Apathy Sketchpad

There is a very simple lesson that Leeds City Council would do well to learn: Tarmac does not stick to cobblestones. All over Burley, the road surface is peeling away in huge chunks. Clearly this is not good enough. The council have responded to this problem in three key ways. The first is to ignore it and hope it goes away. The second is to attempt to solve the problem. This is marginally less successful, since so far it has resulted in a large amount of machinery ariving, closing a road, being vandalised, and then being taken away again, leaving only a small pile of tar and a broken paving slab to suggest any work was started, and a long stretch of fairly busy road being stripped down to a very bumpy layer which is still full of potholes, and now has the added inconvenience of signs saying “temporary road surface” (which is becoming decreasingly believable), “raised ironworks” (the drains are no longer flush with the road, and offer no drainage at all unless rained directly into), and “ramp ahead” (nobody knows what these signs refer to, we haven’t found a ramp anywhere nearby). But by far and away the most successful move they made against the poor road surface was to build a huge speedbump at the junction in the middle of our road. We like this speedbump, because as the only stretch of tarmac in a five mile radius new enough not to contain fossilised dinosaurs it is smooth, and not full of holes. Ironically it’s the fastest road in the postcode.

The plan had worked so well until then. He had done everything right. Why was it all falling apart now?

The preparations had all been made. The envelope had landed on the carpet with the same light smack as the others had done before it, and countless more would afterwards, but this one from the Studio, bearing his victim’s name was special. He did not know what it contained, merely that it must not be opened until the others were here. He had quickly intercepted it, and kept it hidden for so long, and yet now here he was, on his own territory, being grilled by his victim about why it was here.

Eventually the victim left, and he was alone again, simply waiting for the other to arrive. When he did, the envelope could be returned to the victim. It seemed like an age before he returned, but in reality less than half an hour passed. Together, they delivered the envelope to the victim, who cautiously ripped it open to reveal its contents.

As it transpired, the envelope contained less than any of them had thought. There was a white slip of paper, which had clearly been inserted into every envelope the Studio sent out, and a small, dark, glossy card. The card bore a signature, and a face. Both of these belonged to one man. A man the victim had come to fear above all others. A man who they had seen on television broadcasts, but never dared approach in real life. The card bore the name and face of Richard Whitley.

And yes, I realise that may be something of an anticlimax, but that’s how the story goes. Adam and Lee, apparently having tired of playing jokes on Stavros, had sent something to Yorkshire Television in my name. I don’t know what it was, only that it resulted in my being sent a signed photograph of Richard Whitley. I can only pray and hope that it was not something Richard might feel the need to read out on Countdown. If, however, I learn that it was, well I’m sure I can think of an equally mean and malicious trick to play on them.

A couple of days later, I received a photograph of Alex Lovell, bearing the message “Andrew, Your email was wonderful. Thank you, Alex”.

There are some things in this city that I don’t quite know what they’re for. The Starbucks directly opposite Starbucks, for example, or the plug sockets fifteen feet above the lecture theatre floor. But one of the biggest mysteries is why they insist on building things which could only possibly be useful as a placebo.

Now, I’m all in favour of placebos in their place, but their place is a double blind medical trial, or possibly a glass which contains Coca Cola but for a change no vodka. Their place is not a pedestrian crossing. There are a number of buttons in Leeds attached to traffic lights, which when you press them, make a little light come on saying “wait”, and I’m almost certain the traffic lights do precisely what they would have done had you never been born. Then the light goes out and the cycle begins anew.

And yet, not only do they waste money building these wholly pointless switch boxes instead of adding some pedestrian lights to the Burley Road Junction of Death, which could badly use some, but people still press the buttons. And then, having pressed the button, they do precisely what they would have done had the button never been built. As soon as a gap appears in the traffic, they walk across the road, because if they don’t, they have to wait for the lights to change, which is often as long as a fortnight.

But the strangest placebo in Leeds, and I realise it’s probably not a subject many readers will be familiar with, is the lock on Adam’s house’s bathroom door. For background, it’s not really a door at all, so much as a big door shaped rectangle of wood hanging from two small wheels attached to the top, which are held onto a runner on the wall by nothing more substantial than gravity and about half a centimetre of thin metal. The slightest upward nudge will send it crashing to the floor. It is easily removed and replaced. This plainly not being good enough, the designers also added a lock. The lock is a standard bathroom sliding bolt, but, since the door moves sideways, it had to be mounted facing forward, so the bolt extends into the door itself. This has the net effect of mashing up the handle when it is closed and dislodging the whole door when it is opened. It makes no significant difference to how hard it is to open the door

I was hanging around the Union message board earlier, when I spotted a message advertising http://www.leedsromance.org.uk. I did not sign on. Partly it’s because of an in-built cynicism about online dating services, even ones aimed at Leeds students. But mostly it was because I would have been the first person on the service. This was not an image I wanted to put across. It’s a bit like saying, “Hi, I’m the single most desperate student in Leeds. Please go out with me”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s a good service, but I don’t want to be first.

