Thoughts on getting old

Last night Gareth, Stu and I set off for the Phoenix cinema to see Andy Warhol’s Bad and Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital. Graeme caught up with us before we'd reached the train station. We had a couple of drinks in two pubs near the station and for a moment even contemplated stealing a taxi as it stood, door open and engine running while the driver nipped inside, but we dithered too long and he came back out.

The films were quite good and I was glad we’d gone to see them. Bad was about an agency run by a middle-aged lady that dealt in revenge and was especially sick (mutilations, pet-murder, etc.), but it was all done in a blackly comic and somehow slightly fantastic way.

It was well past 3 a.m. when the films ended and we got a taxi back to campus. Lindsey, Shelley and Rowan were still up; Barry was asleep on Shelley’s bed. Rowan had taken speed and was writing, writing in her room her “thoughts on getting old.” She'd written seven sides by the time I eventually went to bed at five. Right before I did, Tim’s friend Stefan went belting up the corridor to the fag machine and, not able to stop in time, plunged headfirst through the window at the end. After standing up and brushing glass from his clothes he wandered away bewildered but unhurt.

I awoke in the afternoon to bright skies and cheerful sun. I got another letter from Grant, written as usual on a sheet torn out from a calendar. He sounds pissed off with work and the whole Easterby scene. I went round to give Pete his letters, knocked, and blundered in to find, to my excruciating embarrassment, Mo in bed and Pete washing at the sink. I fumbled an apology and fled.

We had the usual game of football up at the airhall late in the afternoon; I spent most of the match in goal and our side won 11-6.