Freshers’ week at Loughborough University coincided with the London 2012 Olympics. This made for an interesting mix of faces on a crowded campus.
In the stairwell of the student union building, and not far from the aisle of breakfast cereals, I met the most gorgeous, tall, dark, handsome Canadian. Conversation was a little difficult, however, because heavy PVC strip curtains hung down from the ceiling forming a physical barrier between us. The stairwell started to fill up with American teenage gang members in tracksuits. They all turned out to be quite friendly, although their intentions may not have been honourable.
I left for the playing fields where some amateur athletic practice was underway. Crowds were chanting “Ronaldo!” which didn’t make sense at all: they were mixing up the former Manchester United footballer with sprinter Usain Bolt.
Then I heard my own name, and took this as an invitation to join a group of girls preparing to jog around the field. “How wonderful”, I thought “to be running outside again, and in good weather”, whilst trying not to think of the blisters that would grow from wearing trainers without socks.
Then the leader invited others to join in the run. From the edge of the field surged the entire US Olympic squad, including women in tiny bibs that showed off their impressive six pack stomachs. Once again I knew that I would be the hanger-on at the back of the run.
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We’d moved into our bungalow in Bath, but were struggling to find time to unpack all the boxes of our random belongings. We also discovered that there was little room to dry clothes.
Wandering around our new home town I pointed out Bridge Street, where BK had his part-time dental practice and I would later get my crown fixed. In the open-air market I considered that buying new household equipment from the stall holders might be a solution to our storage box unpacking problem. Further along the street we almost failed to recognise our University of Birmingham pal JS, smartly dressed for work as a part-time accountancy consultant.
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At the conference BK was in a huddle with some geek cronies. I overheard one of them criticise BK for willingly helping others with their technical queries. It appeared that it was my “unreasonable demands” that were under scrutiny.
I did not recognise the speaker: he was large, grey-bearded, perhaps a little younger than me, and wearing a badge that said his name was RW, but this wasn’t the RW that I knew. I marched up to him, declared loudly that I did not bother others with trivial technical questions and, for his information, I could hand-code in HTML.