Physics is traditionally an expensive subject to teach. The laboratory requires x-ray spectrometers, air gyroscopes, computers, and in our case a large red pancake catapult. None of this is free, and some of it has to be custom built. Therefore the department has always had a large pile of money, several labs full of complicated looking things, and a mechanical workshop full of tools and people called Trevor, which builds anything we can’t buy from anywhere else.

This went fairly well, all these places were located in a neat little row in the E. C. Stoner building, which was named after a very clever physicist who discovered something to do with X-Rays right here at Leeds, despite being one of the least clever buildings I have ever set foot in. The layout is based around the Red Route, which I’m told is the longest corridor in Europe, but then I was also told it was used as a set on Blake’s Seven, when in fact they used a rather shorter corridor over at the Met. This corridor (which just for atmosphere, you can never see both ends of; it’s that long) actually has something of a kink about halfway down, because apparently the builders started at the ends and worked to meet, and managed to miss each other by a couple of feet. Branching off this corridor are several staircases. Three of these get to various parts of the physics department. Two drop you either side of the department ‘hub’, that is, the Physics Coffee Bar. The third gets you to the second year lab. Now, it would seem logical that you would be able to get from the coffee bar to the second year lab without leaving the department. And you can, usually, but only if the first year lab is open and you can cut through it. If you dare brave the Forbidden Corridor, then you can get right over to the lobby this way, but that corridor is not open to undergraduates. If the first year lab is closed, you either have to go down and cut through computing (when that’s open), go outside the building, or go up through red route. The last two involve climbing two entirely useless staircases.

The reason, you see, that there is a big chunk of computing department right in the middle of physics, is that the University, some time ago, started charging departments for floorspace. I think they charge about £80 per square metre per year. The physics department is very unhappy about this, because it means that the physics department is being slowly bought out by the computing department, who only need to fill a few rooms with passable computers, and don’t really need any money for anything else. Just outside the physics department is a huge room with nice glass fittings and big chairs. This is called the “Informatics Laboratory”. Honestly, I ask you. It isn’t even a proper word, let alone an academic subject, and yet it has this huge ‘lab’, which is plainly a common room, with a big flat widescreen TV showing their propaganda.

And it’s just got worse. I’m told that, as of next year, the computing department also owns what is currently our first and third year labs, and basically everyone’s in the part of the lab we currently use for almost nothing. I doubt if this is going to impress people on open days, when the physicists are shown lots of rooms with an epic hike through computing between each one, and the computing department seems to exist only in small chunks surrounded by physicists. I know it would put me off, but then looking at most of the computing department, physics probably seems like a non-stop party full of girls to them

In about seven weeks, we will be moving out of our current house, and into the new one. Along the way we will stop at the Housemate store to return one Adam and try to get a replacement, and return Stavros, and try to get a refund. Over the last few months, the war on Stavros has become rather fierce. The trouble is, though, that I don’t think I have managed to impress on the reader just how hard he is to have to live with. In fact, I’m not sure I ever could, but here goes.

Lee joined the war last week, after Stavros had a go at him for not washing up the noodle pan. There is only one person in this house who eats noodles, and it is Stavros. Stavros then, rather than washing anything up, fills said pan with water and leaves it somewhere inconvenient. He agued with Lee that this was all he should be expected to do, and has been informed that perhaps that would be the case were he capable of cooking packet noodles without burning them onto the side of the pan.

I declared war the day that I took too much of Overnet. Overnet, it should be explained, is a program designed to let people stare blankly at a screen while it tries vainly to log on to a myriad servers. Once connected, you are allowed to download huge files. This of course uses up a lot of bandwidth, but the incredible thing is that even when it isn’t downloading anything at all, it still uses up all the bandwidth. We discovered this when we turned it off, and suddenly found our internet access works much better.

