In the growing tidal wave of excitement that is the Crap Lampeter Bands project, someone else has now set up a group called something like, ‘Sentimental twaddlings and nostalgia in early nineties Lampeter’.  Her name is Zoe Russell, and she used to be on the Ents committee.  She is no longer on the Ents committee.  When I lived in Oxford, about a zillion years ago, I met her as I was wandering home from work.  She was something medium sized in paper and paper related products.  I was working for a scientific publisher and spending my spare time getting wasted with Canadians.  Never the twain shall meet.  Let us hope she is now something massive in paper.  I have given up on the Canadians and the work.  Both were over rated.

No disrespect to the woman, but our gang loathed Ents.  I still loathe Ents.  Ents sounds like something terrible that people get when they go backpacking in the Congo; ’Oh yah! Sebastien and I hollowed out or own canoe to escape from the pygmy warriors.  I lost my copy of ‘A Handful of Dust’, it was swallowed by a dugong, and poor Sebastien came down with ents.  We had to airlift him over to the hospital for tropical diseases.  You know the one? Yes, that’s right, just by Kings Cross.  Very exotic.  He’s alright now, apart from the scarring and hideous flashbacks.’ 

Ents was where people who volunteered, yes, volunteered to organise ‘fun’ things like Rag week and baths of beans and races in baths, and getting spiders out of the bath and lots of hilarious bath related japes in which we, the proletariat, would fall about on our arses laughing and then cough up lots of cash with which presumably they could pay a plumber to come and reinstall all the baths they had stolen.  Beans were often involved too.  If you could put beans and baths together you were at the pinnacle of ents related achievements.  Shower caps were de rigeur, as was prowling around the halls, knocking on people’s doors and demanding cash.  I remember being accosted by a prancing Chinese dragon right in the middle of a particularly nasty hangover in which my only interest was to assuage it using the power of Hobnobs.  I believe I was rather curt.  They wanted money, they had no hobnobs, they had a bucket, but they wouldn’t let me vomit in it.  The bastards.

Anyway, she is inviting people to join and become nostalgic.  Been there, done that, as numerous blog entries will testify to, like here, here, here, here, and here (this last being one of my favourites) .  Then of course there is yesterday’s offering here. Nevertheless, I shall join in, in the same spirit as I joined things at the time, as a lurker on the fringes.  My mother told me never to volunteer.  It was, much like my aunty’s sterling piece of advice about never boiling eggs in your kettle, something which has stood me in good stead over the years and I don’t intend to change now.

Here are some of my top nostalgia moments relating to my university career that never made it into the other posts:

