Blame it on the chav!
I figure I better report, for the benefit of Theobold Cecil Davies and my girl Amy, all that they missed of a weekend, for all that they were missed during it therein and such so to speak.
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My version of events by Dan (me)…
The weekend begins on a bus to Cambridge with Danny. This bus journey lasts three and a half hours. They call it the ‘vomit comet’, though I wasn’t even remotely woozy so they’ve embarrassed themselves there. It takes us via Milton Keynes of all places. It gets pelted with a big stone by some chavy youths in an underpass. Be warned, I will use the word ‘chav’ a lot, the reason for which may or may not be explained later.
Yes, so this big bus gets us in at around 8 pm. Just in time to find a pub. This takes about an hour. Danny and I sink a couple in there, waiting around for Nick and Tom, who duly arrive with squeals and kisses. They bring Tom Winter and friend (of whom I know not the name, though I have met him several times and find him extremely agreeable). Together Tom and I sit and talk mainly about http://www.garageband.com/artist/catsinthealley, alienating us from the rest of the group. Danny notices this and will not hesitate to point out at every turn throughout the weekend how we’re a pair of layabout losers, pinning all our hopes and dreams on the whim of college band Americana and hanging like spunk brothers on their every cretinous idiocy. He’s not wrong. He’s still a bum hole.
On to Emanuel College bar, for a couple more scoops and the procuring of six bottles of wine (for later, y’know what I mean?), three of which were opened on speck in order to make Julian’s DJ night in the cellars of Kings College more bearable (he warned me the venue might be grotty). Wine is wolfed en route, the rest are smuggled in past the porter’s lodge. Get there just in time for Julian to say “where were you cunts”, or something to that effect. It is by now 11pm. We had failed him. Sam’s head hangs, though I think more as a direct result of all the joints he was rolling, than out of any kind of shame or self-loathing. The ‘gig’ was up. Julian had passed the baton of DJness on to the next guy, so we hang on till the end of the night. I say ‘we’, Tom, Nick and Sam fuck off to the Kam Bar. Thence there happens to happen an amusing episode involving me, a bunch of churlish German student prigs and a bottle of red.
As I am attempting to dance in that self-conscious way that can only be remedied by: “Tierney! MORE WINE…!”, I notice that one of our unopened bottles has disappeared. “Hmm… that’s odd” I think to myself, “do you think someone took the wine? How could anyone just take a bottle of wine?” Plenty of people. This is Cambridge. This is a place where bored people with more credit cards than they can slot up their arses smash in windows indiscriminately, all for self-glorification. This is a place where friends in these people’s party choose to turn a blind eye. Well done Sam for trying to confront that guy. You’re ace, though I’m glad you weren’t bottled. Anyway, I digress…. I’m just on my way up through the college bar to get to the toilets, when I notice the same bottle of red on the top of one of the pool tables. For anyone who’s seen the ‘Curb’ episode ‘Ted and Mary’ the exact same thing happens when Larry sees the guy wearing his sneakers. I nudge up to them and say to one of the girls “Excuse me this is my wine, I’m just going to take it back if you don’t mind”. To which she replies “Oh, I think - let’s call him Kurt for the sake of argument - it’s Kurt’s” and pointed to some bloke with an entourage in the corner. I pick the wine up, go over to him and this is the ensuing conversation:
ME:“Just wondering why you’ve got a bottle of my wine?”
HIM: “Oh, no… erm… that’s mine”.
ME: “No, I’m quite sure it’s mine”.
HIM: “I’ll tell you what, you can have it.”
ME: “Thank you very much.”
I go back down to the cellar and wait for nod to go to the Kam bar. Cuing outside the club I’m frustrated and feel bad about showing my frustration. Julian calms me down as only he can with the assurance that he can get us in for free. Unfortunately, he isn’t banking on the doorman being a prize cock (“Oh really? You DJ here! Do lots of music nights! That’s nice!”). Instead of being free it’s a fiver to get in and a quid to put my bag in the cloakroom. And I also sub Julian a quid to get in. He pays me back. Highlight of the sweaty hour we spend is Sam (who is by now very much gone) coming up to our table, taking off his coat and jumper, putting it around his chair, sitting down, standing up, putting on his jumper and coat and leaving, but not before nearly comically tripping head first into some people on bean bags.
We pile into a cab sans Sam who is hanging outside the club with people he knows, vaguely. Julian thinks he’s gone with us; we think he’s gone with Julian. To cut a long series of nonsensical phone calls short, he wakes up the next morning in an unspecified common room, and phones me asking what to do. Sam is not annoyed, he’s just hugely confused. Nick manages to direct him up to Girton, where he arrives and waits beneath two trees where he can’t be seen by Nick who’s waiting to let him at the lodge but 50 yards away. Honestly. Idiots. Meanwhile, Sam is phoning Tom’s mobile every 2 minutes getting evermore frustrated: “This is absolutely ridiculous! How long does it take to come down and let me in!”. I’m paraphrasing. This bit is a lot funnier than I can describe here. We kiss and make up. We’re all in morning-after-drunken-orgy bliss. We stink up Nick’s room, say “viiirrrrrd!” a few more times and go for a hearty college lunch.