I don’t know if I’d mentioned so far that our internet access goes through Stavros’ computer. Well, he thinks that it’s okay to use all the bandwidth since the account was in his name. So we said fair enough, as long as he stops running Overnet. He said he’d compromise, and only run it after midnight. Adam said that he only gets home from work at midnight, and therefore that wouldn’t benefit him at all. Stavros acted as if it was his unarguable right to use up all our bandwidth downloading copyrighted material for free, at least some of the time. We argued with him more than a little on this point, and he eventually said he’d stop running it. A few days later, our internet access was running slowly, and we went downstairs to find Overnet sitting happily in the middle of his screen. So I turned it off, and asked him about it the next day. He said it had “probably run accidentally on startup”. He was instructed to see that it didn’t happen again, and he agreed. The next time Overnet ran “accidentally” I turned it off and added a notepad window to his screen explaining that this was not going to be tolerated. He, of course, ignored this completely. A few days later I uninstalled Overnet from his computer. Somehow, it “accidentally” reinstalled itself. I uninstalled it again, and explained to him that nobody was going to pay him a single penny towards the bill for a service that was prictically unusable. He put it back. I uninstalled it again, deleted the installation files, and replaced it with a wave file of Microsoft Sam saying “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you do that”. A few days later, I was surfing quite happily. When. All of a sudden. The internet slowed to a patetic crawl, and I heard the door shut. My bedroom overlooks the front garden, and I immediately went over to the window to see his awful beige jacket strolling out of the door. Then I immediatley went downstairs to turn off Overnet. It turned out, he had not only reinstalled Overnet, not only ran it after we had told him not to, but also put a password on his computer and left to work a six hour shift at the very unlucky Warner Village Cinema. That was when I declared war.

Being an idiot, though, he neglected to do his research properly. I looked around, he had left no hint. I guessed everything I could think to guess. Nothing. So then I thought that, since we couldn’t get on the internet anyway, I may as well have a look around, see if I can’t get past it. After a brief play around in his BIOS settings, I rebooted it, on a whim, into safe mode. What he failed to realise about Windows XP is that in safe mode, an extra account appears. The Administrator account is all powerful, and he had forgotten to add a password to it. Once I got in, I turned off his password lock, turned on one of my own on the Administrator account, which to my knowledge he still hasn’t found. I also deleted Overnet, and changed his desktop so that it had the phrase “DID YOU REALLY THINK THAT WOULD STOP ME?” in blood red letters across it. That was when he declared war. This was how he declared war: a two-page rant that he left on his computer where he assumed we would find it. When we inevitably didn’t (after seeing this in his documents menu we pretty much stopped going near his PC if we could avoid it) he printed it out and handed it round. We later went back on the PC and retrieved a copy of the original file, and here it is, in PDF form.

I hadn’t mentioned something here which you will need to know for the rest of the war diaries. His television. How we hated that TV. His parents had given him some stuff for the house. One was an X-Box, which gave us hours of fun spending all his Koins in the Krypt unlocking Koffins we knew were going to be Krap. One was a DVD player that dodn’t work properly. But the worst was the TV. It was bloody huge. Some TVs are very large and very nice. They pull it off. Adam’s, for example. His is widescreen, silver, classy. Stavros’ was black, 4:3, and despite being the tallest television we had ever seen, still cut off the edges of the picture. And stopped us from getting into the cupboard.

When he declared war he moved all of this stuff into his room, which now looks extremely funny. He even has a huge armchair in front of his PC. He was found the other day passed out in it with a control pad in his hand.

Over christmas, for reasons best known to themselves, his family came up to stay. Everyone else went home to visit their family, but Stavros’ family, who probably have more money than any of our families, came to stay here. Durin this time, they say Lizzy’s fridge stopped working. They claim to have poked at it with a screwdriver for a few hours and then thrown it away. Lizzy did not find out about this until she got back. The current theory is that we put too much beer in it and blew the fuse, which would be a ten minute job for any suitably sentient being to repair.

He also had a clear out of the remaining fridge. He threw out a lot of things, including a bag of leaves. Stavros, who exists on a diet of noodles and Pot Noodles, I don’t think understands the idea of eating leaves, much less the idea of cooking with them for flavour. Lizzy does, and is willing to pay money for bags of such leaves. She was not happy.

Meanwhile, when he did venture into the kitchen, (of course we don’t let him cook for us anymore), he cooked a meal known only as Spaghetti No-Bolognaise. Perhaps the from the noodle pan story you gathered Stavros’ general ability with cooking instructions. But no. While I, when told to make bolognaise, went and cooked it with ingredients, without even thinking about using a jar for something so simple, Stavros demonstrated that perhaps even jars are a bit too difficult.

