by wild_quinine on Mon Sep 08, 2003 7:41 pm
Random, you say?
From 'A Year In Fife Park'
Upstairs and the Randoms.
Fife Park, at the time, was the cheapest student accommodation in the UK. That does not make the final repair bill, which eventually tallied up at significantly more than a full year’s rent, any less impressive. The Park is a shitty set of late 1970s buildings modelled on your average Scottish pebble-dashed papier-mâché council estate. Each ‘house’ has six bedrooms, three up, three down, two bathrooms (with one shower), a kitchen which can comfortably seat four people as long as nobody is trying to cook, and a hallway with a flight of stairs. At the top of the flight of stairs is a sheer drop to the hall below made safe by a protective barrier which cuts off just below the average person’s centre of gravity.
The walls were made of painted cardboard; we know, because there were holes in them before the end of the year. The floor was covered with linoleum in the hallway and the kitchen. It was tiled in the downstairs bathroom. The two miniature corridors and each one of the rooms were carpeted in some kind of rough green hair which, barefoot, was extremely painful to walk on. The upstairs toilet was floored with something blue and slightly spongy. Lord knows what it was.
We had the upstairs of Fife Park Seven. There was a fire door between the small corridor (which led to rooms four, five, and six) and the pitifully small and dangerous landing. I was in room five. My partners in crime at the start of the year were Gxxxxx xxxxxxxx and Cxxxxx xxxxxxxx.
Gxxxxxx is a hard man, tall, thin and bony, but with an almost vampiric strength that wouldn’t be out of place on a man of twice his size. In fact, in our first year, he arm-wrestled a man with biceps twice his size, the late xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx, and the resulting battle lasted for forty-five minutes, until we were forcibly ejected from the Vic. There was no clear winner, but I reckon Gxxxxxx could have gone on forever.
He can also be quite anal, and quite, quite stubborn. He’s very particular about the way some things are done. He’s probably an obsessive compulsive. He’s got just a trace of that ‘bad guy’ streak that women like, without being an absolute cock. He’s very mysterious, and quite capable of doing the unexpected. That year we did things in the name of ‘Random’, and a lot of unexpected things happened.
Cxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx, on the other hand, is a big, hairy man. There’s no fairer way to put it. At the time, he was quite capable of putting away a bottle of vodka in an evening, and still making it out of the house. He had some seriously large hair on the go in our second year, and often sported a hooded top to match. Afterwards, he got it all cut and it’s quite scary how respectable he’s capable of looking. During the Fife Park year, he looked like a cross between Ché Guevara and the Unabomber.
‘I am the Walrus,’ Cxxxxxx would say, in excess of fifteen times per day. It was hard to disagree with him. Cxxxxxx is laid back. He’s not afraid. He seems to live by the maxim ‘It’s probably going to happen anyway, so why get worried?’ I can’t qualify further, without examples. This book is full of them.
Downstairs, in rooms one, two, and three, lived ‘the randoms’. Meeting them was a very surreal experience. They had all been to school together, and had all elected to live together. They all came from in or near the same small and unexalted village of Strathblane, notable not even for being a couple of typically Scottish syllables hammered together to make a new place name. (It’s near Stirling, apparently.)
We called them the randoms for a long time, even after we had been properly introduced. They didn’t like it. We called them the randoms anyway, in the main part because of our fixation with randomness.
That had all largely been spurned by a picture of Cxxxxxx and his friends partying in Arbroath. He had pointed out all of his friends by name, until he came to a toothless bloke with a huge fake afro grinning away in the corner of the photograph. ‘Who’s that?’ we had asked.
‘Dunno,’ Cxxxxx had replied. ‘Some Random Punter.’
From then on, we were in love with the possibility that surreal things could happen, seemingly without reason. It was a good ideal to aspire to, as they constantly seemed to. We drank to random, and we got it. Alcohol is a great leveller, for one thing, and putting together a previous evening’s events piecemeal is likely to be a surreal experience at the best of times.
The randoms were Graham xxxxxxx, Pxxxxxx xxxxxxx, and Jxxxxxx xxxxxx. Pxxxxxx went home in his aging VW golf every weekend to ride horses and visit his mentally deficient girlfriend. He’s a good looking blonde guy, who gets drunk very quickly.
Graham gets drunker, every weekend, and has reportedly pissed in the bathroom sink on more than one occasion. This remains quite simply inexplicable; it was next to the toilet, and in virtually the same room. Graham got more girls than anyone else in the house. He’s a small guy, but athletic and well proportioned. He’s always out for a good time. He probably pissed in the shower, too. We just don’t know. (Gxxxxxx always used to shower whilst wearing flip flops. At the start of the year, we thought this was just one more example of Gxxxxxx’s retentive nature. However, anal as he is, Gxxxxxxx is also a man of potentially enormous insight. The longer we lived in Fire Park, the more reasonable it seemed to become. Especially after the ‘washing powder’ incident.)
Jxxxxxxx is very quiet. He’s thin. He’s a genius. He looks like a man who smokes a lot of pot. I’m certain that at the start of second year I did not know what a man who smokes a lot of pot ought to look like; however if Jxxxxxx influenced my thinking on the matter in any way, it must be said that he makes a pretty good poster boy. It took longer to get to know Jxxxxxx than anyone else. He has long hair, and reportedly looks American. Or like a cocker spaniel, depending on who you believe. I think it’s the dimple in his chin that does it; the American thing, that is.