Kind of blue

Last night Alex brought over Jamie, a small wiry maths student who's pale and strange-looking with ragged black matted hair and a straggly beard. He was wearing an Afghan coat and a big heavy-knit pullover. When not talking he opened and closed his mouth as if taking puffs on an invisible 'spleef ' (as he pronounces it). Alex bought some stuff off him and I contributed £3.

Afterwards, Alex and I went out to Biko's (in the basement of Rousseau) and we got quite drunk on cider. Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue was playing in the bar and a girl named Zoe from sarf London talked to me. My conversation flowed readily for once. . . . We strode out into the night air still carrying half-finished drinks, the campus alive now to the sounds of pissed, shouting people wandering home. We met up with Barry and the others and bundled after them into parties where people crammed the stairs and I climbed through a window and searched for something to drink before we finally went back to Alex’s room where we ended up having quite a session.

We had just finished doing hot-knives in the kitchen when Catrin fled from the room and we heard a thud and someone went out to find her lying on the ground. Someone else said she'd spun round and round and face butted the wall and she was blathered in mud all up one side. She was taken to her room and Jamie comforted her as while she sobbed and apologised on the bed.

By this time I’d already thrown up because of the smoke & drink (I stuck my head out the window and let it all spatter down below), and after we retired back to the kitchen I threw up again. I felt really tired, sleepy and befuddled, but I couldn’t work out whether it was the booze or something else. We left the kitchen, seized on some pillows, and crept down corridors on theatrical tiptoes, pillows over shoulders, softly chanting “pillow-beating-Russ-Russ” because we planned on bursting in on him and bludgeoning him as he laid in bed, but we couldn’t remember which one was his room. We were reduced to stifled hysterics in the corridor.

I eventually got to bed at 5.20.

Today I visited the Societies Fair in Watermouth Hall. I've joined the Buddhist meditation society (I have to do something decisive) and I got talked into going to a meeting of Troops Out. I contemplated joining the Film Society and Hunt Saboteurs but I'm suspicious of ineffective and clichéd student protest. There’s still time.