• Justine, our very quiet and mousy friend, waking up early one Sunday morning to go to church, creeping across the landing of our house and slipping on some cat sick which the cat my friend Rosalind had adopted from some rubbish tip somewhere, had obligingly left right at the top of the stairs.  She skidded all the way down the stairs and landed in a large, crumpled heap at the bottom.  We were woken up by the noise of a falling body making its way downstairs.  We stood at the top of the stairs watching a bedraggled, sick covered woman standing up and apologising for waking us!  We were hopelessly unsympathetic due to the fact that we were all hysterical with laughter.  She was fine and after a brisk wash and brush up, went to church.
• My friend Richard, who played the organ at chapel deciding he was bored with the standard hymns on offer and starting evensong one Sunday with a rousing chorus of ‘There’s No Limits’ by 2Unlimited played on the church organ.  It was a fabulous moment.  I am not a church goer, but he told me what he was going to do and I made an exception for that day.  I wouldn’t have missed it for the worlds.
• My first ever (and the last) Christmas dinner day.  Christmas dinner day was a drunken tradition involving food fights with flaming christmas pudding, japes aplenty and then the entire university squashed into the minute arts and crafts chapel, singing Christmas carols in the same way people chant on the football terraces.  A friend of mine had told me that it was imperative you not drink before the sun was over the yard arm.  It was Wales in December.  The sun was never going to struggle over the yard arm.  He cunningly had drawn himself a picture of the sun coming over the yard arm so that he could flash it, in much the same way as an FBI agent whipping out his badge, before purloining all the booze he could fit into his mitts. He was wasted before half ten in the morning.  Fair play.  My particular favourite memory of that day was a stupendous rendition of Hark the Herald Angels sing at chapel.  It was cancelled the next year because apparently we frightened the vicar.
• Spending the evening with a lady called Liz, who spent most of the evening pretending to be a horse, and the rest of it telling me how she used to have a pet goldfish which she took round with her in its bowl on a little trolley on wheels so that they would never have to be parted.  I never did find out what happened to it, but she didn’t have it with her, so it can’t have been good.
• Walking home from the curry house with my then boyfriend, the aforementioned David Cheetham.  He lived in a flat on Station Terrace which was where all the notorious reprobates lived.  We were just about to round the corner into the road when his friend Martin came running towards us hysterically.  Apparently someone had let a fire extinguisher off in the stairwell of the flats.  Someone in the flat had opened the door, saw all this smoke coming up the stairwell, put two and two together and made ‘FIRE’.  They called the fire brigade and leapt into action waking everyone up.  Bart, the one who found the holy spirit in his jazz club, decided to be chivalrous and rescued everyone.  Most people didn’t want to be rescued as they were up to highly nefarious things, but Bart, bless him, would not take no for an answer.  Due to the nature of activities in the flat, it was decided in a paranoid haze, that the best thing to do would be to hold up the fire engine.  Kevin, a friendly white witch who lived in an abandoned horsebox (I kid you not) was despatched to come up with a plan.  His plan was to walk down the middle of the road very slowly in front of the fire engine, juggling like a maniac.  Someone else I believe was running about aimlessly with an umbrella and there were lots of naked, stoned people standing about succumbing to varying states of paranoia.
• In the second year I was made head of The English and Media Society.  We were supposed to enthuse students about drama and stuff and arrange lots of artistic events.  As you can imagine, in a place where we had to make up our own bands, because nobody would come to see us from the real world, it was quite a task.  One day someone came up with the bright idea of inviting this crazy old guy from the Library of Wales to talk to us about Welsh landscape paintings of the nineteenth century.  Scourge must have had something to do with it, because he collared us and explained that he needed bums on seats and would we come up with a poster which made it all sound a lot more exciting than it really was.  We embraced the task with relish.  We created a storming poster which went something along the lines of: ‘Tonight, for one night only, back due to popular demand, the death defying professor X and his paintings – Be there or be somewhere else!’  It had sex, it had glitter it was a disco ball extravaganza.  We made hundreds of the bloody things and stuck them all round campus.  We got collared by Scourge about six hours before chappy was due to arrive.  He was not impressed.  Apparently the bloke was about 150 years old and took himself very, very seriously and wouldn’t appreciate the posters.  We had to take them all down and start again with something much more sedate.  As punishment he forced us all to go.  It was, as expected, truly hideous.  Lots of brown paint.  We made like a crowd.
• Then we got collared by the head of department while we were in the Spar.  We were very drunk indeed.  We lived round the corner from the Spar in a flat above the undertakers, all very romantic and gothic, but terribly handy for milk.  We were having a dinner party.  Every mouthful came with a free bottle of wine.  We were on desert and had run out of wine, so had to nip to the Spar.  We could hardly see and were very surprised when dear HoD hoved into view.  She was telling us something complicated about the Dylan Thomas Appreciation society and how we had to organise something.  We decided that the best policy was just to nod and agree.  We nodded, Rosalind started doing her Cleo Laine impression.  It did not go well.  We left with our wine having no idea what we had just signed up for.
• We found out.  The Dylan Thomas Appreciation Society had agreed to come and perform their version of Under Milk Wood.  We were to give up our Saturday to organise things to their satisfaction and drum up trade for the show.  It was a nightmare.  We arrived on Saturday morning to find that they had faxed ahead a props list for that evening.  The first thing on it was ten antique chairs.  Antique chairs in a Welsh market town on a Saturday? Nightmare.  We scoured the town. Eventually we found this chap who had an antique shop and agreed to lend us some chairs.  Then the cast turned up late.  Then they were pissed off because they had to get changed in the Arts Centre toilets.  Then they didn’t like the chairs.  We hated them.  We wished them dead.  We sat in the audience.  The big bloke who played blind Captain Cat was so fat he sat on his chair and broke it into splinters.  We were hysterical.  We had guaranteed those chairs.  Nightmare.  Then one of the rows of audience pews disintegrated.  We did the only thing we could do.  We got hideously drunk.  Then we took the broken chair back to the powers that be in the English department and asked them to sort it out.  See.  Never bloody volunteer.
• Rosalind getting dead drunk in the Student Union bar, sitting on a bar stool.  Falling to the floor but still managing to sit on the bar stool.  Refusing, absolutely refusing to get off the bar stool and come home.  We picked her and the bar stool up and reinstated her at the bar.  She gripped the rail, said she would be fine and carried on drinking.  She turned up about fourteen hours later with a large dent in her head and a nasty hangover.
• Going to a Chapel Party, which contrary to popular belief were very wild affairs, watching Alice show her knickers to the vicar’s wife shortly before passing out, drinking far too much cherry brandy (why? I hate cherry brandy) and allowing someone to wrap me from head to toe in toilet roll to create a living mummy.  I had a hole poked through for breathing purposes.  I don’t recall being able to see.  On the way home it was very, very icy and I tripped over my wrappings, skidding down the hill on my arse.  Thank god for the cushioning effect of the toilet paper or I probably would have had to go to hospital with asphalt in my arse cheeks.  As it was, there was some interesting bruising for about a week.
• Going kite flying one day with my friends Kate and Rachel.  Coming back to find the boots that I had abandoned on the grass were filled with flowers.  A visiting professor who I had befriended when I lived in Germany had come on a visit, seen us flying kites and decided to leave me a present to remember him by.  Not often you find your Docs full of daffodils.
• Up in the hills above Lampeter is an abandoned village.  It sits in a pine wood in the middle of some sheep fields.  Someone told me about it in first year and we used to go and visit it once or twice a year.  It was rather spooky.  The pine trees are so densely packed together it’s quite hard to navigate through and it’s so very quiet and intense.  You have to park the car in a layby about a hundred yards from the path and walk back.  On the other side of the road from the layby is a pagan altar.  One day we were driving up there for a visit.  Kate was driving.  We crested the brow of the hill only to find that there was actually a pagan ritual going on.  All these people were dressed up as jesters with hobby horses and stuff.  Kate nearly crashed the car it was such a shock.  She wouldn’t stop.  Not sure why!  They all stared at us as we nearly rammed into the stone wall opposite.  Nobody said a word.  It was very odd.
• Another time we went there it was snowing, proper, thick snow.  We pushed our way through the trees and sat amongst the ruined houses.  You couldn’t see the sky.  It was really dark with that weird kind of sky glow you get from clouds full of snow.  The snow was falling all around us in big, thick clots and we just sat there in this muffled world until we were so cold we could barely move our fingers.
• Hanging out with an Irish guy called Gavin who was very into film making.  We would go round to his place where he would cook endless loaves of soda bread and show us his latest films.  He was a big fan of remaking war films as I recall.  I think he did A Bridge Too Far on the disused railway track, which was very fine.  He renamed it A Bridge to Spar as I recall. I remember one part where there was supposed to be people jumping out of planes with parachutes.  He substituted it for people jumping out of the back of a minibus with tablecloths tied to their backs. You could hardly see the join.
• Meeting a very odd boy called Tim who turned up on the doorstep of our flat once dressed like the boy from the Hovis adverts.  He didn’t approve of the new fangled ideas of the twentieth century.  He had shunned all that modern stuff and was determined to live his life as if it were still 1914.  He used to come round for cups of tea occasionally.  Presumably to get away from the grind of beating his own clothes on a rock to get them clean and having to rub two sticks together for warmth.  In the third year he had a room in the Old Building, which suited his era needs rather well.  I lived above from him.  I was allowed to enter the portals of his room once. It was insane.  He still wrote with an ink pen.  I have vague memories of penny farthings but I think I must be making that up, because there was no way there’d have been room for one.
• Trying to find the Scourge one day in Old Building.  We came across a door that said Moreland Beasley’s room.  We decided that this was definitely the Scourge’s room, as nobody real would have a name like that.  We knocked on the door.  A muffled voice asked us to come in.  On the bed was a figure wrapped in a purple duvet.  I accused him of being the Scourge of All Christendom.  A head popped out of the duvet very indignantly.  Turned out it was a very old man, who was in fact really called Moreland Beasley.  He was a bit upset I had accused him of being the Scourge of All Christendom because he was in fact training to be a vicar! Oops!
• In that year I also had a neighbour across the way who drank malibu straight from the bottle and organised seances in the empty room next door, which was rather stressful at times.  Malibu and seances don’t really go well together.  She also owned an electric frying pan which she talked about rather a lot and kept trying to bring round to show me.  There was a bloke who lived across the way who thought he was an aeroplane.  Every morning he would taxi round the quadrangle before taking off for lectures.  He would repeat the procedure every evening.  Apart from the plane thing he was very nice and helped us steal our twenty foot ladder when we needed to put a pinafore on the statues over the door.
• Whittling fish made out of carrots to put in the fountain to cheer it up.  Turns out that carrots don’t float as well as fish, and we just added to the general miasma of gloom that was the fountain.  Rather a shame, as whittling lifelike fish out of vegetable matter is quite time consuming. You’d think I’d have learned with the swede episode.
• I was once rudely wakened from slumber to find a man called Clive Temple, who had a shiny, red Morgan car and a jolly disposition, and who we called Mr. Toad, because he had the brightest and shiniest of everything, doing laps round the fountain.  It was quite something.  The fountain was filthy, not that deep and circular.  Clive was at that time not a slim line chap and was, surprisingly, rather drunk.  He looked like he swallowed several pints of the stuff and I remain amazed to this day that his constitution was hearty enough for him to not succumb to diptheria.
• There was this mad chap whose name, I think, was Jason.  He was really, really mad.  He used to stride about wearing a cape and wiggling his fingers like he was always playing an imaginary piano.  In first year some friends and I went to see what the womens’ group was all about.  He came too.  The first meeting was a nightmare concerned with whether he would be allowed to join being as how he wasn’t a women, and would women feel threatened by his presence.  The answer was a resounding yes.  Not because he was a man.  Just because he looked like Count Dracula playing one of those organs that rise out of the floor in old fashioned cinemas.  I once had a very bizarre conversation with me where he told me that there was no need for people to have blood transfusions because if you drank salt water it immediately turned to blood in your body.  Hmmm!
• This cape wearing chap did actually play piano.  There was a bloke called Andy White, who decided it would be good if we competed in an Eisteddfod.  He got together a choir, of which I was a reluctant member.  The whole point of an Eisteddfod is you have to speak Welsh.  Only about three of us did.  He wrote out the words to some crazy Welsh love song about shepherds pining for their loves, and Ave Verum by Mozart in phonetic Welsh and coached us.  Dracula piano boy played piano.  It was a disaster. Our Welsh was, understandably, shit.  Dracula boy couldn’t resist going mad on the keyboard and added twiddly bits everywhere so our timing was out all the time.  We went anyway.  We spent forty eight hours in Bangor, sleeping on a hall floor.  We were not allowed to speak English, so we just didn’t speak at all.  We went onstage and the whole thing went bonkers.  Dracula boy got completely carried away on the piano and we all sang like we were in a crazed rave band.  We got a standing ovation and the crowd went wild.  We did not come last!  It was hilarious.  We weren’t allowed on stage to accept praise etc, because if we opened our mouths it would give the game away.  We all filed out the auditorium onto the bus using the cover of darkness. It was like the Von Trapp family breaking away for the Swiss Border.  As soon as the bus was full the driver pulled away like he was auditioning for the Sweeney.  Oddly enough I never did another Eisteddfod again!

I have to stop now.  As I sit here, the thing that truly strikes me is that there were not really any normal days at Lampeter.  Not really a day when I got up, went to lectures, came home and got pissed like people do.  Someone, somewhere was always doing something a bit odd, just for the hell of it, or someone was just living their lives in an odd way.  It was just bloody odd.  I liked it at the time.  I’m glad I don’t live like that now.

When I had the great good fortune to be at Lampeter university, back in the olden days when it was still crap, and therefore rather good, there was this chap whose name was Edmund Simons. It still is his name, as Facebook will testify.  He was rather mad in a deranged genius sort of way.  He liked dressing up, a lot.  I don’t mean in a dirndl skirts and sweetheart neckline type way.  I mean in a: ‘This morning Matthew, I’m going to be a bishop.’ type way.  Sometimes he was a cavalier, sometimes he was a round head, sometimes he would lend his costumes out to other people, people who would then go from being rather ordinary to miraculously wandering about dressed as Franco Prussian dictators and the like.  As I recall he was rather good at prancing about.  In fact if I had to encapsulate what he was like at that time I would have said: ‘A man dressed as a bishop, prancing about, giggling a lot.’

I feel that this is still the case as his facebook picture is of him dressed as what can only be described as a malevolent Bugsy Malone.  I have no idea what he does for a living now, but if he turned out to be the shopkeeper in Mr. Benn it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

So, why am I writing about him today?  Because his actions have yet again swirled the layers of memory that are part of my Lampeter past.  He has set up an association on Facebook which is called ‘Crap Lampeter Bands Project.’  The title is self-explanatory.

