31 Postcodes - Poem 12

 

Ugliness

 

This is it? No way.

This miserable place

with the roughest carpet tiles,

the stifled dialogue,

so much pushing?

 

Long laboured traditions,

bowler hats, forbidden lawns,

bad bars, worse clubs,

and, gowns or no gowns,

some criminal catering.

 

At night drunken teams

fall low to their knees,

pissing contests for real

that they never wipe clean.

That’s their pattern.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

The university I was heading to was Cambridge and this was one reason I did come back from Spain in 1986. They make such a fuss about how hard it is to get in there that a part of me did want to see what it was like for real (plus my Mum was so excited, like really, really excited). For the first year I chose a room in college (the university is split into 31 colleges, like little boarding schools in a way, if very rich and well equipped ones, each with a refectory, library, chapel, common rooms, residences etc.). The college I was in was something in between the modern (twentieth century) ones at one end of the spectrum and the famous, photogenic, palatial ones at the other. Ours, when I arrived in 1986, seemed to be a bland but angry place (or maybe the angry was partly me – I wasn’t exactly pleased to be back in England after my first taste of, well, anywhere else). And this strange little city-village in East Anglia certainly was a change from the warm, relaxed, diverse atmosphere I had enjoyed in Madrid. I had a room in the modern block you can see in the photo above (couldn't get Google for this one, had to take a virtual tour). It was in a corridor of single rooms (not in a flat) which I had chosen (unseen) because the rooms had en-suite bathrooms and I loved the idea of my own place to wash. This was in the very early days of en-suites in the UK (now they are expected even in most cheap hotels) but back then it was pretty unusual for student rooms to have them, even in fancy Cambridge. The university used a lot of their rooms for conferences in the summer so the newer accommodation was being better equipped with this in mind. 

I’m sorry if it sounds ungrateful but from the start of my time at the university very little about it appealed to me. It was very sporty (so much rugby and rowing talk), it was very posh (stripey shirts and brogues, Pimms garden parties in summer, every fecker going skiing in the winter) and it felt very stunted, like such a tiny part of the population was so overrepresented. You might say ‘what did I expect?’ but I really had expected something else – I had believed the hype that it would be full of just really smart people. Of course there were some very intelligent students (and plenty far smarter than me I’m sure) but there were others who seemed to be just really, really good at being posh (and they seemed so old, almost preserved, so it was a bit like being in some kind of museum-cum-care home). And some of them were so vicious about the rest of society (again this might not be surprising, especially considering the state of the current Westminster government) but I hadn’t really come into contact with this particular kind of privileged English people before (certainly not such giant packs of them). 

Also some of the sports teams behaved very badly, not only, but especially, when they were drunk. The pissing in the poem really did happen – there was a geeky guy on my floor (long before geekiness/nerdiness was any kind of cool) and a rugby team night out decided they would all piss under his door (onto the delightful carpet tiles mentioned in the poem – who would think this was funny?). At Cambridge the campus rooms have cleaners (and of course there’s a specifically Cambridge name for them – ‘bedders’ in this case, and they still use it because I found an article in the student paper about them from 2019) and ours was a lovely, not young, woman who had to face this horror the next day. I remember her crying, as you would expect. This was not the brightest and best young people but the meanest and least caring. It was horrible.

I was studying Spanish and Russian and the languages faculty felt particularly uninspiring and ski-infested at times so I mainly made friends with people who were studying politics or English and got involved in student politics too (there was plenty to fight against and there were some pretty amazing people involved too). The organised social life was pretty limited (“drinks after chapel?” “hell no to both”) but I found some friends pretty quickly and we stayed in our tiny tribe a lot of the time. We listened to a lot of music, ranted more than a little, drank too much, ranted a little more. We went on lots of protests, sold Nicaraguan coffee in the market square, watched incomprehensible Russian films, wound the toffs up as much as we could, maybe acted a little too much like Rick from The Young Ones now and then. You know, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all…

In the second year I shared a house with three friends, so tomorrow come and join me for a plate of overcooked pasta and half a pint of Southern Comfort*. And who could turn down an offer like that?

*I don’t know why I suddenly got a taste for this sickly spirit aged 20 but I did. I think it was partly laziness – it comes ready mixed.

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.