hand of the Circle wanted to leave the auditorium, a face-shaped sillhouette floated across Middle Earth. Regardless, there were definitely a lot of people wandering about for one reason or another. It’s not as if it was a particularly wet movie, like Titanic or whatever, which could inspire frequent trips to the bathroom.

This reminds me of one of the best jobs I’ve ever had – working at the 051 arts cinema in Liverpool – during my time there we screened The English Patient on two reels, so there was a short interval in the middle. We cut the film during the middle of one of the prolonged hot-oh-god-I’m-melting-and-parched desert scenes, and lo and behold, during the interval, a massive queue at our concessions stand, all asking for the biggest, wettest soft drinks we had. Ka-ching. Very cunning.

So as a matter of curiosity, if Titanic is a cold, wet movie, and The English Patient is a hot, dry movie, can you think of a hot, wet movie? Or a cold, dry one?

There was this night at the end of my fourth year of undergraduate study at Liverpool – and I have to admit that, as it was just after the end of exams, we might have been a little bit…um…under the influence, and that’s ok because, you know, we were young and carefree and that’s what we did back then, because we didn’t care about jobs and life and social responsibility, we just cared about having fun, however remote and distant that feeling may be now.

Anyway, after a momentarily diverting interlude which involved placing an electric toothbrush on the end of one’s nose (“it makes your whole head buzz”), Charlotte, my then flatmate announced that what would be really really magnificently weird would be watching the cascade of playing cards that happens at the end of a game of computer solitaire.

Yeah. That would be kind of bizarre looking.

So with all the logic and enthusiasm that an altered state can summon, we switched on my computer and waited approximately four years for it to boot up. It was a very old machine – very very old – running Windows 3.1 and only useful for bashing out the odd essay, playing interminable games of minesweeper and teaching myself to use DOS. It gradually groaned into life, and we both pulled up chairs to the desk and got ready to play.

One thing we hadn’t really figured out was that in order to see the brilliant display of cascading cards, we’d have to play solitaire first – and win. Hard enough when in sober mind, this was not something we were capable of attempting half-cut, although by gum we certainly tried.

And then something odd happened. Charlotte said something frictive, and a little globule of moisture flew from her lips to the screen. It made a trippy pattern on the screen, refracting the light. We both looked at it. She did it again, this time on purpose – “pah!” – and the white screen came alive with rainbow polkadots which changed colour as you moved your head.

Stop for a moment. Let’s do a little experiment, shall we? Lick your index finger. Now dab it on the sceen over there in the white space next to this paragraph. See how it’s made up of lots of different colours, refracted light? Now move your head a bit from side to side and up and down. See how cool that looks (in a really really limited way)? Now imagine you’re off your head. OK, now imagine how thoroughly absorbing this activity was, at quarter to four in the morning, completely munged.

Now, bearing in mind that we were quite wankered – and you may well have been in a similar state yourself, at some point – you’ll forgive and perhaps even understand that we spent a further seven minutes that evening taking it in turns to shout “PAH!” at the monitor and gazing at the results with mirth. You might even forgive the fact that we got a pint glass of water and sat flicking water at the screen, enraptured at the pretty patterns the droplets left behind. But not even the most hardy of partyers could forgive us going to the effort of emptying into a spare teapot and then filling up with water the plant spray thingy from the living room and waving it gleefully in the direction of my poor computer monitor.

See, the thing is (and here’s a lesson in basic electrical engineering for you) – electrical stuff doesn’t get on very well with wet stuff. So with a damp fizzle and a surprised pop, the monitor died on us – no bloody wonder, frankly, and it’s a miracle we weren’t electrocuted in the process, because that would have been a tough one to explain at the autopsy.

My poor monitor died because we were bored (and a bit out of it). My poor, poor monitor.

We shrugged, switched off the machine at the wall and turned to something else for excitement – I don’t remember what; it was about half four in the morning, so it might very well have been sitting on the fire escape outside the house (where you could hang out and just about pretend that you were in a Noo Yawk apartment building, ya know?) counting cars, or something equally scintillating.