I mentioned some of these bands in previous blogs.  There were, for a small university, quite a lot of bands, most of which were spectacularly crap.  Spectacularly crap in the same way that the university itself was spectacularly crap, in a grand, overblow, fin de siecle way that you just couldn’t help loving and being attracted to.  You might pretend that it is was only in an ironic, post modern type way, but it wasn’t really.  You loved them in the same way you loved Take A Break magazine or disco glitter balls, because they revelled in their crapness and allowed you to dress up like a freak, dance like a loon and remember what it was like to be five and think that dressing in sparkly wellingtons, a Violet Elizabeth party frock and a snorkel parka were where it was at and that was where you were.  So, all good then…

I think there were so many bands, because as I mentioned before, it was a teeny, tiny university.  It may even at that time have been able to lay claim to being the smallest, crappest, university in the British Isles.  There was absolutely nothing to do there. Nothing at all, unless you like rambling and eating mouldy sandwiches from a genuine 1950’s coffee bar which still sold coffee in those weird glass cups and saucers.  You genuinely did have to make your own entertainment.  There were very few bands who would travel all the way to deepest, darkest Lampeter to play gigs.  Consequently lots of crap bands were created so that we could have gigs to go to.

There were real bands of course.  Some bands are so desperate they’ll do anything to get changed in the Arts Hall toilet and entertain several hundred drunken teenagers.  I remember Kirsty McColl came once.  I really wanted to see her.  I was away that weekend getting my mother to do my laundry.  Arse! Jools Holland came once.  I had a ticket for that one, but ended up vomiting my guts up sitting outside the student union in a welter of purple rice (risotto and pernod and black do not go together) and missing it.  Arse.  I also missed The Levellers and The Shamen.  I now no longer regret missing The Levellers, though at the time I was fairly annoyed.  I do regret not seeing the Shamen.  Apparently they blew the speakers and you could hear them as far away as Cwman (the next village.  Oh how we lived!).  Nice one!

Two real gigs I do remember seeing were Doctor and The Medics, who turned out to be just up Lampeter’s street.  They dressed up for a start.  They also, I recall, offered free kittens to take away.  I like that in a band.  It makes a change from signed posters and a t-shirt.  The other gig was by a band called The Ukranians, who used to be half of the Wedding Present.  It was insane.  They did in fact play Ukranian folk music, but very loud and in a rock ‘n’ roll kind of way.  I ended up taking my shoes off to dance, because it’s very difficult to try and do Russian style dancing in boots.  I finished the evening with splinters in the soles of my feet and ripping my tights to shreds.  My other vivid memory of the evening was of a preternaturally tall chap called Matt Lievers, who used to play the saxaphone and look like the pied piper on crack, wearing a giant cossack style fur hat, which made him about four foot taller than normal.  I swear that man got taller every day.  By the time we left he was so tall a strong wind would have snapped him in two like a stick.  I think he was studying archaeology.  I expect being so tall was a benefit, because it means that he could dig really deep holes but still see over the top.  It’s a profession in which tallness is a boon.

So, back to the home made bands.  One of the fascinating things about this particular project for me is that there is a photo album.  I have spent most of this morning when I should have been washing toothpaste out of sinks and picking up stray Bob the Builder accoutrements, having nostalgic flashbacks in an LSD type way.  What was particularly weird was spotting my friend Alice Roberts in the background of one of the photos, drink in hand, looking very chuffed with herself.  It was lovely to see her again, particularly looking so drunk and festive.  Alice died in 2002, so it’s nice that she’s got a bit of posthumous fame, even if it’s only in my house.

There are no photos of me.  If you will recall, our gang was rather crap, and nobody wanted to be in it except us.  We were not very photogenic and I hate having my photo taken at the best of times, so it was never going to happen.  I did go out with the keyboard player of the Blend Band for a while, David Cheetham his name is/was.  He looked like Aubrey Beardsley, always wore sensible blue jumpers and danced like a gyrating pencil (his description, not mine).  He never dressed up in silly clothes, but by the sheer fact of being sensible in a sea of frocks, horns and mitres, he always managed to look quite weird without even trying.  He liked Dave Brubeck and eating boiled eggs in bed, which was one of the anti social things which meant our love was doomed to fade.  I could just about cope with Dave Brubeck.  I couldn’t hack the egg thing.

He was a funny one.  He had a totally mad side to him which meant that he could happily spend a whole evening crouched round a kitchen table trying to bring a burned peanut back to life, or playing: ‘Rude French Lithographs of the Nineteenth Century,’ which was a particular favourite.  There was also a game about shellfish in which you had to guess the name of the shellfish the person was thinking of.  The answer, as I recall, was always the same, but you had to guess anyway.  Then there was his serious side.  He was a proper scholar, a theologian who was rather brilliant and whose specialisation was eschatology, or the study of what happens to you after death.  He worked hard to balance the two out.  I coped well with the Rude French Lithograph part of him, couldn’t really deal with the conservative voting eschatologist side of him.  Mea culpa.  I’m just not an eschatalogical kinda gal, and I’d rather cut my own head off with a spoon than vote conservative.  He married the girl who comforted him after we fell out, and is still blissfully married to her and busy being head of comparative religions at Birmingham University.  I don’t think he likes French Lithographs any more.

Edmund is calling for old Lampeterites to clamber about in the loft and dig out recordings of crap Lampeter bands, which they can then send to him so that he can get someone else to digitally remaster them and stick them on a CD, presumably to sell them to people like me.  People who are now middle aged and encumbered with children and want to remember more vividly what it was like to listen to a man who looked like Jesus and a man dressed as the devil in a frock singing about Lemons in Buckets and the delights of Newcastle Emlyn.

I’m in two minds.  I used to have a tape of The Blend Band and some posters of their gigs.  I think they’re long gone now.  I do vividly remember the song Verucca, which was a particular favourite of ours, strong on narrative, and with a rousing chorus, and who could forget the classic Lampeter to Llandovery (hmmm! Everyone probably)?  I think I might quite like to hear them again.  I’ve always had a soft spot for Graham Priddle who used to front the terrifying band The Rockin’ Thundas, ever since he tried to assassinate some very annoying chap at the Student Union Annual General Meeting one year.  I remember Dim Disgo Heno with the now stratospherically famous Andy Lewis and Dennis The Menace bejumpered Nick Bradshaw, all round chirpy ents guy, being quite reasonable on the ears.  I’d quite cheerfully pay money never to have to listen to Reeperbahn or Prey again.  It’s a dilemma.

The thing is, those things are in the past for a reason.  They were great at the time and brilliant for nostalgia purposes, but will they be like many things from my past that I have revisited and found lacking? Will they be as crap as Chorlton and the Wheelies, as insubstantially flimsy as the shit sets on Blakes Seven and as dodgy as that pair of Victorian bloomers I used to wear with a lumberjack shirt and Doc Martens in 1990?  The answer to that is going to be a grim; ‘Oh yes!’ I feel.  Nevertheless, rather like a scabby knee you can’t help picking at, even though you know you shouldn’t, I’m probably going to end up succumbing in the end.  What price nostalgia?  About a fiver hopefully…

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my university days recently.  Not in a nostalgic, sepia, big hatted kind of way you understand.  It has more been thrust upon me by the indecent number of people from university who have recently sprung, mushroom-like into my life once more.  I blame Facebook.  Actually, I don’t blame it at all.  I kind of enjoy it, because I’ve always been a nosey bugger, and I just want to look at everyone’s photos and wonder how someone managed to go from turning up dead drunk at lectures on Minoan civilization to selling photocopiers in Reading and wearing a tie.

Looking back, I realise I haven’t changed that much.  I mean I have more money and I can no longer be affable about the thought of either a) pot noodles or b) sleeping on a futon, but mentally I’m still the same idiotic woman I always was.  The same things still make me laugh.  I have some of the same friends, all the ones that count the most.  I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.  I still resent the idea of having a proper job.  I still want to get paid for muckin’ abaht and having a laugh.  I still have the same indecent capacity for stuffing down hobnobs like there’s just about to be a ban.  I can’t drink as much any more, which is probably quite a good thing.  I definitely can’t get by on no sleep any more.  I’ve gone up a cup size and down a dress size, which is the way to go about things.  I’ve got more cellulite, I’ve gone blonde and I still hate James Joyce.  Hmmmm.  Not sure what that says about me really in terms of progress made.  There’s probably a quiz about it somewhere.

When I was at uni I was in a kind of a gang.  We had a lovely time, when we weren’t hating each others guts and screaming a lot.  We enjoyed our gang.  Looking back I expect we enjoyed the falling out and screaming bits just as much as the good bits.  Life isn’t real unless there’s a bit of angst in there, specially when you’re in your twenties.  Angst is de rigeur. It’s the new black.