The most obvious example of his almost unique flair for ignoring cooking instructions was the frozen pizza. We had to explain to him that “place into a cold oven” meant you did not have to pre-heat it. Heat being the opposite of cold, I would have thought he would have grasped this concept quickly enough. He then told us that you obviously had to pre-heat it a bit.

The Spaghetti No-Bolognaise was more interesting. He used the last of a bag of mince, which was clearly not going to be enough for the three of us. To combat this, he added another entire bag. This meant we then had about 550 grams of mince. The instructions on the jar called for one jar of sauce to 350 grams of mince. It was going to be a bit weak, unless he added some tomatoes, some herbs, somthing, anything to give it some evtra flavour. We were not prepared for what he did next. He added half of the jar of sauce. We argued with him on this point. He said it would save money. We said no, all we would have is half a jar of Dolmio, and as he was amply domonstrating, it is impossible to cook anything with half a jar of Dolmio. He tasted it and explained that it was “perfect”. We tasted it, and explained that is was “bland and tasteless”. That was the last time we let him cook.

We don’t let him wash up, either. This is because he will use a scouring pad for everything. Especially Teflon. The first rule of Teflon is not to scour it. He always does. We told him not to. We told him it wasn’t even his Teflon. He scoured it anyway. He said it didn’t hurt as long as you did it lightly. We showed him the scratch marks and explained that yes, it really did hurt, and might hurt him personally if he persisted. He ignored us. We don’t let him wash up any more.

Then, of course, there’s the thing with the shoe. I mentioned this in another column, so I’m not going to repeat it all here, but I will say enough in case you haven’t read it that you should have some idea what happened. It was difficult, when he had back seats, to get into the back seats of Adam’s car. Stavros, whenever a car journey seems imminent, immediately stands next to the passenger side door and grins a grin that says “Instead of getting in and not drawing attention to it, I am going to stend here, watch you get into the back, and grin this stupid grin while I do.” This is about the most irritating thing he has ever done. By no means the worst thing, but certainly the most irritating. This, of course, was before Adam declared war on him. This came around the same time as I did, but with the added build up that, the last (not most recent, but final, ever) time that Stavros was allowed to visit Adam’s house he parted with the words “You’re a complete bastard. I mean, you’re a nice guy, but you’re a complete bastard.”

He also has a very annoying (but totally unconnected) habit of playing the same damn Coldplay track over and over again. I very nearly kicked down his door and ranted at him a few nights ago when he played it loud enough to be heard on the next floor at half one in the morning.

In equally unrelated news, he also eats a lot of cereal. He keeps this in bowls, and keeps the bowls in his room because he can’t be bothered to move them. Every so often, we are forced, by sheer volume of no-bowls-anywhere-in-the-house venture in there to retrieve the stack of bowls next to his computer. These frequently contain bits of old milk, his hair (usually from his head, but not always), and/or cotton buds. Then he refuses to believe us when we tell him this, and starts a new stack.

He has also talked over me for long enough, and these days I can be quite patient, for long enough to make me shout directly into his ear just to get some attention. It worked, so I decided against actually saying anything now that I had the floor. He even punched me once. We were sat next to each other in a lecture, having an argument, when he explained to me I shouldn’t insult someone so far within punching radius. I explained that I doubted very much whether he could land a good punch from such close range. He punched me in the head, and the only thing that stopped Adam leaning over and probably knocking him out cold (which wouldn’t have been noticed, since he sleeps through most of his lectures anyway) was the fact that all I said was “See?”.

One morning he was “warning” me about changing the channel labels on his TV to “SHITE”, “ERROR”, and “GNOME”. But that’s nothing compared to what he was telling me later that day. Apparently he’d got a letter from some company, who had “basically offered [him] a job in June 2005 designing software”. Now I already knew this, because it was me and Adam who had written the letter in question.

Dear Mr. Dickenson,

We at Generico would like to invite you to apply for a position with us as a Generico Informatics Technician here at our Leeds centre of operations.

This job carries an annual starting salary of £24,601 plus expenses. You will be using some specialist software including C and VisTran to help create an innovative, interactive, user-friendly interface for our lower-level call centre employees. You will also be expected to liaise and assist our I.T Support department…

…It has always been our policy to recruit the very best of this country’s university students and you were recommended to us personally by Dr Clarke at the University of Leeds, Department of Physics and Astronomy, who said, “You will be very lucky to get Chris Dickenson to work for you; I think nobody could do the job better”…

Michael Spencer
Chief of Staff

Download the PDF of the whole letter.

