Sunday 8 January 2012

My girlfriends and other animals

Karen's parents were away on a six-week Hoseason self catering cruise giving us the freedom to play happy couples in between hours of endless revision. As we lay in each other’s arms, she with taught boyish buttocks nestled into the faux fur oversized bean bag, me my trembling buttocks precariously hanging on for dear life in fear of sliding off the tactile slope of happiness, we dreamt of all the awards we would one day pick up.

‘And this year’s Oscar winners for their portrayal of Spear Carriers number one and two in Spielberg’s ‘Encounters of the third Spear’ goes to William and Karen now joined at the pelvis who share best actor and actress since becoming inseparable due to Karen’s surgical detachment from Chris (previously known singularly and collectively as ‘Chris and Karen’) and whose reattachment to William (soon to be known singularly and collectively as Will and Kaz) has created a quite outstanding tour de force.  APPLAUSE.

‘Thank you all so much, we’d like to thank everyone we’ve ever known’ and so it went on. We were blissfully happy, blissfully unaware, blissfully self indulgent, we were so full of bliss, when out of the blue I received a telephone call from a college I’d auditioned for earlier in the year.

‘We keep some places back for students who really impressed us at interview and we’d like to offer you a place to read English and Drama’

             I couldn’t believe it. Somebody actually wanted me. I’d finally impressed someone. But this college was number seventeen on my list of places I never wanted to study at. Not if they were the last college on earth would I contemplate going there.

'Thanks very much, when would you like me to start?'

             I later found out that of course there were no places kept back for exceptional auditionees , only places left over they couldn’t fill and rather than leave empty and risk losing funding they filled them with the thicko’s and total wasters who ordinarily the college wouldn’t  touch with a barge pole .

             When I told Karen of my imminent departure she was devastated beyond devastation. Hours upon heartbroken hours were spent crying and kissing, kissing and crying.  Fate had thrown us together and fate would cruelly tear us apart. We didn’t need a University to teach us about life. Karen’s parents Rose Royce album was our Alma Mater, showering us with wisdom and guidance. Our tears cascaded onto the vinyl of despair as ‘love don’t live here anymore’ comforted us with its prophetic musings.

               When I left the following Friday bound for Crewe, Karen came to see me off.  We cried some more, our tears now threatening to become cavernous stalagmites. We told each other we’d never find another love like ours, that one day we’d meet again and whatever life threw at us we were now singularly and collectively as one.

              Well what a load of bollocks that all was! The Friday evening of the Friday afternoon of the most devastating Friday of our Singular and collective lives saw heartbroken Karen in attendance at David Bartletts ‘going away’ bash with fifty other successful undergraduates who were all looking ahead to a place at one of their top three chosen Universities. Obviously the emotion of total devastation and loss for me had overwhelmed Karen to such an extent that she quite understandably felt the need to seek comfort, legs wrapped around David, his hairy white arse pumping for all his worth.

             I just wish I had found this out at the beginning of term rather than at the end and certainly prior to buying Athena’s entire cuddly toy department on my newly acquired credit card. Cow!  In a way I think she was far too nice a person to tell me to my face ,that I’d only ever been a fill-in during the summer holidays, and that in a strange way she was helping by allowing me to run up hundreds of pounds on my credit card on twenty seven  assorted stuffed bears. COW! Mother was furious of course when the statement arrived and promptly cut up my four and half weeks of independence. For the next three years I would receive an allowance by recorded delivery to be picked up at the bursars lodge on the last day of every month. On the days it was supposed to arrive and didn’t my culinary skills were put to good use varying my diet from dry Shreddies to Shreddies with brown sauce. But what did it matter? What did any of it matter? I was at my seventeenth choice of further education and ready to study… get pissed…and study…get paralytic…and study… rekindle my acquaintance with my donkey derby friend.

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