There were five hardcore members, me, Rachel, Kate, Rosalind and Justine, and then there was Alice.  Sometimes Alice was in our gang, sometimes she was in someone else’s gang.  Alice was hard to pin down.  We were fine with that.  She could drink us all under the table.  She was a young farmer.  You don’t mess with young farmers.  You let them get on with it and stand well back during times of crisis.

The thing about our gang was that we were not at all cool.  Nobody else wanted to be in our gang.  We were fine with that.  We shared a warped, twisted view of the world, we liked muckin’ abaht, and that was it really.  We met in the first few weeks of first year and were pretty much glued together until the end.  We had fallings out and fallings in, we flirted with other gangs, we brought men along, who were mostly bemused and wished they were elsewhere until we gave them biscuits.  We were very loud.  We thought we were hilarious.  We were to each other.  We probably weren’t to anyone else.  We didn’t really care.

Being in our gang consisted mostly of the capacity to drink endless cups of tea or coffee, and the ability to eat confectionary at the drop of a hat.  We virtually stalked the local Spar and while everyone else was buying cut price Dutch Lager, we were emptying the shelves of jelly babies and hob nobs faster than you could say knife.  We drank, oh yes! We drank.  In fact we drank obscene amounts, but we also ate.  Eating was key in our gang.  If someone passed you the biscuits and you said: ‘Oh no! I couldn’t possibly have another.  I’ve already had five.’  You would be out, tied to town pump and thrashed within an inch of your life.

Apart from that we shared a rich and warped fantasy life.  We used to watch people.  It was our thing.  We knew about everyone.  In the first year, we would sit in Rachel’s room because it had the best view of the lecture hall and the Student Union, and we would spy on everyone.  We would spy on people in the library and in the Spar, and almost anywhere you care to mention.  Eventually we got to know most people, it was a ridiculously small university was Lampeter.  It was a pimple on the bum of mid Wales.  When we arrived there were less than a thousand students. My school had twice that many kids.  Really knowing people wasn’t that important though.  What we didn’t know we made up.  We created lives for people that were way more fantastic than their own.  We embroidered a mythology, a pantheon.  We had our heroes and our villains and we made them into a kind of living soap opera.  I managed to persuade Rosalind once that this bloke Bob, who we used to watch wandering around in bare feet all the time, varnished his feet to keep them tough and supple.  She believed me for ages until I confessed in a drunken stupour.  I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for that.  He was always known as varnished Bob after that.  Then I met him properly and found out that he was obsessed with Ralph McTell.  I thought that was slightly more improbable than having varnished feet and told him so.  He was very offended.  Turns out he was actually, really, really obsessed by Ralph McTell.  Apparently he’s a legend in his own lunchtime.  Who knew, apart from Ralph’s mum?

When you weren’t drinking, or in lectures there wasn’t a lot else to do, being that we were in a Welsh village, miles from anywhere.  It was one place where the old adage of ‘making your own entertainment’ really came to the fore.  We took this to heart.  We all liked mucking about with writing and drawing and glueing and sticking, so we would make magazines featuring stories about our favourite characters.  We created secret clubs within secret clubs, some of which I have mentioned in previous blogs (the Banana Band and the Jelly Baby Mutilation Society) and enacted bizarre rites of passage.  It helped to pass the time.  We were, as also previously blogged, totally obsessed with Take a Break Magazine, which was our holy grail.  We hunted down pictures of Jeremy Beadle and Chesney ‘Cheese’ Hawkes.  We sent them to each other as billets doux.

In our first year we decorated our entire corridor with pictures of our student union president’s head which we had cut out and stuck onto various festive figures.  We made strings of Father Christmas’ and snowmen and snowflakes.  I think we were going for festive.  We ended up with macabre.  Our president that year looked a lot like Jesus with a twirly, circus ring master’s moustache.  Imagine him leering out of a jolly santa and you will see where we went wrong.  We thought it was quite endearing.

At halloween we couldn’t find a pumpkin for love nor money.  Someone assured us that swedes would work just as well.  We all gathered in my room for this endeavour.  My room was the hub of the creative process.  I don’t think anyone else wanted glitter on the carpet.  I didn’t care.  I was sorry about the root vegetables though.  We had a swede, a parsnip and something else that was hideously odiferous.  Only one of us had a sharp knife.  Her name was Charlotte.  She was a member of our gang in the first term until she ran away to Paris and never came back.  I expect she was repelled by the swede.  Charlotte’s knife was about an inch and a half long and slightly sharper than a dinner knife.  It was disastrous. Rosalind, as our most artistic member, drew the faces, we took it in turns to whittle.  It took hours.  The smell of swede was totally overwhelming.  We all had blisters and were sick to death of it by the time the swede was done.  We abandoned the rest and went to the bar.  When we came back drunk, we decided to light the swede.  I can tell you with hand on heart that the aroma of warm, sweaty swede and candle wax after six pints, really does make you feel quite unwell.

Then Fran, another member of our gang who left after she got chicken pox from a girl called Splasher at the Christmas party, got some jumping beans.  They were real jumping beans with real little jumpy maggoty things in.  We loved them.  We named them after members of the English Department and used to race them about the corridors.  Lawrence got ill and died, so we had to go in mourning for him and would stare sadly at the real life Lawrence in lectures wondering if he knew how well he had jumped and how much we were going to miss him.  Much more than the real life one actually who we had decided was actually Nosferatu because he had very long, slender fingers.

Other things we did included making full sized paper mache models of a man and woman eating a christmas dinner, which we hoisted onto the dining room roof in time for Christmas Dinner day.  I was particularly proud of the turkey, which I modelled on back episodes of Tom and Jerry.  We also dressed the statue outside the chapel in a pinafore one year, which nearly killed us.  It takes a lot of hard work to steal a twenty foot ladder and run across a boggy field with it.  I liked dressing up like the Milk Tray Man more than I liked stealing the ladder.

We weren’t insular.  We mingled, we partied, we gatecrashed other people’s bedrooms and stayed until dawn.  We socialised and vomited into other people’s shoes.  We were not exclusive, but we always drifted back in the end.  We weren’t the only ones doing odd things.  At the end of our first year, someone invented a game called shoe golf.  You had to play it in the dark and the course was laid all over campus.  Kate and I used to wander around for hours chatting to the golfers, who were all dedicated to their art.  I remember discussing in great detail the possibility of launching a Lampeter olympics.  We were going to have shoe golf, obviously.  Also walking across the pipe which spanned the stream from the Student’s Union.  It had to be done drunk or it was no fun.  We had previously played extensive games of football with bara brith and thought that something could be done with that if we could get a more dense cake recipe.  It was going to be good.  Somehow it just never happened.

Someone painted pink spots all over a very pretty white house where a lot of the religious studies students lived one night.  That was good.  A bloke called Ralph used to have a wind up gramaphone which he dragged through the halls sometimes playing The Teddy Bears Picnic.  A chap called Bart used to run a coffee bar and jazz club in his room, all night, every night for several years until the holy spirit found him for a sun beam.  I once had a fascinating conversation about a halibut for several hours with someone at Bart’s place.  One year he lived in one of those mobile cabins they called a terrapin.  You could lift up the roof tiles and climb through into people’s rooms.  You’d be sitting there, innocently talking about fish, when the roof tile would pop out and someone would leer down at you.  It was a bit unnerving.

Other people were way more ambitious than us.  There were a group of people who regularly stole and decorated shopping trolleys in different themes and left them in people’s gardens.  There were people who had access to re-enactment costumes and would wander about dressed as Cavaliers playing odd games with bits of wood.  There was a bloke called Max who was a great friend of an ex boyfriend of mine who liked dressing as a Franco Prussian Military dictator and blowing things up.  There were fictional societies which were on a much grander level than ours. My particular favourite was The Pickling Society which had a stall near us at the Fresher’s Fair in second year.  They dressed in brown shopkeeper coats with hankies on their heads and demanded a joining fee of tuppence for the purposes of pickling things throughout the year.  Oddly I never did receive my copy of pickling news, first for pickles…

I found being there a great relief after the initial shock had worn off.  I didn’t think that there were many people like me in the world, and then I went to school with several hundred of them.  It changed towards the end.  It got more accessible.  Serious people started coming and it turned into a proper university, which was a shame.  When I went there it was just a playschool pretending to be a university.  People still worked, people still got degrees, but they really knew how to mess about.  I loved that.  I still do.  I still look for those kinds of people in the world.  People who wonder who asks the Queen if she isn’t getting a bit above her station.  People who think, ‘I wonder if I’m ever going to spot the transvestite alien in Glenfield Co-op?’  They’re my kinds of people.