The moral of this story is that it wouldn’t have happened if we’d had something to amuse us in our unfortunate half-baked state – like this site, for example, which would have kept us and thousands of other bollocksed students captivated us for simply hours, I swear (and which reminds me in execution of Plumb Design’s eternally brilliant visual thesaurus) – and this is the reason that the Interwebnet is fundamentally a Good Thing, and I curse my studentlike cheapness for not shelling out for a modem until it was too late. Bah.

I miss my guitar.

I’ve had the same twelve-string acoustic since 1990, when I bought it in a small music shop while on holiday in North Wales, and then hauled it over the long ocean to Canada. I chose it because it made a lot of noise – twelve strings always sound more accomplished and polished than six, and you don’t need amplification to busk. I did a lot of busking. On the ferry from Tsawassen to Swartz Bay, I pulled out the guitar and busked Indigo Girls tunes to pay for the bus journey into Victoria.

In 1990, I discovered that the best acoustics were to be found in the bathroom of my college residence: I sat on the counter with my feet in the sink while the steam swirled around me, and I strummed along to my showering peers.

In 1991, I jammed with Valdy beside a cedarwood fire. Later that winter, sitting in the art studio of a friend who was completing his exhibition, I doodled with acrylics on the sides of the instrument – swirling patterns of colours combining. What I didn’t realise is that the paint constricted when dry and changed the sound of the guitar completely. The next day, it sounded like I was strumming on a biscuit tin. I spent another long evening easing the paint off the curves of the guitar with the edge of a plectrum. Peeling away acrylic skin, layer by coloured layer.

I’ve always had a thing about travelling light. I try to take only the smallest backpack – just hand luggage if possible – and few clothes or posessions. Books can be exchanged along the way, knickers washed, sarongs or sarapes bought in place of sheets, towels, skirts, shawls. Taking a guitar was a big thing for me, because it was big instrument – it had to be checked in on planes. In 1992, the guitar travelled with me wherever I went; from northern Canada to Central America via a Great American Road TripTM, a voyage to the Outer Hebrides and extremes of temperature and humidity, extremes of music. I picked up tunes along the way, music to entertain crowds in any and every place – a bit of Nueva Canci�n here, a touch of Leonard Cohen there, a few Scottish folk tunes to roudn off the mix. And my own stuff too, which I was constantly twiddling with. My guitar was my constant travel companion.

Until I met Tom, and settled down.

Tom was an accomplished guitarist, and he knew it. He did twiddly things with his fingers while I was still plodding away without phenomenal skill, but with enormous, infectious passion. That had always been my thing; to inspire others to participate, rather than to bandstand. Tom preferred the limelight – and our relationship wasn’t big enough for two guitars. So he kept playing, while my Tanglewood sat in the corner, gathering dust. I still sang, though the tunes were his choice. He held the melody, and I would tack on a harmony, improvising as we went. We were good together. Our music made sense. It was logical, accomplished, rational. But it lacked passion.

In 1993 I moved to Liverpool, where I ended up living with Sam, who played the guitar in a series of terrible bands with a terrible names. Sam was more into Hawkwind and Hendrix than Nick Drake and John Martyn, and our flat resounded nightly to his elaborate and lengthy riffs. My guitar had made the move with me, but the time between my caresses seemed to get longer and longer.

By 1994 I was barely playing at all. It seemed futile and embarrassing to hammer out my crowd-pleasing run-of-the-mill stuff when those around me could stun and amaze with their talent and virtuosity. Better to keep quiet.

In 1995, I moved to Spain, and then Bolivia. Guitars weren’t nearly as commonplace as they were on the student scene in the UK, and I gradually found it easier to do my turn at parties, borrowing any guitar to hand. I made no pretence to be able to play with the skill of the flamenquinos or charanguistas, but I had a clear advantage in my favour: I could hack out most REM and U2 songs – in English. I cannot count how many times I heard the phrase “sabes tocar…?” followed by the name of a song by anyone from Bryan Adams to Alanis Morrissette.

By 1996, I’d figured out how to deal with requests. They’d name the song, and I’d then transpose it to three basic chords (all great western music is written on three chords; don’t let anyone tell you different). Then after the second verse and chorus, during the bridge, I’d translate the lyrics on the fly, or make up a rough approximation:

“…�se es yo en la esquina, perdiendo mi religi�n….”

