Halls Life

I'm beginning to develop a worrying addiction to backgammon. This is troubling, because I'm crap at it. (Is it good to be crap at craps, though? Does anyone ever play?) I've spent far too many hours of late playing backgammon on Yahoo! against the infinitely better Heinrich, who demolishes me on a regular basis. The games have little chat sections underneath, which we fill with our life crises and bad jokes. This is an attempt to virtually replicate, albeit sans Guinness, the many games we've had in Corrigan's pub in Rathmines, to the bemusement of the barstaff.

Standard jokes include punning on the word 'roll' and muttering in German, at which I'm atrocious, but which Heinrich has a certain facility in. Probably because he's at least theoretically German, though largely Hibernicised now. So early in the game I'll invariably roll badly, causing Heinrich to remark 'What a substandard roll.' I will concur, and then point out that I once had a remarkably substandrad roll in UCD shop. Ham and far too much coleslaw, invariably. Then a truly crap roll will follow, enabling me to point out that the worst roll I ever had was in the aptly named 911 sandwich and doughnut shop in UCD. I had food poisoning for a week and was a shadow of myself for the next month.

(An effective dieting technique that, by the way. Live on raw pork and rancid tuna, as the resulting food poisoning will ensure you lose the best part of a stone within a week.)

German jokes shall be considered another day. I don't know if blogger will let me do an umlaut here.

Lately I've been teaching my friend Eddie to play in real life. We've had four games, and I've lost all of them. Three tonight, in fact. I'm beginning to regret teaching him. Ah well. So it goes. Unfortunately as he left tonight, having thooughly destroyed my sense of backgammon-confidence, he declared that he'd enjoy coming back and whipping my ass. This troubled me. People keep making unfortunate comments in my room. Last Thursday Oliver, who lives across the corridor from me, came in at around half-twelve to ask did I want to grab lunch. He was, however, not ready to get lunch, as had yet to shower, having, it would appear, risen rather late. He was dressed accordingly, clad, or so it seemed, in but T-shirt and towel. His first words on entering my room had nothing to do with lunch, I'm sorry to say. No. Oliver, former child prodigy and chess champion, wearing nowt but T-shirt and towel, noticed the chess board and declared: 'Hi Greg - oh fantastic! I'll have to come here and whup your arse sometime!'

I don't mind telling you, I was a bit concerned. And before you ask, I'm abysmal at chess too.

Yeah, I live in a University Hall of Residence, and hence have oddly dressed visitors at odder hours. They come to my room generally with the aim of drinking tea. I do a lot of that, and indeed may be the only person in my wing of the hall who has a teapot. Strange gatherings happen at about eleven in the morning, a mere two hours, if we're feeling diligent, after breakfast, all centred upon my teapot. Which is cool, but strange. Having seven people drinking tea in your room at eleven in the day when they should be working is kind of peculiar. In a fun kind of way. Some people reckon I should just stick a sign on my door saying 'Common Room'.

Jenny, who is among the coolest of the myriad girls living upstairs, has a similarly social room, where people gather to hang out in the evening. Last night myself, Shaw, and Eddie sat there watching the latest episode of 'Angel' on the computer, and Eddie Izzard 'Live at the Ambassadors' on the video.

'Angel' is, I admit, something of a closed book to me; I tend to suffer from 'X-Files Syndrome', whereby I've historically only seen about a dozen episodes, but seen them a ganseyload of times. This happens with 'Buffy' too. I tend to like it, but never know when it's on and make no effort to find out. As a result I see both series completely out of sequence and am always deeply puzzled. I'm still not sure why the Giles-type character in 'Angel' no longer hangs out with the gang, where Angel's son came from, why Cordelia has lost her memory, who the green singing guy with the horns is, and who the other two are. Last time I saw it there were just Angel, Cordelia, and the guy who's like Giles and whose name I can never remember.

(Although 'Angel' has better music, I freely admit that 'Buffy' is a better show. Though I've always had mixed feelings about it, since the first episode I ever saw was one which my friend Andrea in Canada, a genuine fan, regards as one of the worst in the series. Viewing that gave me a somewhat jaundiced view of the show from the start. Weirdly, Holly thinks that one wasn't bad. Maybe I need to see it again.)

Eddie Izzard was cool, predictably enough. His comments on Jesus' inability to run in flip flops made me think of that fantastic statute of Jesus sprinting along which can be bought at a very reasonable price on the deeply bizarre catholicshopper.com. Go check it out. And his analysis of the advantages of Roman 'pokey-pokey' swords was completely on the button. The others asked me, and I had to admit that, yes, everything he said was true. My name is Greg and I'm an ancient military historian. Sad but true.