Where are we now?  Alice died of breast cancer a few years ago, leaving a very small son and a step daughter, a distraught husband and family and lots of very sad friends.  Justine has always been notoriously bad at keeping in touch.  The last time we met her was about five years ago.  The last time I spoke to her was about three years ago.  She lives somewhere in Surrey and was working as an archivist, something she had wanted since Uni.  As far as I know she is not married, or with child, although with Justine anything is possible.  She was always really quiet at uni.  When we shared a flat in our second year, our landlady used to feel sorry for her.  She thought that we oppressed her and would run up the stairs of our flat calling ‘What have you done with Jacinta?’  and tearing the place up.  Of course, we had no idea who she was talking about, because she insisted on calling her Jacinta, so we just thought she was mental.  We ignored her and got on with things.  She would eventually find Justine, usually in her room, reading the Guardian, eating Rich Tea biscuits and drinking endless cups of tea, and would throw her arms around her and say things like: ‘Oh! Jacinta! I’ve been so worried about you.  Are you alright?’ whereupon Justine would blink at her in total bewilderment, wondering who the bloody hell Jacinta was.

Rosalind lives not far from me.  She’s still married to the guy she met at uni, and they have four children.  I see her quite often.  Kate has three kids, Rachel has three kids, they’re both teachers.  We still see each other and all our kids play together.  We still eat a lot of hobnobs.  We don’t have as much time to muck abaht these days, but we’re passing the skills on to the next generation.

An article in today’s Western Mail mentions problems in the University of Wales, Lampeter. Apparently HEFCW is unhappy with some aspects of the university’s management and has commissioned a team of consultants to draw up a report and make recommendations for improvements. In its defence the university has drawn attention to its status as a center of research and its impact on the local economy. The Department of Welsh received a very positive report recently.

The health of Lampeter’s economy is dependents on the success of the university. The university has shown a great deal of willingness to work with the local community of late and it’s been of benefit to both the town and the college. Fortunately the consultants have ruled out any extreme measures such as closing or moving the campus but we now all need to work together to help the university secure its long term future. Without it, Lampeter would be a shadow of its present self.

I don’t know where to start really.  I’ve actually been quite legitimately busy for the last two days.  Usually I just sit round on my arse pretending to be busy and making up stuff to write about so that I can feel like I’ve been tremendously industrious, when in fact I have mostly, as my children so succinctly put it: ‘been living in la la land’.  Now I have real things to write about I am slightly nervous.

I did make a list though didn’t I? That might be a good place to start.  Let’s take it from the top:

Boiled Eggs:

Ah, yes! This all came about because the children are very keen on eating boiled eggs and soldiers for tea.  Whenever I ask them what they want for tea, which I try not to do very often because the results invariably begin and end with the words ‘chicken’ and ‘nuggets’ in close proximity to each other, the second result is usually boiled eggs with soldiers.

The weird thing is that they don’t actually like the boiled egg bit very much.  Neither of the girls will eat the yolk at all, so they eat egg white with toast, which seems highly unsatisfactory to me, but they like it.  I think they enjoy the ritual more than anything else.  In fact they enjoy hitting their eggs so much that I actually bought them egg cups of their own after they took a socking chunk out of one of my pale blue Nigella ones and made me cry.

The thing that gets me when they have boiled eggs is the fact that they’re so useless at it.  They are totally clueless about the etiquette of eating boiled eggs.  Now, I don’t seem to recall having any difficulty at all with eating what was known in our house as ‘dippy eggs and soldiers’, dippy because you dipped your soldiers in them, not because they made you mental (thanks Edwina).  It was all very straightforward, and we just got on with it.  You hit the top of your egg with your teaspoon a few times, sliced the top off with the edge of your spoon, removed a little shell and whacked your soldier in it. Bob was your Humpty and all was well with the world.

My kids can’t do that.  The first time they had them I patiently demonstrated upon an egg in a Delia like, domestic and highly practical way.  I asked them if they knew what they were doing, they assured me they did and then they beat the shit out of their eggs, using their spoons like some Ninja weaponry and ending up with what was effectively scrambled egg with bits of shell in it, sore arms and nothing to show in terms of edible produce.  Since then I have demonstrated the art many times, including the enjoyable denouement where you trick your amazed and gullible relatives by turning the egg shell upside down in the egg cup and inviting them to hit a ‘new’ egg, knowing full well that their spoon is going to plummet into nothingness and you will be Loki, the god of hilarious egg type pranks.

They love this idea, just as they love the idea of boiled eggs in general.  Can they achieve it? No, they can’t.  I remain utterly perplexed.  I sat there watching them on Monday night thinking: ‘Have I bred a generation of idiots who will go on to breed even more idiotic people?’  I got quite depressed.  Then I decided to blame the schools and have laid the blame squarely at the feet of the educational experts and their ’dumbing down’ strategies. I felt a lot better after that and treated myself to a biscuit.

It may also explain other failures on their part to grasp the simple childhood concepts that we all used to sail through with aplomb in the nineteen seventies and which now leave my children gaping like stranded fish.  These include:

• The operation of a spud gun
• Catapults
• Parachutes for dolls, furniture, stupid pets and members of your immediate family
• The ‘hilarious’ nature of the Carry On film genre: ‘But mummy, I don’t understand why that man is dressed as a nurse? Why is it funny that he’s wearing socks in his bra? Why is that man pinching his bottom? Mummy? Mummy? Why have you turned over?’
• The concept that if you do evil things quietly you’re much more likely to get away with stuff.
• The failure to grasp the simple concept of a practical joke, i.e. that you don’t tell the person you’re about to practice it on all about it beforehand.

So, boiled eggs.  Back to the drawing board.

Darth Vader:

Jason, as you may know, apart from being keen on being The World Poker Champion, would also like to be an evil genius.  His evil genius role model has always been Darth Vader.  On Sunday night the kids came out of the shower and for some reason decided to line up on the landing like nine pins in order to dry themselves.  Oscar was facing a painting we have of Darth Vader leading his troops into battle with the Death Star looming in the background (Clearly not one of mine), and getting terribly excited.  I started dirging away at the Imperial Death March for him, and the girls joined in.  At this point he was so excited that he started leaping up and down and doing his own version which involves him shouting ‘DAAAAAAHHHHH   DAAAAAAHHHHHHH  DAAAAAAHHHHH’ very loudly and off key for several moments and then making lovely sucky inny outy type noises for the Darth Vader breathing noises.  Jason was near to tears with pride and joy when he heard him.  His son is finally coming into his true inheritance and will indeed one day be the Dark Lord of a vast empire stretching over billions of galaxies.  The only thing that could possibly make him happier was if he combined that with being the natural heir to Jeremy Clarkson.  It was an emotional moment for us all…

Mowing The Lawn:

Whilst I was getting the kids ready for bed on Sunday night Jason decided that he had to mow the lawn.  We didn’t get back from my mum’s until seven, but there was no denying him his right to mow, and off he set with the Flymo and the strimmer, looking pissed off and self important all at the same time (it’s a skill).  He sweated and huffed his way about for about an hour and came in, ruddy and knackered and needing a stiff sit down and several cups of tea. 

I asked him why he didn’t leave it for me to do one day in the week when Oscar is at nursery, but apparently it turns out that he holds my mowing prowess in low esteem.  I have been informed that I am, and I quote ‘rubbish’ at mowing the lawn.  I am extremely hurt by this criticism of my mowing ability.  It is one of the few household jobs I actually like doing. I love the smell of the grass and the mindlessly repetitive nature of the job.  I particularly like it because it’s quite dangerous which means that the children can’t help me, and they have to stay indoors, pressing their small noses up against the French windows and looking wistfully at me with some kind of power tool.  It’s very peaceful because with all that racket from the mower you can’t hear them howling to be let out.

Anyway, there I was thinking I was quite good, when it turns out that I am crap.  Apparently, according to my venerable husband, Alan Titchmarsh’s right hand man, I don’t take my mowing seriously enough, which leads me to produce shoddy workmanship. 

I know this because we had to have an hour long, in depth discussion after his throwaway remark about me being rubbish, to establish just how rubbish I was and how come he’d never said it before.  We never got to the how come he’d never said it before, because when the words ’shoddy workmanship’ passed his lips I flounced out in a huff and went to make a cup of tea.  I am deeply, deeply hurt by his accusation, and one weekend when he’s out pretending to be an elf and sharpening his plastic sword I’m going to mow that bloody lawn like it’s never been mowed before. It will be a revenge mowing and it will win prizes on Gardener’s Question Time when I send in a picture.  So there…

Saj’s Fashion Call:

Saj complained that my summary of her and her activities makes her seem shallow and that I must do something to rectify this immediately.  I cannot vouch with hand on heart that Saj is kind to old ladies and animals, although she is very sweet to my three, delightful children.  She did however do me proud at the weekend.  When I was taking time out from worrying about what I was going to say to The Modfather, I spent the rest of the time worrying about what I was going to wear.  Saj suggested that I hot footed it down to Primark and take advantage of their splendid offer of skinny jeans for six quid.  She said that it’s what all the rock chicks are wearing this year.  Consequently I did that very thing and wore them yesterday night. 