“….deseo ejecutarme…deseo ocultarme…deseo rasgar abajo las paredes que me sostienen adentro…deseo vivir en una pampa alta, donde las calles no tienen ning�n nombre…”

“no es ir�nico, no pienses?”

“…era seis pies y cuatro y lleno de m�sculos….le dije ‘habla mi lenguaje?’ y �l sonri� y me dio un bocadillo del vegemite…”

“…sabes que si…todo lo que hago, lo hago por ti…”

“…en tu cabeza….tu cabeza…zombi…zombi…”

By 1997 I was back in the UK and though my guitar still moved with me from home to home, it had become more like a piece of furniture that helped me to define my living space than an instrument of creative expression.

In 1998 a close friend of mine said she was thinking of taking up the guitar, and I pressed my own into her hands willingly, as an extended loan. I wasn’t really using it, I reasoned, and she’d be doing me a favour. Guitars have to be played, just as much as pearls need to be worn.

We lost touch in 1999, when she moved away.

Now it’s ten years since I bought my lovely tanglewood twelvestring – it’s a little worse for wear, and there are probably more knocks and scratches on its smooth surface than a decent guitar should have. The soundboard is a little warped from too many journeys through extremes of climate and if you look closely, you can probably still see a few flecks of coloured acrylic paint around the body. But I would know its sound anywhere. The feel of its hard strings on my fingers is like a familiar lover’s touch. It’s been two years since I last picked it up. And I miss it.

Some aspects of student house-sharing are more guaranted to cause stress, stomach ulcers, hernias, rifts, stabbings and other unpleasant social phenomena than others. Leaving a polite amount of milk is irritating, surreptitiously moving a girlfriend or boyfriend into the flat can annoy and completely failing to wash up ever is virtually guaranteed to grate (and probably cause an outbreak of salmonella) but as unpleasant as these acts are, they all pale into insignificance in comparison with the true student horror – the ritual splitting of bills.

Students, as you may already know through experience or observation, do not have much money. Educational priorities such as indian wall hangings, hair dye, beer and recreational drugs often mean that a student will reach the end of term eating spaghetti and vinegar, or fluttering eyelashes at mum & dad. You can bet that beer consumption will not decrease, though – there is always enough cash for a cheeky pint.

In an example of supremely bad organisation, the end of term generally coincides with the arrival of bills – phone, electricity, gas – unlike rent, which is usually (wisely) paid in advance, when students are relatively flush – or at least were, when grants were doled out on the first tuesday of term – “What’s this? Free money? Why thankyou! (Mine’s a pint of cider)” – the arrival of bills in the skint dog-end of term, however, is a nervous and fraught time, which inevitably leads to The Great Division Of Bills.

Each bill will have been issued in one person’s name, which means that they will be the one who gets chased by the bailiffs for failing to cough up. Although equally, risking a bad credit rating (and surviving) as a student tends to go down well with mortgage lenders when you get old and fat and boring (two years after you graduate). Go figure.

But the person with their name on the bill will have it in their best interests to divide and pay the bill as quickly as possible, which means that in their house-mates’ eyes they magically transform from NiceResponsibleFriend into EvilBitchTryingToScrewMeOutOfBeerMoney.

Gas bills tend to be the easiest to divide, as no-one can figure out what the complicated measurements and calculations on the bill mean- and besides, it’s only sixty quid, and in a house of six, that comes to just over five pints each, which seems fair enough.

Phone bills tend to be more complicated, though. The simple rule of thumb is that the phone bill will always bear no relevance to what you were expecting. This is because of the second rule of phone bills, which dictates that you will always use it more than you imagine. However, given that only one person in each house-share will have an aging relative in Penrith, it’s relatively simple to figure out who owes for what.

Until, that is, you come to the local numbers. Oddly, it tends to be the pizza delivery number that inspires the first scrap. All of you wanted pizza. All of you ate it. So who pays the 0.042p that the call cost? Likewise, even after everybody has claimed their respective calls and divied up for them, there will always be an outstanding £8.92 which no-one wants to claim responsibility for (or indeed pay).

