Oliver's writing

Guide to Fresher's week

2007-11-07T16:48:54+01:00

This was published in Pi Magazine 660, September 06.

Freshers’ week has become part of our national heritage; it is our cultural rite of passage for young people. In distant Amazonian tribes, young warriors might jump over flames, jettison their foreskins or impale unsuspecting woodland creatures on large sticks; in Britain, freshers drink themselves to a vegetative condition in the company of near strangers, before crawling to an unlikely establishment (police station / primary school / hospice) to hurl up carrot-shaped lumps on the doorstep. It is at once hideous and glorious; or so the media would have you believe.

Last year, when preparing for UCL, I came across a guide to Freshers’ week in the Times. I’ve since lost it, however I remember that it written by some Crispin Hyphen-Smythe character, who - despite having no first hand experience of University since streaking around an Oxbridge quadrangle in the late 19th century - was clearly determined to relive his misspent youth vicariously by writing a poorly informed guide to Freshers’ week. The advice started out straight-forward enough - send parents home at soonest possible opportunity, ensure when unpacking CDs they remain in alphabetical order - until it came to social intercourse, where Crispins’ ideas went something like this;

‘After unpacking your bags, you may be tempted to nap on your new bed, however head to the kitchen to meet your new friends; make sure to bring a bottle of something, and condoms!’

Sat between piles of half-filled Tupperware containers and Cardboard boxes back at home, I found it hard to imagine myself wandering into the kitchen, finding some beautiful stranger before going at it ruthlessly on the Smeg cooker, Morrisons’ own-brand White Lightning still in hand. Needless to say, I failed the test when I found myself sat in the kitchen, silently sipping tea with people from Guilford and feeling only vaguely disappointed.

Freshers’ week is, nonetheless, unique. At no other point in your adult life will you and your contemporaries be thrown into a social melting pot and be given nothing to do but run riot for a whole week. This artificiality does however have its down-side. Sat in a room where you know no-one, it’s a reasonably safe bet that the first person confident enough to speak will be the biggest twat in the room, happily marshalling the flow of conversation and intimidating everyone else into a kind of social submission. In this climate of uncertainty it is likely that you will bond with the most unlikely people; you will find solidarity with the mute international student in the next room when the Public School Rugby Massive loot and pillage your corridor at 4am on a Tuesday morning. You might even find yourself playing Warhammer with freshers of titanic dullness, if only to be afforded the security of a ‘gang’ with whom to walk to college.

Most importantly, the greatest unspoken truth about Freshers’ week is the fact that it is seldom indicative of the rest of your University life. However much fun you might have, over time you will almost certainly make better friends, find better places to hang out - although many have conducted their three-year long pulling jihad exclusively at the Roxy - and muster up enough confidence to lay rabbit snares for the Public School Rugby anti-sleep Fascists. I’d have to be an Olympic level spoil-sport to suggest you remain in your room rearranging your CD collection along alphabetical, chronological or even ethnic lines, but you’d probably make more friends taking George Foreman’s Lean Mean Fat-Grilling machine to the kitchen than you would a pack of Durex.

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Freetown Blog #1

2007-11-07T16:38:41+01:00

Unpublished, August 07.

Travel blogs typically announce themselves from a misty-eyed distance. Whether you are swimming with an albino-siamese manatee in Fiji or breaking down barriers (or laws) with children in Cambodia, the point is that backpacking is all about you, and adding an extra 40 litres of ultra-lite GoreTex to your not so ultra-lite ego.

Your friends don't want to hear about it. The manatee doesn't even want to hear about it. Only the most miserable fucks in the land - in houses where the the colouring books are coloured in, the Jigs have been Saw-ed, the Mills have been Boon-ed - will anyone do anything but press delete and condemn your tiny little email screaming down black hole of cyberspace.

It is with this in mind I embark on my Freetown blog. To say that Freetown is the anus of West Africa would be unfair. It would imply that 1) it can be wiped clean and 2) that there is a regular (and/or smooth) passage of traffic through the region, when in fact neither is the case. Aesthetically, Freetown is a generous dollop of concrete on the Atlantic, nothing more.

Arriving ten days ago at the airport - accessible only by water, thanks to some aeronautical sage - Arwen and I spent one night at the 'Lungi Airport Hotel', an outrageously overpriced hotel frequented by giggling BA staff and entrepreneurs (henceforth read arms dealers). Here follows a rough transcript of a conversation with one of these people:

Arwen (chirpy north American twang): 'So how long have you been here?'
Person: 'One week.'
Arwen: 'How are you liking it?'
Person: (gravel-like, the horror, the horror voice): 'One week is enough'

No-one in Freetown seems to want to be here. The chorus of 'HelloHowAreYouHowCanIGoToAmerica' is predictably common. The NGOs don't seem too keen either (I have it on good authority that one member of the UN staff succincty assessed the combined intra-factional polticial tensions, infrastructural crisis and estranged youth as 'shithole'). So it is lucky for me that I'm staying in one of the rare places with people who do.

