Chickens

I'm not really going to write about chickens, I just asked HF what I should write about and this was his best suggestion. I will offer this piece of information though - chickens are the most common birds in the world. Fact.

So, instead, I'm going to tell you about my first night at university. Which wasn't a lot of fun, for various reasons. I'm not sure I've ever told anyone this story, well not properly anyway.

I was only just 18 when I went to university at Bournemouth. I was leaving behind a serious boyfriend and all my friends but was obviously quite excited about the experience, having never lived away from home before. Anyway, at Bournemouth University, rather unusually they put most of the first year students not in halls of residence but in hotels - the town being very full of them and there being little call for them outside of the summer.

I was allocated a room in a hotel near the beach with 18 other people, 17 first years and one second year who had stayed in the hotel the previous year. I was pretty nervous meeting the other people, who arrived in dribs and drabs during the day. We all decided to go to the student union nightclub, The Old Firestation (more commonly known as the direstation) that first night. It was kind of a weird experience - not too many people had arrived yet so the club was pretty quiet and none of us really knew each other. As I recall, two or three people split off from the rest of the group to meet people they knew from their courses, the rest of us stayed in a small group, popped our coats in a corner together and got some drinks. We weren't there for very long before I had to go to the loo.

When I came back, everybody had gone. I wasn't unduly worried to begin with, assuming they were in a different part of the club. I had a wander around, but couldn't find them. I looked in the corner where our coats were - except they weren't. My possessions had been abandoned, they had all taken their coats and left mine behind.

I am not the kind of person who can hang around drinking on their own, nor am I the sort of girl who just goes up to strangers in nightclubs and talks to them.

So I left the club, pretty upset and angry and more than a little tipsy. I didn't have a lot of money, so decided to walk the 20-25 minute walk back to the hotel rather than buying a taxi. It was tipping it down with rain. I was wearing a going out jacket with no hood and some sort of skimpy outfit. I didn't have an umbrella.

I should point out that this was probably the safest time for a lone woman to be walking alone, as it was during the Labour party conference and there were policemen at every junction leading to the swanky hotels on the beachfront where they were presumably all staying. I got an awful lot of cheery, sympathetic comments from all the bobbies (well, it can't have been a particularly fun job for them either, although they did all have brollies) including one who smiled and said: "You look really wet." Not terribly useful, but at least I was reasonably sure I wasn't going to get jumped by anyone.

During the walk, I got more and more wet and as a result more and more angry. I am fairly mild-mannered. I don't get angry about too many things, I just tend to purse my lips and brush whatever's irritating me aside. But sometimes, I get REALLY mad. I used to say to my parents that I had a very long fuse, but a massive bomb. So by the time I got back to the hotel, I was hopping mad. It wouldn't have been a problem if everyone had gone to bed - I would have slept on it and realised it wasn't that bad. But unfortunately, two of them were up. They greeted me in a perfectly friendly way and were probably quite taken aback when I turned the air blue, trying and failing to explain how I felt abandoned and upset. Instead I just swore at them, I may have used the expression "f***ing w**kers" on several occasions and just went off in a long, slightly drunken (and rather wet) diatribe. They tried to explain that they thought I had pulled and was off with some bloke. Which shows how little they knew me.

I can't even remember how I left it, I think I just stormed up to my bedroom. And nothing was said about it again. But I never really made friends with most of the people in that house and I think my behaviour probably had something to do with it. Nobody likes a screaming harpy and I think that's pretty much how I came across.

And while the moral of the story is that shouting drunk insults is unlikely to get you anywhere, I will never forget how I felt in that nightclub when I realised I was all alone and I had been left behind. It wasn't nice.

I realise this isn't a very cheery post. Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about how I accidentally almost entered myself in a wet t-shirt competition for shit but funny men's magazine Nuts. I even got a rather tight vest for my troubles.

More on that story later.