Denied of Ibid and Bryn's company, Soppygit and I spent the evening wandering around campus. As we talked, up came the matter of what you would name your-

"I'm not having any flipping kids!" I interrupted.

"But what if you had to?"

"I'd give them really horrible names so they'd hate me and run away from home as soon as they could."

"Aw!"

"Ok, ok. Well. For boys, I only like really simple names."

"Yeah, me too."

"Anything too fancy leads to accusations of being gay." (Not that there is anything wrong with being gay. However, an eleven-year-old boy could probably do without the torment of this cruel and ignorant world.) "The trouble is, everyone and their mother likes simple boys' names, so for every name, I know someone who possesses it, so it has major connotations. For example, I quite like Chris as a name, but there's no way I could ever use it."

"Yeah, I have the same probably with the name Mike."

"And even if you don't know someone with a certain name, there's always a celebrity or fictional character you link it to . . ."

(As you can see, for someone determined not to have kids, I've thought about the issue a lot. In fact, that's part of the reason why I don't want children - I have enough trouble naming my characters, never mind assigning names whose recipients are stuck with them for life.)

". . . hang on a second. We're saying we like simple names, when we fancy people called Bryn and Ramsay?"

Sunday 5 November 2000

Yesterday, after spending all day working (or, to be more accurate, sitting in my room thinking, "I'll go to the computer room and do some work soon, but I'll just listen to this song / have some more sandwiches / charge my camcorder battery a bit more first"), the question was, how to spend the evening?

Usually, there would be at least one answer. Last weekend, in fact, I had a choice between going to the Becket Court party and Slimelight. However, this weekend, Bryn is staying in a "carstle" in Wales, and Ibid has gone home.

So Soppygit and I decided to look for adventure. We set out to Mr Street's corridor.

We spent a while sitting in its kitchen (they get proper kitchens in Keynes College!), talking to his corridor mates and being shown his underwear. (Why, I have no idea!) Then we went to Darwin bar for a while, then onto The Venue, where I encountered some of my corridor mates.

I braced myself for the worst. After all, this was Saturday night. Cheese night. Now, I know I used to go to fromage fests all the time (well, not all the time, but every time I went to a club, I was served Cheddar and Edam), but that didn't mean I liked them, just that there wasn't any alternative. More to the point, of recent weeks, I'd had all the alternative I could possibly want, on indie nights, along with 80s on 80s nights, metal at the Electric Ballroom and The Pit (the irregular rock society event) and goth at Slimelight. How could I now pay to listen to stuff that would give me nightmares?

But it really wasn't bad at all. The first song I heard was Mansun's "Wide Open Space". Mansun? Cheese? Perhaps very mouldy blackened foul-smelling cheese that has been sitting under a bed in a brothel for three years, but definitely not the day-glo cheese you'd expect to find at a night entitled "Loveshack". Although I had to endure "Summer Nights" and "It's Raining Men", they didn't even play any Abba! Or Village People! And the version of "Tragedy" was the Beegees' - no Steps was to be heard. Or Britney Spears, for that matter.

Instead, they played songs that I really like and aren't cheesy in the slightest: "Livin' On A Prayer", "Baggy Trousers", "Walk This Way" and "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?" The only improvement would have been an inclusion of "Centerfold" in the playlist.

But never mind the sounds, the sights were much more pleasing. Soppygit and Mr Street started dancing with each other, and drew closer and closer as time went by. At the end of the night, the three of us left together, but since they were holding hands, when he posed the question, "Where are we going?" I answered, "We could go back to my room, but I think you two would rather go back to her room, so I'll just go on my own. Byezeep!"

So! Development! Yay! See, the trouble with being me is, despite not ever having had much of a love life compared to most people, I still always manage to have more of one than my closest friends. Hence, the completely single Will, Smill, Roe and Marion could torment me about Chris while I had no retaliation material, and likewise, Soppygit and Ibid could make jokes about me and Bryn and never have to suffer wisecracks themselves. But now, revenge is nigh. Bwahaha!

(Of course, it soon transpired that he didn't want to go out with her after all. Blarg!)

But I must say, they could have timed it better. I was already missing a certain somebody, but absent Objects O Lust can be tolerated with a little help from your friends. But when your friends hook up, the woe is magnified tenfold.

No, I'm exaggerating. I'll live. But I haven't even seen him for more than a few minutes since Wednesday night.

Let's see. On Thursday I was busy with lectures all day long. (Now I've changed degrees, I now have six hours instead of the already bad four. Blarg!) On Thursday night, I was tied up with Ahem Ahem for thirteen hours. Not literally tied up, you understand. Ahem Ahem isn't someone I practice BDSM with, only we're both a bit inept at it so we both ended up unable to move until one of my corridor mates wandered into my room to ask if I had a bottle opener, and set us free. Not that anyone goes looking for a bottle opener at eight am on a Friday morning, in the normal run of things, but we *are* students, so you never know. Anyway, no binding was involved, and Ahem Ahem isn't a person. Heurgh, what do you take me for?

It's several people.

Also on Thursday, the Psychics Lecture Theatre flooded. Why didn't they build Kent University waterproof, I wonder? It's a well-known fact that Eliot and Rutherford Colleges were designed by a prison architect who later committed suicide, so I suppose he didn't really care if the inmates drowned or not. But you would have thought that in thirty five years they could have made some improvements?

Apparently not. When I first arrived here, the sports hall had flooded. Then our shower made its presence felt in the corridor. Now Lara in my class has rain coming in through her roof, and the Psychics department can't stand the water pressure either, even if it can tell you it equals depth x density x 10.

But there's one advantage to this situation, because shifts in lecture location mean I run into people who I'd never normally see while going from one class to another. Yesterday, Soppygit's lecture got moved to the Grimond building, which is where I was waiting for mine. And on Friday, as my first lecture was moved to Rutherford College, I encountered Bryn on the way there. He revealed he had failed to see both slasher week movies showing at the cinema the previous night, by going out in Ramsgate (only to not be allowed into a nightclub, for the second time this term). The consequence for missing any slasher week films, he decided, was for me to be suspended upsidedown in a vat of custard, but he seems to have forgotten, thank goodness. Anyway, as a result of the conversation, I promptly lost the rest of my class, and only just made it through the labyrinth that is Rutherford to the appropriate lecture theatre. (As I left it, I met Ibid.)

But now, he is in Wales, and I am here, drowning my sorrows in . . . watching other people drink beer. (I can't afford it and don't like it anyway.) And I know you rely on me not to go sentimental on you, I won't do it again, but . . . I miss him!