Freetown YMCA not only boasts a small but friendy crowd of Anglophone travellers, but has the best thing an African city can offer, the only thing that can keep you entertained for a day's length, come rain or shine (but mostly rain, being the rainy season); a balcony. And being bored by writing my own blog that's exactly where I'm going now.

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Freetown Blog #3

2007-11-07T16:38:08+01:00

Unpublished, August 07

Golf courses are truly places to indulge one's eccentricities, and Freetown's Lumley golf course is no exception. In civilisation, flabby old Scottish executives dress up in tea-towel trousers and waddle about blithely between bunkers and fairways. Sooner or later, they'll creak back to the clubhouse, and spend the evening quaffing whiskey and indulging in the most smug, armchair-sinking pastime of any sportsman; trying to adapt sporting terms and phrases to suit real life. Too many people have made a living out of this sort of toilet literature.

But where Hamish might be 'in the rough' after his wife left him or Duncan might have a 'hole in one' nailing his secretary after the Rotary Club Leukemia fundraiser, Captain 48 Hours of Lumley, Freetown - the greatest links lunatic in the land - is most definitely 'in a bunker'.

Today Arwen and I were filming a group of street kids in the western area of Freetown's capital. As a white middle class public school kid who spent his formative years playing the viola and having wrestling moves practiced on him by those higher in the food-chain of high school (which is to say, everyone including violin and cello players) I draw immense pleasure in hanging out and getting bro-slapped by people called Handbrake and Supermax (a guy who boasts more lacerations than a breadboard).

Handbrake and Supermax both turned up to our interview magnificently stoned, answering almost every question 'Yeees' whilst smiling a Stephen Hawking-smile, tipping their heads to the side and allowing the gooey red lines in their eyes to fizzle about their retina. Half an hour and half a million affrimative answers later, Captain 48 hours made his timely appearance.

48 Hours told me he is a former commander of the RUF - the rebel movement that waged a bloody civil war against the Sierra Leone government in the 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the moderate and diplomatically named 'Operation No Living Thing', amputations, etc. People struggle to think up words for some of the nasty stuff the RUF did.

In spite of this, Captain 48 hours' delusions were nothing short of hilarious. Everyone has heard about the Japanese soldier on some remote, godforsaken atoll in the Pacific who went on scouting about the island hunting Americans until 1958. Well, 48 wasn't far short of the real deal.

Promising to show us how he fought in the bush, he lead us on to the golf course, pointing to enemy positions over by the 3rd hole before lecturing his troops - Handbrake and Supermax, whose pupils were by now in indefinite hibernation - on how to go about attacking the enemy base. Supermax - wielding an invisible gun - proceeded to climb a tree to demonstrate sleeping arrangements in the bush.

48 - so called because he 'never sleeps', and is 'always ready' - offered to take us over to the 'deep bush'; a small copse of trees the other side of the fairway where a golfer and a few confused caddies looked on confused. Before I could leap at the chance, Arwen pulled her quasi-maternal 'you've had enough fun being silly for now Oliver' face, and we were on our way home.

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Freetown Blog #2

2007-11-07T16:37:21+01:00

Unpublished August 07

There is precious little common ground between the different peoples of the world. The clipboard charity terrorist on Tottenham Court Road will tell you that starving poor people in Darfur laugh, love and cry just as we do - that they are our brothers and sisters - but the same beaded be-dreadlocked female do-gooder still probably wouldn't want to move in and have her clitoris proudly pickled on a mantlepiece in southern Sudan.

There is one institution that unites people of the world like no other. When the UN gets spooked and runs, when the World Bank grabs the cash and makes a dash, one enduring symbol of unity - the connecting fibre of civilisation - remains. Ladies and Gentleman, Ladyboys and Janjaweed are all free and equal at 'The Irish Bar'.

Stanley waded through the Congo for months, picking his way through dense undergrowth where no footprint had ever been imprinted, loosing over half his expedition to malaria, cholera, dysentry only to find Dr. Livingstone sipping Guiness whilst the Hutus riverdanced at Paddy O'Neill's, Bujumbura. Where seventy years ago a quarter of the world was coloured pink, now the little flecks of green are slowly joining up...

Only one other thing can manage to get to the places normal products just can't reach - the Lebanese. I - along with about five other honkies - managed to get a lift back to my hostel with one such gentleman from a miserable little beachside bar in Aberdeen, Freetown a few nights back.

The man drove through us through downtown Freetown - where electricity and lighting haven't paid a visit since the mid-eighties - without any headlights. He drove the car in a way I wouldn't even drive a dodgem. Sporadically, he would turn his attention from driving to take mammoth swigs from a can of Carlsberg. Neither the passengers, the steering wheel nor the accelerator were informed of these lapses in concentration. Whilst the steering wheel and the accelerator relished the new found freedom, the passengers did not.

The Lebanese man was kind enough to point out all the places he had crashed the previous week between sips. I can honestly say there have been few points in my life where I have feared for my life quite as much as that night.

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