CND, RCP, SWSO

The day has gone by innocuously enough; Lee atoned for the last night by rolling up at one and we went into Watermouth with Barry. An unpleasant Saturday afternoon near Christmas, the town awash with people. Around the Attlee Square clock tower a large group of students had gathered in the road and were singing in aid of peace. Crowds of people thronged around them—contempt and amusement from some—the traffic tailing back in several directions. All the University SWSO crowd were there: ‘dog-faced’ Mickey with the mohican, Martin Hegarty, Guy’s friend Felicity . . .

Lee and Barry and I were full of scorn for them—as if ANYONE will listen; it’s like preaching peace and morality to a psychopath with a machine gun. Sitting in the street is useless. When Heseltine had his face splashed with red paint on a recent visit to Manchester University, the CND bureaucracy predictably condemned the act as “intolerant.” CND will go on singing and linking hands until the fateful Day itself, all their undoubted commitment and sincerity smashed to pieces against the brick wall of the State. And I suppose on this point, I agree with the RCP.

I was spending money “like a man with no arms” as the saying goes, and somehow I’ve got through a little under £40 in two days. I’m now £150 overdrawn. I wrote to Mum and Dad about the year abroad, and in my letter I hope I made my position clear. I also wrote a typical sort of letter to Claire.

Michael P. had stayed at Lee’s halls watching a Jimmy Cagney film and was summoned by a telephone call. We met him in an amusement arcade near the seafront. I’ve only met him once before, a brief moment at Easterby Art College when I paid a visit with Grant last Easter. He had long hair down to his shoulders back then, but now wears it slicked back with a parting down the middle, ‘twenties fashion. He’s thin and small and looked quaint in a black tuxedo jacket, grey waistcoat and white shirt and bowtie. He doesn’t speak much, but when he does it’s with a heavy Easterby accent that’s music to my ears.

We walked home.

How hard it is to really know anyone in this life

What have I done today? Very little.

I got up at two and sat about idly, winding Pete up most of the day. . . . I’ve done no reading lately and I’ve quite let work and other things slip. I started off the term well but things have deteriorated.

I’ve got to read the 200-odd pages of Hermsprong for tomorrow at eleven a.m., but it’s nearly half-ten already and I’m only on page 26 and so I may have to stay up all night.

Barry has gone to Masquerades by himself. Earlier today he went round to see the girl he met at the Cellar and she and her friends are going to the club tonight too, so Barry once again sets out with raised hopes. Ade returned today to tell us his “love life is just about going again”; he’s in Barry’s room listening to records.

I keep pretending both to myself and to others that at the end of the year I’m going to shave my head and give up all drugs and drink, but I should realise that this would require more mental resolution and effort than I’m capable of . . . Why would I want to do this?. . .

It’s not important.

I still can’t decide about America—I wish I could make up my mind. I can’t even answer this simple question, so what hope for me? Decisions! Current financial position: £104 overdrawn . . . I look at Grant’s poems and they make me think how hard it is to really know anyone in this life.

This diary says so little. No doubt there are innumerable thoughts and passing shades of mood that have touched me and marked the last two days, but my words have such limited power against the great yawning gulfs of time they strive to combat. One day when I read these words again I’ll curse my lack of skill at fleshing out these transitory moments. What’s clear now won’t be when the surrounding chaff of living and peripheral thoughts have been swallowed up by the years.

This narrative is dull and uninspired because I’m a bit drunk on the whisky Mo brought back from London as her payment towards rent.

Pasmore

Poor prospects for the year abroad. I went to a meeting at twenty to four with Colin Pasmore, who’s in charge of year abroad arrangements. I was told that that mine, Guy’s and Pete’s first choice of Miskatonic is very highly subscribed and it’s doubtful we’ll all be there together.

Next on the list would be Camden College in Vermont. Students are coming back from America with £800-plus in debt. I was asked about my money situation and I said I felt guilty asking Mum and Dad to fork out this sum on top of the £1000 they contribute towards my grant.

Exemption from the year abroad would be “no problem” says Colin Pasmore: I would just slot straight in with the final years and take my finals in May 1985, a year earlier.

I also met Mr. Carwardine and apologised to him for missing last Thursday’s tutorial, some lie about illness and a note that wasn’t delivered. He was quite OK about it and told me what’s due for next week (Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley).

We have a reading break this week. I got away with it.

Big E

My tutorial went well and I enjoyed it. In the afternoon after this had finished, I went back to Wollstonecraft Hall, for the first time since I left, for the second meeting of the newly organised American Studies Society that has been put together to help lessen the culture shock for those going to the USA.

There were several fourth years there, and the average amount each has come back owing is £800. The rest of the American Studies first years seem, on the whole, a pretty wanky lot. Pete and I took a look at the prospectus for Miskatonic U.; it’s a vast campus housing tens of thousands of students and dominated by twenty-five-storey accommodation blocks It’s the only University Guy, Pete and I can go to together, as American Studies History and American Lit. people get different campus choices.

Afterwards I went into Watermouth and met Lee in Room 312 of the Art College, right on the top floor. We wandered around town and L. ended up climbing into a derelict house on Barker Street right in the centre of Watermouth; he found two bound volumes of Punch magazine for July-December 1925 and 1926, plus a couple of envelopes full of the most pornographic porn I’ve ever seen, advertisements for magazines with titles such as “Cum” & “Girls Who Take it Up The Ass,” “Girls Who Eat Cum” - incest mags, bestiality mags, gay mags, all featuring explicit (with a big E) cover photographs of girls sucking on enormous cocks, a Chinese girl (?) with breasts and a huge erection raping a bloke up the arse, etc.

I couldn’t stop wondering what actually motivates people to be photographed doing such things . . . What goes through their minds?

Barry, Lindsey and Shelley and I went out for a drink on Wessex Road in the evening and I felt a great sadness creep over me about leaving England in nine months time, an echo of that quasi-sentimental and over-sensitive moodiness I experienced the last week of term last June.