But you’d think that the electricity bill would be the easiest bill of all to divide up and cough up for, wouldn’t you? I mean, after all, everyone uses electricity, and you kind of need it. But oh no.

In my second year of university, I shared a house in Penny Lane, Liverpool, with five blokes. On reflection, this wasn’t the smartest move I’d ever made, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I vastly underestimated how bad it could be. In the three months I lived in that house, all manner of random and worrying things occurred – which I won’t go into here, as they’d make far better fodder for another story. I moved in in September, and left in January, when I moved to Spain – which may seem a little extreme, but was infinitely preferable to communal living lad-style. For the most part, they were just rowdy and untidy, and I could deal with that at the time, no problem. But when the bills came around, life turned very very bad indeed.

Paul, a long-haired geordie architect-in-training, and usually the most laid-back person in the house, announced a couple of weeks before the christmas holiday that he was going to take a reading from the electricity meter before he left, and then another one when he got back, and that he would deduct that amount from his share of the bill when it arrived next term. Cue bewildered faces in the living room. You *what*?

He explained that it wasn’t fair to expect him to pay for electricity while he wasn’t there, because he was going away for all three weeks holiday, while others (like me) were working right up to Christmas Eve and then dashing home across the Pennines for the festivities, returning on Boxing Day so we could (in my case) flog books to well-fed liverpudlians during the sales. It didn’t strike him as odd in the slightest to ferret about in the cupboard under the stairs looking for the meter, in order to save himself a few pence on the next bill.

Sam, one of two philosophy students in the house (the other one also, confusingly, called Sam, and also with long hair and a band – the two were only differentiated by their accents – Sam S was from Preston, Sam B was from Gloucester) pointed out that he’d been away for a long weekend the month before. I chipped in that I’d been in New York for two weeks in October, and away just about every weekend at my boyfriend’s place. This cut no mustard with Paul, who started making noises about how people would use more electricity in December, because of there being more on television. This was a spectacularly weak argument – but not as weak as the next one he pulled out, about how because the weather was colder, people might use electric blankets, which cost a ton to heat up.

“Hang on a minute,” I said, “hands up everyone who’s got an electric blanket in this house.” No one raised an arm. “Any other heating devices?” Nothing. “OK then, I don’t think we need to worry about that. Next.”

The conversation went nowhere – Paul was adamant about his budget-cutting measures, and everyone else thought he was a loon. So after a couple of days of flogging that particular dead horse, raising his apparent insanity at any opportunity, we took a different tack. Sam put up a sheet of paper on the door to the cupboard under the stairs. I attached a pen with a bit of string. Mike, our resident Welsh (“I’m not Welsh! I’m from bloody Wrexham!”) engineering student sellotaped a calculator to the doorknob. Every time someone left the house, they crawled into the cupboard, took a reading, and noted it down. When they came in, they took another reading, and gradually the page filled up with elaborate calculations of kilowatt hours and units and VAT and all sorts, saved.

Soon, and probably inspired by the coming festive season and frequent indulgence in recreational substances, things got even more ridiculous. Sam B was the first to stand up, halfway through a movie, stretch and say “I’m not watching this anymore. I’m going to go take a meter reading so I don’t end up paying for the rest of this shit.” We giggled, but he went and did it anyway. Soon, we were trying to out-do each other, much to Paul’s bemusement, taking readings when someone used the microwave, boiled the kettle, switched off their desklamp – Mike sat in the dark for two days, saying “If you want the light on, you’ll have to pay for it. I’m happy in the dark, man…” and I caught Sam S using a headtorch to brew up one evening, a spotlight on the mug in the dark kitchen.

The joke stretched so far that eventually there were pages and pages of numbers and ruled lines and workings-out attatched to the meter. Christmas came and went. The bill arrived. We attached the mighty sheaf of calculations to the bill and left it on Paul’s desk, to figure out when he came back from holiday. There was a week of silence, and then he split the bill six ways, meekly, and paid up. The whole incident was never mentioned again.

Who did/do you live with at university, if you went?