Almost every line had a joke in it somewhere (which I’ve underlined and hovering the mouse over them should reveal), and of course, he fell for it hook, line and sinker. He said he was going to do a gap year and then hopefully work in electronics, though, so he wouldn’t be able to take up the offer. Personally, I was hoping he’d go and visit Michael. Ah, well.

But even that was nothing compared to the fake hours sheet we slipped him a few weeks ago. We scanned in one of his timetable sheets (with his scanner), changed the date, gave him loads of extra shifts, rigged Holly, the girl he fancies’ hours so they will never meet (this really irritated him, since we’ve been bugging him to ask her out), changed one of his co-workers’ names to Dave Gorman, printed it out (with his printer), and put it on the floor of his room, where he normally keeps important documents. Oh, and just in case he phones up to complain, the manager’s phone number is now a phone box in Tingley. Adam (no, not that Adam, the other Adam) had to leave the room to laugh when Stavros came in complaining about his new twenty-eight hour working week. “Well at least you ought to get a chance to ask Holly out,”
“No,” he said, “that’s the really annoying thing..,” then he went back to sitting and staring at the sheet, every so often saing “bitch!”, or “twenty-eight hours!”. We all managed to keep straight faces until he said “There’s a Dave Gorman on here!”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I really don’t remember picking this sheet up.”
“What?”
“They normally don’t give these out until Thursdays.” This was Wednesday. We started to get a bit worried.
“Maybe they gave you extra notice, you are working twenty-eight hours, after all,”
Then he spotted a mistake we’d made (it wasn’t a brilliant forgery, to tell you the truth, but that just makes it funnier). We’d accidentally duplicated one of his shifts in a totally random place. We panicked a little at this point, but then (with a little prompting) he put it down to a photocopying error, and moved on. He still hasn’t spotted (well, he hadn’t when he left for work a few hours ago, at any rate) that we had to duplicate one of his co-workers entirely, to cover up a scanning imperfection, but that said, he didn’t notice when we gave him a piece of raw pasta in with his meal. He noticed the second time, but seemed to think it was an accident. Nor, come to that, did he notice when we added salt and vinegar to his squash, or salt to his Frosties. He did get angry about the coffee we’d salted, but only because he accidentally dropped it and smashed the jar. I don’t think he ever noticed we’d starched one of his socks, either, but then I don’t think that worked very well.

Another time, we stole an entire roadblock, and set it up outside his door (though we returned it the next day). This is the “traffic cone incident” he mentions in the letter.

We never did think of a good prank to play with the bags of hair, too. A few weeks ago, myself, Adam and Lee were at Adam and Caroline’s house, and Caroline was eager to try her new clippers. Adam wanted a haircut, so volunteered. Then she wanted to do me. I refused, but then Lee said he’d have a mohawk if I had mine shaved. So I said yes. I now have a Number Three, Adam has a Number Seven, and Lee has a bleached mohawk and three bags of hair, which we saved specifically to annoy Stavros with. We thought we should wait, though, until it wasn’t so obvious that the culprits are probably the guys with the recently shaved heads, but that won’t work, firstly because Lee threw the hair out, and secondly because I just had mine done even shorter. Well, that’s not strictly true; really, I asked for a Number Three again, Caroline looked at the clippers, said “these have got a number three on”, started to shave my head, and afterwards I discover she read the metric size and I now have 3mm long hair. Anyway, it’s all terribly amusing, even if we are going to Hell.

When Stavros got back from work, he told us that we were sad for going to all the effort of making a fake hours sheet, and that the real one was even worse (because Holly had taken a week off), and sat down to his tea, which unusually we hadn’t sabotaged, but we had left in the oven to keep it warm, so when Annie set it to preheat before cooking her and Alex’s food it rather burnt. Normally we add a single piece of raw pasta to any pasta dish we make. Today’s was the master stroke. His needlessly weak bolognase — which you must remember he cooked — was accompannied by a single piece of raw spaghetti.

Stavros came back up to Leeds this Friday, after spending a year annoying Canada, and left again on Sunday morning, having managed not to annoy anyone enough to actually kill him, but in his brief stay he did manage to help make fajhitas with broken glass in them and ruin his own shirt by attempting to iron it.