I would explain the whole “viiirrrrrrd” thing but I’m running out of energy. This thing is far longer than I anticipated (That’s what she…). I suppose I’m not helping matters by including things like this. And I’ve just noticed how my vocab has gone down the pan.
At lunch Sam decides to take the literal meaning of mange tout by forcing all the mange tout on his plate into his mouth at the same time. Needless to say, he regurgitates most of it back into a paper serviette. We laugh very much throughout this grossly inappropriate yet highly amusing episode. Tom, Nick and Danny get the bus into town; Sam and I decide to walk in for a bit of exercise, holding a very edifying discussion about religion and politics. Back to knob gags by the time we all meet up together in a pub, as we wait for Mark and Julian to turn up. They do so; we go back to Julian’s and make James a birthday card which we subsequently forget to take with us. On it, Danny draws a fish with a monacle turning into a cock in a glass. There’s a whole other thing going on with Danny. The offer of tea is proffered, oranges are juggled and thyme is snorted in the kitchen. And so we head off to the train station for a quick ride down to Stortford, where James’ party is to be held. Sadly, this is where Sam’s part of the story ends, though he does make a brief reappearance when we’re on the train by sending each of us in turn insulting texts. Nick also regrettably decides not to go no further. We’d already ruined the rest of his university life with our juvenile approach to simple things like eating lunch. He could take us no longer. Got to admire that.
We get to James’. Leave to get booze. Get back. I will now list the things I remember about the night from then on.
1. Seeing Ritchie again. Him telling us about him having a line in the latest HP movie. I point out the parallel with Kramer (“These pretzels are making me thirsty”).
2. Listening to Danny babble nonsense about his giant cock.
3. James telling Julian he looks like Peter Cook.
4. Danny pointing to the Christmas lights on the shed at the bottom of the garden, saying they’re used to “entice children”.
5. Being introduced to a chav work mate of James’ who kipped on the floor with everyone (more about this later), “alright govna?”
6. Listening to Danny babble nonsense about his giant pulsating cock.
7. Confronting Damien about the time he sprayed shaving foam over my face in the middle of the night on a boat going to Hamburg, and it blowing up in my face. The confrontation, not the shaving foam.
8. Listening to Danny go on endlessly about his throbbing, veiny cock.
9. Damien dancing over my face shaking his hands in a trance and me starring back at him bemused. (I don’t actually remember this - Tom told me all about it in the morning)
10. Danny’s cock (shit, that was the bad thing…).
I put that last one in for a Joke. I wake up to the sound of that chav complaining about at least three people snoring like baboons and talking about how there’s someone sprawled out on the kitchen flood. It could have only been one person. I go back to sleep. Am woken again by that chav telling James he had to go and play football, which he did, but not before all six or so of us are wide-eyed and wanting morning refreshment. For Tom, Mark, Julian and me this means tea; for James and Danny this means cracking open bottle of chilled white wine.
We sit, watch ‘Curb’ and ‘The Day Today’ and reminisce about the night’s frolicking. Some of us are still pissed; one or two of us are very pissed. We talk about a song that was played that included the Lyrics “Rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape…” I say that I remembered it vaguely, though it may also have just been Danny. Julian remarks about how my nipples are in a continual state of erection. I feel self-conscious, in the gaze of five men, though I can’t put my jeans back on because some drunken moron has spilled wine all over them. I blame that chav. I have to sit in just my tight H&M pants and a t-shirt for the rest of the morning. After a bit of tidying up, Mark and Julian head off at around lunch time - Mark to London; Julian to Cambridge. Tom, Danny and I stay with James till the evening, talking mainly about chavs, reaching the same conclusion: “Blame it on the chav”. The guy at the party we called “that chav” wasn’t even really a chav. He just had a southern accent. That is what is funny. Equating all southerners with chavs. As soon as we’d said “chav” once on the Friday night (both Tom and I remarked that it was the first time we’d ever verbalised it), the flood gates opened. It is also at this time that James came up with a corker of a drunken quote: “If I had one eyebrow, I’d sit and listen to The Lightening Seeds all day.”
All three of us got the train back to Cambridge, before heading off to our respective destinations. Danny and I discovered that we missed the last bus back and so had to get the train all the way back into London and, from there, the bus back to Oxford. This bit is all boring really.
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There it is. I hope you manage to feel somehow part of it even though you were sorely missed.
Thanks to all you guys for making it a weekend to remember. Thanks especially to Nick and to James for being so hospitable and for being such a laugh.
On another note, Sam phoned me up today, telling me that he’d just bumped into Kevin Eldon (again) and thinks he may be able to pinpoint the exact street on which he lives. Also, I’m going with Danny to see Richard Herring who’s playing in Oxford tomorrow night.
Signing out!
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