Phoenix

Barry, Ade and I called round to the Art College to see Lee. We found him in room 312 hunched over a tidy grey and black Remington Rand typewriter newly acquired for £15 second-hand from a nearby shop.

We left B. and A. battling on Phoenix and walked the few hundred yards to the shop where I bought an angle-poise lamp for £3. Lee’s Easterby Art College friend Michael Pugh was coming down at six-thirty, so I arranged to meet them both in The Quayside at 7.30. Much to my annoyance, they didn’t show up and so I sat for an hour alone in the crowded noisy pub listening to two girls arguing about the merits/demerits of some bloke they had both been going out with.

At half-eight I wandered down to The Anchor to meet Pete, Mo, Ade, Barry, Guy and Kamran and we went to two pretty crappy parties, the first one at 29 University Gardens, where we went over the top a bit and had a water fight on the back verandah, bombarding Guy and Barry who cowered down below in a doorway. I nearly crushed a little girl whose drunken tearful mum, for some reason alien to me, had brought her along to what must’ve been a very unpleasant, frightening place, full of loud, stupid people looming up out of the throbbing gloom. As a result, words were exchanged between our lot and a rugby-type who voiced the opinion that he thought we ought to “clear off.”

Party no. 2 was equally crap, a laid-back affair near White Deer Park, the rooms thick with the smell of dope, everything very silly as parties usually are, everyone hugging and laughing and screeching.