I wore them with my 1920’s vintage top that my Gran gave me and I did look very rock chick indeed.  I spoiled it a bit because I wanted a little bag to put my purse and phone in.  I looked at all the rock chickette offerings and didn’t like any of them.  In the end I plumped for a Charlie and Lola rucksack from Boots for a tenner.  It has a picture of Lola on the front and the legend: ‘I will not ever never eat a tomato.’ I love it.  The kids think I am the coolest.  The rock contingent weren’t impressed.  I was though when I realised I could get my sandals into it.  I wore my four inch patent dominatrix heels, and then when it came to the mosh pit, I whipped them off, stuck my comfy sandals on and grooved the night away.  I bet Kate Moss does that too when there aren’t many cameras around.

Silly man on a mobile:

Ah! Yes! Right in the middle of the gig yesterday, may even have been during a very noisy rendition of Eton Rifles (I was telling this to my dad and he thought I said Elton Trifles. Excellent!), a guy got his mobile phone out, presumably to try and take a picture of Mr. Weller (and in actuality to take a picture of the backs of several hundred people’s heads), but when he got it out of his pocket it rang.  He put it to his ear and just kept screaming: ‘Hello! Hello! I can’t hear you! Hello!’ at the top of his lungs.  It never occured to him to actually move to somewhere quieter, or to hang up the call.  He was clearly a bit mental and just came across like Dom Joly with his oversized mobile in the Quiet Zone of the Dome.  Awesome.  I laughed so much I nearly missed the next song.

Old Mods who never die

Last night’s crowd were a very mixed bunch, clearly, because I was there for a start.  There were the youth of today, but there were also people who were obviously die hard Wellerites who had been there from the get go.  The odd thing was that many of them had resolutely refused to move with the times in terms of fashion and were firmly sticking, clinging and unpleasantly adhering to their Mod roots for better or worse.  Often worse, it has to be said. 

A Weller haircut only suits those with preternaturally thin faces really (and whether they even suit those is a matter of hot debate amongst some of my friends), but they really don’t do anything for someone carrying a few stone more than is wise and who has decided to grace the whole thing by wearing a casually tied silk scarf round their neck, just to highlight the head and shoulder area.  It’s hard to describe the effect, but there was one man who looked like a hamster hiding in a pashmina.  It wasn’t really the effect he was going for, at least one would hope not.

Famous people who aren’t famous but look like they should be:

Last night at the gig Paul and Jackie managed to spot a few local celebrities in the crowd.  They kept saying things like: ‘Oh look! It’s x who does y! How exciting.’  This made me realise that my encyclopaedic knowledge of O.K. magazine is clearly not going to stand me in good stead in these situations, because I had absolutely no idea who they were talking about.  Mainly, it has to be said because many of these people were of the sporting fraternity.  It was however, quite disappointing not to be spotting stars (apart from Andy that is, and as he was who I was there to see anyway that one was rather like shooting fish in a barrel). 

I decided to while away the time before the gig proper spotting people who I thought might be famous.  There were quite a few people who really looked like they should be famous, or at least know people who might be famous.  I pointed these out eagerly to Paul and Jackie who just looked at me with blank faces and clearly thought I was bonkers.  I however, am very excited that I have created a sub category of social strata, people who look like they should be famous.  It’s these people they should get to audition for Big Brother.  If they already look the part it can’t be that hard to arse about in a hot tub and play dares in front of a load of hidden cameras.  Hurry people.  Real fame awaits you.  I might start my own casting agency.

The World of Men’s Tailoring:

All the time I was worrying about what to say to Mr. Weller about, I had no problems with Andy at all.  We got talking about the world of men’s tailoring.  It is something he is quite knowledgeable about.  I love good tailoring.  I drool over pictures of Ozwald Boateng suits.  Obviously I can’t afford one, and I’m a girl, so that’s a bit of a bummer.  I have tried in the past to influence both my ex-husband and my now husband into the glamorous world of tailoring.  They weren’t keen.  Jason in particular is a man who loves his nylon shorts.  Nothing will part him from those shorts.  And, as I said to Andy, it is a sign of my deep and abiding love for the man that I endure those shorts, because ‘endure’, is exactly the right word to describe how I feel about them. 

Andy on the other hand is an afficionado of tailoring and spent several happy minutes telling us about how he gets his clothes made by Gieves and Hawkes and William Hunt.  He even has proper trunks for his clothes, one of which has a stand for his iron, so he can press all the creases into his trousers properly before going on stage.  He did, it has to be said, look very dapper last night, and because he is a bass player, and therefore can lounge about moodily on stage whilst making plangent guitar style noises, he doesn’t have to get quite as hot and sweaty as everyone else when they’re feverishly leaping around wielding their axes etc. 

I bet he’s really glad he never took up a career as a drummer.  High fashion tailoring and drumming just don’t pair up together at all neatly.  There would be tears before bedtime when a twenty minute drum solo ruined the lining of his best jacket.  It just wouldn’t do.

This conversation has inspired me, and I have decided that when I am insanely rich I am going to go and see Ozwald and plead with him to make me a suit, or even a fleet of suits.  I don’t want to go through a sex change or anything.  I could be the next Bianca Jagger, as long as the children promise not to wipe ketchup on my cuffs.  I’d have to be so insanely rich someone would press them for me, as I don’t care how exciting the world of suiting is, I am not, not ever, never doing my own ironing.  There are limits.

Pete Paphides Being quite important but eternally scruffy

Another thing Andy and I were talking about last night was Lampeter, the university where we met.  It was quite a coincidence that he met up with me last night, because also at the gig was a guy called Pete Paphides, who also went to Lampeter.  I explained to Paul and Jackie that Pete was a shortish, squattish, eternally scruffy bloke with huge shambolic hair and frightening black Uncle Fester sweaters who loped around uni at the same time as us.  I never knew him to speak to, but with only a thousand students, you do tend to know who everyone is, what they like for dinner etc, because word gets around fast.

After we left uni, Andy went on to become famous and so did Pete.  Pete used to work as a journalist for Time Out, as I found out when we lived in London and used to subscribe to the magazine.  One day I was bimbling around flicking through the covers and came across an article about Pete going swimming in Hampstead ponds complete with photographs.  It was easy to recognise him.  He was the only man going swimming in Hampstead ponds dressed as Uncle Fester.

Anyway, Andy informed me that Pete no longer works for Time Out, but is in fact The Times Music Critic.  This is quite an important job, and he was there last night, doing that very job and interviewing Mr. W as we spoke.  This was one of the reasons why poor Paul and Jackie didn’t get to meet him, so I hope it was a good interview.  Apparently he still dresses like Uncle Fester.  I looked him up on The Times website today and it is unclear what he was wearing beneath the chin line, but I would like to bet it was an overlarge, ravelly black jumper.  His hair was still the same, and his hair always matched his jumper, so it’s got to be true.

So! Two people I went to university with are now ‘famous’ or at the very least ’successful’ in their chosen field.  Even the Scourge of Christendom has an uber powered job in marketing and he is a Scourge (albeit a hugely gifted and talented one.  For an ex-hairdresser he got the highest first in the history of the University and it’s been going since 1822).  What? What? What? am I doing with my life? Lampeter is clearly, despite all appearances to the contrary (i.e. the fact that they would take you if you only had your Brownie, ‘Safety in the Home’ badge) a hot bed of creative talent.  I really need to pull my finger out now and write that bloody novel.

I’ll do it after ‘The F Word’ and a nice, relaxing cup of tea…

I have fulfilled a lifelong ambition and am feeling very chuffed with myself.  I have actually turned into Jim’ll Fix It, but without the jangly jewellry and the gold tracksuits, which is probably for the best. In fact I look remarkably like me still, but me jumping about excitedly shouting: ‘I’ve turned into Jim’ll Fix It!’ while people give me weird looks.  I think I should be allowed to get excited about it though.  It’s not like these things happen every day, and it’s not like it’s going to last.  I am but a fleeting shadow of a Jim’ll as my brother used to call him.

So, let me tell you all about it.  Because that way I have to sit down instead of bounding round the room like a hyperactive kangaroo.  I hope you’re sitting comfortably because you know I’m never going to go straight down the narrative path.  As ever we will be following the twists and turns of my remarkably long winded brain.