See also: Stavros’ passwords cheat-sheet — purely for his hilariously bad handwriting.

I may have explained before that a disproportionate amount of the spam that appears in my inbox is about septic tanks. I can offer no explanation for why this might be, but the fact is that none of it has been as good as this one:

“Wonder what happens to a poorly maintained septic system?

“Click here a FREE Trial of SPC Septic cleaner while supplies last!

“And hopefully you won’t have to!”

Do I really need to tell you why that’s not a good slogan?

A few months ago, Mars bars changed forever. They became fluffier, the packaging changed and they started to use the slogan “Pleasure You Can’t Measure”. This, I can’t help but think, is a very clever slogan, because they also became two grams lighter, so any measurement you did make would be unlikely to favour the new bar. This, perhaps, goes some way to explaining why one idiot filled a large portion of his house with a vast stockpile of the old-style bar before the change.

But I think you can measure the pleasure. We just need a new unit, or rather, we don’t. Modern society has problems changing from one system to another. The BBC just can’t get the hang of widescreen, NASA can’t quite work metric, and my Dad has trouble with VideoPlus. Perhaps. But I have solved one of these problems. There are exactly two units of measurement that everyone, metric or imperial, understands: the first is the second and the second is the pint (if you follow me). The second measures time, and while it does a very good job of it, it isn’t terribly flexible. Therefore, I propose to base all future measurements on the Pint. This is exactly as hare-brained as it seems, but bear with me on this one.

Some qualities are very easy to measure in pints, such as volume, capacity, drunkenness, or attractiveness. Others are more difficult, but it can be done. For example, we don’t, it turns out, actually need seconds at all. The pint is already an accepted value of time, defined as a comfortable time to finish a pint of beer before leaving a pub, as in “We’ll stay for one pint, and if he doesn’t show up, we’ll go on without him”. The pint has also long been accepted as the standard unit of currency for students, who prefer not to deal in small change, since they very rarely seem to have any. Anybody who goes on a lot of pub crawls has a good idea of what length and area a pint constitutes. A crawl will be a certain length, and cover a certain area, and a certain number of pints will be drunk. From this, it is easy enough to work out the definitions of the pint length, and the pint area, unless of course you have just completed the research. Yet more quantities are very difficult to express in pints, but they can all be done. Weight, for example, is a tricky one. It is quite simple to say that a book, or a coat weighs as much as two or three pints of beer, but this is not a smart way to measure the weight of a car. Therefore for larger objects the weight is defined as the number of pints you would have to consume before you think you can lift it. The pint can even measure electrostatic potential and data capacity. As far as I know, there is no imperial unit equivalent to the Volt. The pint is here defined in terms of how drunk you have to be to touch a pair of contacts at a given voltage. Also, there is clearly no imperial unit equivalent to the byte, so the pint of data is defined as the difference between the amount you can hold in your head before another drink, and the amount of said data you can remember afterwards.

I choose to measure pleasure by the number of pints you would need before you would rather have them than the Mars bar. It doesn’t come out very favourably.

I have had a request from Adam for some clarification in the field of which-Adam-is-which. The more intelligent of you will no-doubt have noticed by now that I know more than one person by the name of Adam, but may be unsure as to which stories relate to which. The situation is only exasperated by Lee’s habit of calling me Adam. Usually, on this website, ‘Adam’ refers to Adam Whitlock, but sometimes it refers to Adam Tumber. Put simply, any Adam mentioned in the same sentence as Caroline, a hi-fi, or a car is almost certainly Adam Whitlock, whereas any Adam mentioned in the same sentence as “18 girls”, or Tom Paris is almost certainly Adam Tumber.

If it helps at all, you can remember that Adam Tumber is the Adam who I live with, until July, when I move out and move in to a different house with Adam Whitlock. (Adam Tumber is moving in with Adam Sculthorpe. It’s fun, this, isn’t it?) Adam Tumber dropped off the physics course a few weeks ago, whereas Adam Whitlock only dropped out of the Year in Industry.

I also, entirely in an evil bid to confuse you, know an Alistair and an Alisdair. Alistair, or “good Al” as he is known in the department, is reputed to be a robot vampire (he can tell you your neck measurement to within half an inch). He can find his way anywhere, from anywhere else, in any length of time he wants. He knows everyone in the world, but only as a friend. Alisdair, on the other hand, is known as “evil Al” (or “Mr Physics” to the first years). He has a girlfriend called Rachel at another university, and spends altogether too much time with the department flirt, Lucy.