Local Affairs

So anyway. Talking of curries. Not that we were, but suppose that was the case.

I saw an amusing sign yesterday in a curry shop in Rusholme. It said Radio Ramadan, but had a big letter 'R' shared by both words. Passing by quickly, I thought it said 'Radio Amadán.' This amused me. Amadán is an Irish word that essentially means idiot or cretin. Radio Gobshite, basically. Look, it made me smile, anyway, right.

For those of you whose experience of Manchester has been limited, for whatever reason, Rusholme is south of the city centre, between Fallowfield and the University area. The stretch of Oxford Road in the heart of Rusholme is known outside Manchester as the 'Curry Mile'. Strangely, I haven't yet heard anybody here call it that. There are at least forty Indian Restaurants and Kebab shops along a short distance of road, along with several rather dodgy fried chicken joints - Hentuky Fried Chiken is probably my favourite. (That's how it's spelled. Really.) Not that I've eaten there, I just like the name. Other places have clearly opened attempted to be traditional English chippies and eventually cracked, now predominantly dealing in 'clay oven cuisine'. Not a fish in site. If anybody has any particular spots there they can recommend, stick it in the comments box, since I'll probably be going on Friday and have only been to two of the multitude...

The whole street is filled with tasteless neon lights. When I first saw it in September of last year I thought I would never get used to it. Amazingly, it only took about a week.

There's a fun poster up there at the minute, asking 'Can you MC?' and 'Can you sing in Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi?' It's for Asian Starsearch. If only I could enter...

One of the oddest places there is an Internet Cafe and call centre, which also sells dodgy phones. Some people call it the 'Call Boots place,' after the badly spelled sign outside, but I've always favoured 'Taliban Central'. At the start of last year, when my University computer account wasn't working, I did all my mailing from there, since it was the cheapest place I could find. Funds were, as ever, in short supply. Their screen savers, get this, were pictures of Osama Bin Laden. And this was mid-September.

I don't mind telling you, I was a bit concerned.

Residential Madness

Anyway, so much for Rusholme. What about my ever so fascinating life? Well, I'm afraid I have a bad conscience. I'm a bad man. I've done bad things. I've been more than a little cruel to some of the girls here. Some people, it must be said, are natural targets, but even so... I'm a bad man.

We have three highly peculiar girls here, all of whom are absolutely barmy. Which is not to say that they're not nice, just that they're bonkers. Two Germans, and a French girl who hates children but wants to be a teacher. Don't ask. And lately I have been tapping wells of vitriol and venom that people here have never seen, and calmly skewering the girls at mealtimes. I haven't meant to, at least not systematically, but that's been the overall effect.

It started, I think, with their George Clooney Night. The girls got out three G.C. videos and put up posters for their big girlie night in the common room. The following morning they were all at breakfast and Sylvie, the French one, turned to Marlisa, asking in a rather pointed fashion, 'And where were you last night, Marlisa?' She was clearly expected to have been sitting in with the girls. I have no idea what she would have said, but my own rather sharp response, uttered while violently pronging a worryingly greasy hunk of bacon, was 'She was off having a life.' This was the beginning. For the next three days I played funny mind games with Anne, one of the Germans, dropping wordbombs into the conversation in order to puzzle and confuse her. Or just staring at her left ear. That's a classic. It gets everybody. Try it some time. As for Judith, whose surname is Mueller, she was taken to task one day for paying her hall fees with yoghurt rather than money - we'd all got mueller yoghurts for dessert. And she defended herself as though I was seriously convinced that she had done this. Bizarre. Another time she believed me when I told her how one of the lads in hall was a burglar... he leaves the building late at night with his cellar turned up, a scarf covering up to his mouth, a hat pulled down low, and a big bag on his back. It might as well be marked 'swag'.

Sylvie is deeply nuts. She goes bright red whenever I wink at her, so I do that a lot. However, my tormenting of her may have gone too far. She likes to stick signs on her door- fair enough. On weekends, she's had ones telling people to be quiet in the corridors after eight o'clock, since she needed to sleep because of teaching during the week. I'm sorry, Sylv. Get earplugs, or move out. People will keep it down later, but eight o'clock? Please. That's not her only sign. Her best one featured a list of locations where she could be found - a lump of blu-tak was stuck on the sheet, to be moved about as a marker. The locations were fairly comprehensive: 'In'; 'Out'; 'In here sick'; 'with Judith or Francesco'; 'you shouldn't care'; and my favorite, 'So out I'm not even in Manchester'. Well, faced with such a list, and such an opportunity, and indeed, such a freak, what could any right thinking citizen possibly do except shift the blu-tak on every possible occasion? Every time I passed by Sylvie's room, which was fairly frequent, I moved the marker. How could I have done otherwise? Ask yourselves whether you could have resisted such a temptation? And, I must point out, I was not the only such offender.

Well, this obviously annoyed Sylvie. Today, like Popeye, she clearly thought to herself 'I can't stands no more!'

A new notice joined the location sign. It read, more-or-less, as follows:

Dear Messer About,

It is my privilege to move my blu-tak on my sign to let my friends know where I am. If I find out who you are, you will need to run very fast and very far to avoid being caught.... I can't remember the next bit, but it ended with ... Yours, pissed off, Sylvie.

Well, there was only one thing for it. I took the blu-tak, broke it into three pieces to represent her fractured personality, placed one bit to indicate that she was in but sick, another to show that she was so out she wasn't even in Manchester, and a third beside her signature on the new notice.

This may have been a step too far.

She took both signs down, and stuck up a new one, which Shaw told me about, unaware of my mischief. I went to see it, and was deeply impressed. It reads as follows: Those who care will remember who lives here and will know where I am. Those who don't, well, F--- them! A direct quotation there. I've just been to check. Good though, eh? Do you like that wonderfully Gallic mixture of nonchalance and defiance?

Marlisa popped into my room while I was working this evening, and I began assembling a door notice of my own. In a particularly whacky font, it read more-or-less as follows:

'Ello. Je m'appelle Sylvie.

Je suis:

bonkers

Several sandwiches short of a picnic

demented

loopy

nuts

a fruitcake

so out of my mind that I'm not even in Manchester

a potential bunny-boiler

French

I decided against putting it on her door. I reckoned that might consititute harassment. Comedy harassment, but harassment nevertheless. Would there be anything wrong with putting it on my door though? Hmmm.

Perhaps Sylvie could let me use her blu-tak.