When I was at university I used to be friends with a guy called Andy Lewis.  He was in his final year while I was in my first year.  He was a mod.  He was the moddest of mods.  He wasn’t one of those scruffy clothes wearing mods.  He was one of those sharp suited man about town mods with pin sharp creases in his trousers and shoes you could skewer a winkle on.  He used to DJ at our uni discos.  This may sound a bit lame, but we were at Lampeter Uni.  It had less than a thousand students.  About a thousand residents in the town, eleven pubs and that was about it.  There was no nightlife unless, as in Victorian times, we made it ourselves.  Consequently the Student Union hall was ‘the’ place to see and be seen, and discos were a big event. 

Andy would dj and when he wasn’t dj’ing he would dance very impressively (he was extremely good at twirling as I seem to recall).  Everyone knew him because a) he was the only Mod on campus, b) he ran the student mag and c) he was a very memorable dancer.  I believe he may have had something to do with a pirate radio station called Radio Daffodil as well.  I can’t be sure about that because naturally it was all swathed in secrecy, apart from the bits where you could hear everyone else in the room (it was done from people’s bedrooms, flats etc) having a chat, putting the kettle on and saying things like: ‘Clyde, do you want a hob nob?’

I believe he was also involved in various of our extremely bizarre campus bands as well.  The ones which spring to mind were Dim Disgo Heno (which is Welsh for ‘no disco tonight’.  All our posters had to be bilingual, so everyone knew a lot of what we called ‘poster Welsh’.  This was one of those phrases in the ‘Poster Welsh’ guidebook), The Blend Band (who were huge amongst us thousand! And had a very fantastic song called Hey Verruca!),  The Rockin’ Thunda’s, who were large and scary and looked like portly versions of Rik Mayall in The Young Ones and once did a gig for ’The Merthyr Tydfill Earthquake Disaster Fund,’ and Edmund Estefan and The Mydroilin Sound Machine.  These were probably the oddest of the bunch, consisting of a man called Edmund Simons who dressed as a bishop and a man called Robert Mighall who was known as The Scourge of All Christendom and who wore green and gold dresses with devil horns.  They had some interesting songs including: ‘lemon in a bucket’, and ‘hooked on hymns’ which was a kind of rave medley which I believe included Kum By Yah as you’ve never heard it before.  I believe that Robert is now some mover and shaker in the world of high level marketing, which amuses me greatly.  Edmund, I’m not sure about, but I suspect he’s now somewhere terrorising people in much the same lines as the Professors on History Today. (You know that blob of spit? Yes, I am aware of that item. Well, That’s your best swimming pool that is.  As I was saying about the peasant revolt of 1415…)

I used to write for the magazine, and help collate it (we had a photo copier and a lot of staplers.  It was heady stuff.  Apparently that’s how they still put together The Sunday Times) and also deliver it.  At the end of the year when he handed over the reins of power to someone else he very kindly thanked me by name for being a good and helpful girl, and I nearly wept.  It was very exciting, me being a lowly first year, albeit and unknown to many other people, also in the deadly Banana Bunch, and a member of the Jelly Baby Terrorist squad.  These were other things we used to do to keep ourselves busy when times were hard.  The banana bunch was basically me and five friends who used to write threatening messages on pieces of soft fruit and leave them outside people’s doors.  We also doctored the film soc poster for ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which was quite a coup.  The jelly baby thing was us torturing poor defenceless jelly babies in a variety of evil ways and then leaving their corpses outside people’s doors.  My particular favourite was the staged hanging with the elastic band and a drawing pin.  Mostly we did weird stuff and left it lying around for other people to find.

Anyway, then Andy graduated and went off to become famous, popping back to Lampeter every now and again to remind himself why he had left, presumably.  We didn’t keep in touch and I had no idea what he was doing.  Then quite recently I was listening to a favourite CD of mine, which is a collection of random Sixties lounge music from a DJ night that used to be big in London called Blow Up.  This cd, Blow up A Go Go has been in my collection for years.  I love it dearly and so do the kids.  So we were dancing away to Bert’s Apple Crumble, which is a very cool song, and when it finished I had to have a sit down, because I am old.  The kids kept on jiving and I read the sleeve notes.  This is the first time I’ve read the sleeve notes ever, because I am just not one of those High Fidelity type Nick Hornbyesque listy people when it comes to music.  I was reading away and suddenly read the name Andy Lewis.  Then I thought: ‘Hmmmm! This is the kind of music ‘my’ (if you will forgive the ownership) Andy Lewis liked.  I wonder if it be he?’ 

It was, dear reader, a lightbulb moment.  Anyway, it was he and I annoyed him on Facebook and he annoyed me back and we resumed our friendship and all was lovely.  He is very famous.  He hangs out with Paul Weller and Blur as was, and makes records and goes to London Fashion Week.  He’s still a mod and he’s still groovy.  I expect he still dances around very well, although I have no proof, and I expect like me that every now and again he has to have a little sit down, unlike the days of yesteryear.  I am not very famous, except for being a bit eccentric in Glenfield.  He is very nice, so this doesn’t seem to matter too much at all.  Hooray for us.

Anyway (bear with me.  We’re nearly there now).  Last week when my friend Paul came round to have tea and cakes he mentioned to me that he is going to see Paul Weller in concert on Monday and he is very, very excited because Paul Weller is his absolute god and idol and has been super shiny for Paul since he was but a wee tadpole.  I said: ‘Ohhh! My friend Andy knows him and sometimes plays in his band.’  Paul looked at me in that way kids look at you at school when you say stuff like: ‘Yeah! And, so, like. Well, because my dad is bigger than yours and he has a better car!’ as if to say: ‘Yeah! Right!’ and then he said something along the lines of how cool it would be to be acknowledged by Mr. Weller in his role as Musical God of the Western Universe, clearly thinking that this was never, ever going to happen because I was just showing off to my friend to make myself seem cool and important so that he wouldn’t beat me up and steal all my toys.

So, I e-mailed Andy and asked him if he could possibly get Paul Weller to say: ‘Hello Mum!’ to my Paul, because he would probably wee his pants with excitement and all would be well, and all manner of things would be well.  I also said that I would understand if he thought I was being a cheeky monkey, bein’ as how we haven’t seen each other since about 1994, and the best that I can offer in return is not to tell him how hard it is to stop small boys sliding over their potential wedding tackle and getting slide burn, which might ruin the idea of ever being wedded in the first place.  It’s not even a case of ‘fair exchange is no robbery’ really is it?

Anyway, Andy is an absolute star and lovely person because not only has he offered for Paul and his wife Jackie to go back stage and meet Mr. Weller after the gig, but I am allowed to go too, and I didn’t even have a front stage pass!  When I rang Paul he was so excited I thought he was going to burst my ear drum off, leaving only a shattered stump.  Apparently Jackie had to be escorted to the sofa for a lie down and they have now been worrying about what to wear since yesterday afternoon.  Paul is already planning on buying a new t-shirt it’s that serious!  My experience of gigs is that they have always been hot, sweaty and the less you wear whilst still clinging to your dignity, the better.

Anyway, Paul and Jackie are currently carving me a throne and will be carrying me through the streets of Melton Mowbray, throwing cake and jewels at me and singing hymns in my praise. It seems a bit unfair given that it was Andy who did all the work, but I have mailed him and offered him the use of the throne, although I will probably eat the cake myself.  I was talking to my cousin Tom about all this.  He said that I am truly Jim’ll. I said I wasn’t really, for the abovementioned reason.  He pointed out that Jim’ll didn’t do any of the actual work either.  He just lounged about in his big red chair, dispensing largesse when other people actually did all the work, so I am really really like Jim’ll.  I have to concur.  It feels quite good.  I must make oversized badges on strings for Paul, Mr. Weller and Jackie and probably Andy as well.  I’ll get the kids to do it at the weekend.  Thank god I put tin foil in the Ocado order.

Now I am worrying.  Paul (my Paul, not Mr. Weller) is also worrying because he doesn’t know what he’s going to say to Mr. Weller.  I too have no idea.  I’m rather hoping that I will merely get to say: ‘Hello Mr. Weller (tugging forelock and looking ‘umble), great gig, before scurrying on back to see Andy and talk about random shite like washing your John Smedley jumpers in spring water and whether he’s thinking of doing a cover of ‘Hooked on Hymns’ on his next album.  Andy is used to me talking shite.  I’m famous for it in my own little world.  Paul Weller isn’t used to me talking shite, and when I get nervous I talk even more shite than normal.  I will probably blurt out something about velour snails or regale him with the vendetta of the Doo Bobs and the lost frisbee of doom, and the poor man will shrivel up, screaming for help as I am escorted from the premises by two burly minders, both called Dave.

