5

Student Days

As new student flats pop up around our main cities, we bring you some of the stories of our bright young hopes for the future.

 

AS the new intake of students prepares to head off to university, a former Glasgow Uni student tells us of a group years ago getting together for a drink, when one of them who had disappeared for a while told his pals: “You’ll never guess what I wrote on the toilet wall.”

One of his pals was sober enough to tell him: “We left the Union half an hour ago, ya eejit. We’re back in my flat.”

 

OUR recent tales of student life remind a former Glasgow Uni student of a neighbour knocking at the door at two in the morning and announcing that he couldn’t sleep. Our reader’s flatmate, who answered the door, drunkenly told him: “Well, you’re in luck. Our party’s still going so come on in.”

 

WE asked about student flats, and a Glasgow reader tells us that, years ago, he and his chums played the classic trick on a flatmate who was annoying them. They balanced a bucket of water over his partly open bedroom door. “Of course he spotted it,” says our reader.

“Rather smugly he slowly removed it and took it to the kitchen sink to empty it. He then failed to notice that we’d removed the waste pipe below the sink.

“Happy days.”

 

A READER on the train from Mount Florida to Central Station yesterday heard a young girl look up from her mobile phone and tell her pal: “Did you see that Selena Gomez got a kidney from her best pal?” After a pause, she added: “And you wouldnae even lend me yer student ID card.”

 

CONGRATULATIONS on Glasgow Uni going through on University Challenge after a close victory over Emmanuel College, Cambridge. We liked the comment of Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon after seeing the programme, who remarked: “Speaking as an academic, it’s just a delight to see eight students without their phones for half an hour.”

And Dani Cugini on the Emmanuel team said afterwards: “I love presenter Jeremy Paxman. He gets so indignant if people don’t recognise the poet William Blake, but he reads out the science cards like they’re in Klingon.”

 

TODAY’S daft observation of the day comes from a West End reader, who emails: “A big thank you to the Student Loans Company for getting me through university. I don’t think I can ever repay you.”

 

OUR colourful tales of infestations remind Willie Young of post-student days living in a West End flat with pals above a bakery and having an influx of cockroaches.

Says Willie: “One of my flatmates worked at United Biscuits, where the pest-control man suggested we put down bicarbonate of soda and sugar on baking foil. Successful? Fantastic.

“The only snag was we had to have the kitchen redecorated as the cockroaches exploded. What a sight when we turned on the light in the morning.”

 

SOMEHOW we slithered into tales of flat infestations, and Stuart Miller in Linlithgow recalls: “In a West End flat in the seventies we lived above a kebab restaurant, which sent cockroaches up the pipes. When the Rentokil man came he asked me to capture a few at night so he could assess the problem. A few weeks later my brother-in-law came across my matchbox with a cockroach, so jokingly put it in his wife’s coffee. As it eventually floated to the surface, she screamed in horror, but he laughingly assured her it was just a plastic fake. ‘Er not exactly,’ I told him. Cue more screaming.”

 

WE pass on the comment from American college professor Marian Viorica, who is not impressed by the ability of her students to get up in the morning. As she put it: “I once taught an 8 am college class. So many grandparents died that semester. I then moved my class to 3 pm. No more deaths. And that, my friends, is how I save lives.”

 

 

OUR tales of student life remind Sandy Tuckerman: “I had a flatmate who would Hoover his bedsheets once a term, whether they needed it or not.”

 

AS our flat infestation stories continue to run around, reader David Steel tells us: “Reminds me of sharing a communal flat on Pollokshaws Road with one friend embellishing his life with a pet hamster, which ran about the living room inside its ball.

“However, one day the hamster went missing, and after much searching we reckoned it had escaped to city life.

“Three months later we were leaving, and the owner sent in cleaners to make it ready for the next tenants.

“We arrived to reclaim our deposit, and the owner produced a dead hamster which had been found in the toilet brush holder. To add insult to injury he took £30 off our deposit because we weren’t meant to have pets.”

 

 

MANY parents will have sympathy for broadcaster Anneka Rice, who said: “Messaged my son, ‘Dear Son, I transferred £80 to you in a sunny weekendy moment of love, except you’ll have realised by now my thumb juddered and I sent £800. This is not what I meant to do. Obviously. Please get in touch.’ No reply so far.”