A friend of mine once had the great honour to sit in the box of fame at a Red Hot Chilli Peppers gig.  He was very excited about this.  He was even more excited when it turned out that he was sitting next to Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, who was his all time Rock God Hero Extraordinaire.  He was telling me all about this with great enthusiasm and much waving of hands (presumably to indicate how tall and wide Mr. Page was.  I always think he would be quite short and a bit stumpy, although he’s clearly got very long arms and tenacious finger control).  So I said to him: ‘Great Jon.  And what did you say to Jimmy?’ At which point he looked very shame faced and quite a bit shuffly and said something in a muffled voice which I couldn’t quite hear properly.  I asked him to say it again and he looked at me and said quietly: ‘I said, ‘Hello Jimmy!’  at which point I went quiet myself and said: ‘Oh! Was that it?’ and he said, even more quietly: ‘Yes!’ and confessed that it had all gotten too much for him and he was so overwhelmed he simply didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything at all.  We vowed never to speak of it again.  You see, it pays to be prepared in these circumstances.

I don’t know anything much about music.  I know what I like, but half the time I can’t remember what it’s called, so I can’t even say: ‘Wow, I thought that bit where you played the spoons was tremendous’ in case it was in fact a harpsichord, or it was the worst bit of the show or something.  It’s all a bit Rabbit in the Headlights.  In fact the only thing I can really think that I would want to talk to Paul Weller about seriously is the fact that he went through a stage of wearing John Craven type jumpers for a while, and I was worried.  I was worried about whether he had in fact pinched them off of John, where I could picture John naked and shivering in a little ditch, soldiering on bravely with Countryfile while Weller scarpered with his knitwear. 

I can understand why one would want to go for comfy knitwear after years of being renowned as being one of the sharpest dressed men in the world of pop, but still, it’s a bit of a shock really.  I would imagine doing a couple of hours gig under blazing spotlights in a heavy knit jumper with reindeer frolicking on the front would get a bit sweaty as well.  Perhaps that’s how he manages to remain so lithe and trim.  No Slimming World for him.  None of these aquanautic silver suits where you leap about in them for hours and sweat all your fat off.  Nope, it’s three choruses of ‘Changing Man’, two encores of ‘Going Underground’ and some frenzied guitar playing in the hot lights with a thirty toggle jumper on and bob is your very slim uncle.

So, questions for Paul Weller on a postcard please.  Something to make me sound intelligent, but not too pushy and not like the totally abstract ditzhead that I really am.

My Paul sent me an e-mail to say thank you.  It’s very sweet and he’s worked all the titles of Paul Weller songs into it.  It must have taken him bloody ages.  It’s never likely to get published in an anthology, so he has given me permission to publish it here so that you can be privy to the sweat of his brow (he probably wrote it wearing a jumper) and his very real obsession with the man himself:

What can I say – you’re an “English Rose”. Whenever you find yourself in as “Strange Town” or a “Wild Wood” look for the man in a “Peacock Suit” for he will guide you out and back to “Suzie’s Room”. You will find this on “Friday Street” near the church with the “Porcelain Gods” outside. Remember now that you are “In the City” “In the Crowd”, but don’t be “Frightened” as “Time Passes” you will be at the “Foot of the Mountain” or somewhere in the “Country”.

Walking “Amongst Butterflies” can be enchanting, did you know they have “Wings of Speed”, the bees love a “Sunflower” and the birds flock here for a “Long Hot Summer”. As you stroll along you may see “The Woodcutters Son”, a bit strange really, a bit of a “Changing Man” you may say. He will lead to the river – Careful of the “Broken Stones” and the “Savages”. Stay with him though and he will find “The Holy Man” for you, there high “Above the Clouds” he will lead you “Into Tomorrow”

No more “Private Hell” and “As You lean Into the Night” remember “You’re the Best Thing”.

 Yes.  He is bonkers, but he’s a lovely man and he wouldn’t do anyone any harm!

Below is a presentation I gave to the Lampeter University Students Union Forum on the 29th of November.

I’ve come in tonight to say a few words about the “Transition Town Lampeter” project, which has been gaining support in Lampeter town recently, but which is still largely unknown amongst students in the university. I would therefore like to speak a little about the project’s aims and objectives, with the initial intention of raising its profile in the university, and the further intention of gathering support for it amongst the students. I will first present the motivation for the project, introducing the notion of “Peak oil”, and then briefly outline the heart of what it wishes to achieve, namely “energy descent”, before going on to sketch out the growth of the project and to make an appeal for university involvement.

“Peak Oil”
Our culture feeds on oil. It is the main source of energy consumed in the world today. Almost every aspect of our lives relies on a steady supply of oil, from food production and transportation, to the wars fought in our name. But oil supplies will not last forever: there is only so much oil to extract from inside the earth’s crust. It is estimated that world oil production will peak in the very near future. This doesn’t mean that we’ll run out of oil next week, or any time soon. What the oil peak means is that over half the world’s oil reserves will have soon been used up -estimates for this peak range from between zero years to thirty years maximum, with the most realistic seeming to be about five years. After that time, production goes into irreversible and rapid decline and our main source of energy starts running out. Prices will rise as availability declines, and much of life in the world as we know it will no longer be affordable to the vast majority of people. Since we have not so far identified another viable energy source to replace oil in the quantities that our present consumption requires, the wise response is to begin to prepare now for “life after oil”.
But, one might ask, can we not turn towards alternative energy sources? In a word, No! Take transportation alone. Running the UK’s vehicles on hydrogen, which is one proposed alternative, would need 67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations or a wind farm bigger than the south-west region of England. Or what about biofuels? It would take over 25m hectares of arable land to run the UK’s vehicles on biodiesel, and the UK only has 5.7m hectares of arable land. Basically, supplies of ‘green energy’ just aren’t a feasible alternative to oil, at least at today’s rate of energy consumption.

“Energy Descent”
So, in the absence of an alternative way of fuelling our energy hungry way of life, we must start to face the prospect of “energy descent”. “Energy descent” is the transition from a high energy consumption to a low one. It is a movement towards preparing now for a lower energy consumption lifestyle, the only kind of lifestyle that will be possible in a lower energy future. If we wait for change until we have no choice then we will be faced with massive, ugly, and painful transformations within a short timeframe, whereas if we act before we are forced to, we can make the transition to low energy consumption a graceful and non-traumatic one. Indeed, many of the changes that “energy descent” asks of us are changes that would increase the quality of our lives, if only we could choose for ourselves to make them. This is what ‘Transition Town Lampeter’ is all about. Like other transition town projects, in Kinsale and Totness for instance, the Lampeter project is looking at ways to make creative adaptations in all regions of life to lower dependence on oil use, fostering a sense of community and engagedness with the world we live in.
Re-localisation is one major way in which transition can occur, since oil supplies 95% of the world’s transport energy. Re-localisation turns towards local production and trade, relying on local recourses and skills to supply us with the things we need to live. This means buying our food and stuff from local farmers and craftspeople instead of from faceless and soulless multinationals. Permaculture is another major way for transition. Permaculture is defined as: “a design system for sustainable human habitats that supply human needs in an environmentally enhancing way,” which basically means that it is a way of living on the earth that works with nature instead of against it, rather than the aggressive resource-rape that is our present way. Permaculture claims that human life does not have to be destructive to its environment, nor precariously dependent upon unsustainable resources, in order to thrive. These two elements of transition go hand in hand, and form the core of “energy descent”.

“Transition Town Lampeter”
Transition Town Lampeter became a real possibility when Rob Hoskins, who is a major player in several other transition town projects, came to the Arts Hall in April for a public meeting on the issues of peak oil and energy descent. There was wide agreement among those 450 or so people who attended the meeting, that Lampeter should strive become a transition town. Since then, a steering group has come together, there have been several events and meetings, and action groups have formed, in areas such as: Building, Energy, Healthcare, Food, The Arts, Heart and Soul – the psychology of change, Local Government, Economics and Livelihoods, and Transport.
So, slowly, quietly, there has begun a movement in this town where we live that is responding to what some have described as the greatest challenge that our collective human genius have ever faced. But what is the university’s involvement? Has it occurred to the administration that there is a golden possibility for Lampeter University to become the worlds first ‘Transition University’, gearing itself actively with the help of its students towards peak oil, with a creative plan for on-campus energy descent? I hope it has.

While most of us are just in Lampeter for a few years to get our degree’s, the town and university will remain after we have moved on elsewhere, and so will ‘peak oil’. I believe that the the students of Lampeter, now and to come, would benefit greatly by being part in this transition, which all will have to make at some point anyway, learning lessons here that can be carried on to other places. We really need a transition world. Transition towns are part of that. Transition universities are another, vital part, for the awareness and the seeds of change that could be started in students while at Uni would later be carried far and wide, into every sphere of life.