doesn’t have an impact on me, day by day. That’s what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
I mostly smoke marijuana, which I buy from a boy called Glynn Powers. I don’t know where Glynn buys it, but he has several kilos of it in the built-in bedside locker in his tiny room in the new Queen Elizabeth block, a short walk beyond Fellows’ Pieces (i.e. grass area reserved to dons). The block was opened by a princess only three years ago and in the entrance hall of the building, next to the commemorative plaque, there’s a picture of her standing in one of the little cells, smiling at the president, with the bedside locker in view behind them. The brickwork of the wall is exposed because they discovered when the building was completed that the size of each room was smaller than the minimum required for single human habitation by the Department of Housing. By removing the plasterboard they were able to add just enough volume to go legal.
In his bedside locker, Glynn keeps polished scales and brass imperial weights. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin : you have been weighed in the scale, balanced and found wanting. Not that I’d argue with Glynn Powers or tell him he was wanting in any way at all. He wears a leather jacket with a thin fringe of tassels halfway down the back; he has a thick, trimmed beard and a motorbike. I have neither. He is studying Engineering. He doesn’t smoke himself, which I find sinister.
And tonight is Folk Club, as I said. This happens in the college bar, because you can’t have folk music without beer – in this case Double Diamond or gassy Worthington E. Brian, the professional barman who does the first two hours (after which the students take over), offers a free pint if you can drink one in less than five seconds. I have seen it done.
Bicycles start to arrive at about seven. There are striped scarves, coats; small, cheap cigarettes; most of the boys have hair to their shoulders, much of it grown out from a previous schoolboy style, so they still have a parting in the undergrowth. There are printed posters in the quads and linking passages. Hobgoblin, they announce. Avalon. With support: The Tim Wills/Steve Murray Band. After the interval: Lyonesse. With special guests: Split Infinitive.
When there are enough people in the bar, I move in among them. It must once have been a cellar, I suppose. The walls are white brick. They start to sweat.
I’ve drunk some gin in my room and have taken a Nembutal, which makes you feel detached. I’m smoking a cigarette. I really love cigarettes. I like the moist fragrance of the ones you roll yourself and I like Rothman’s King Size, advertised by a man’s hand emerging from a sleeve with gold hoops to grasp a gear lever. (Why is the pilot or naval officer still wearing his uniform in his car? Is he trying to impress an unseen woman? Is the gear lever a symbol? In which case, shouldn’t it be her hand on it?) I like the small piece of paper, like a miniature bookmark, that you pull up inside to arrange the fags in a little castle shape that makes it easier to extract the first one. (Now I come to think of it, this is one of the most courteous, customer-loving things any manufacturer has ever done. To go to the trouble of folding in this thin strip of paper, just so the smoker shouldn’t be irritated by trying to fish the first one out of a tightly packed bunch and risk squashing the others . . . Ingenious, thoughtful and quite irrelevant after the first cigarette, whose absence leaves space for the remainder to be slipped out easily. One day an accountant will calculate that the infinitesimal saving of not including the strip, magnified by the huge number of packets sold, will enable the companies to make an extra one thousand pounds a year profit, and they’ll stop doing it. For the sake of one thousand quid.) Another thing I like about smoking is allowing a small amount of smoke to escape from my lips then reeling it in
I mostly smoke marijuana, which I buy from a boy called Glynn Powers. I don’t know where Glynn buys it, but he has several kilos of it in the built-in bedside locker in his tiny room in the new Queen Elizabeth block, a short walk beyond Fellows’ Pieces (i.e. grass area reserved to dons). The block was opened by a princess only three years ago and in the entrance hall of the building, next to the commemorative plaque, there’s a picture of her standing in one of the little cells, smiling at the president, with the bedside locker in view behind them. The brickwork of the wall is exposed because they discovered when the building was completed that the size of each room was smaller than the minimum required for single human habitation by the Department of Housing. By removing the plasterboard they were able to add just enough volume to go legal.
In his bedside locker, Glynn keeps polished scales and brass imperial weights. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin : you have been weighed in the scale, balanced and found wanting. Not that I’d argue with Glynn Powers or tell him he was wanting in any way at all. He wears a leather jacket with a thin fringe of tassels halfway down the back; he has a thick, trimmed beard and a motorbike. I have neither. He is studying Engineering. He doesn’t smoke himself, which I find sinister.
And tonight is Folk Club, as I said. This happens in the college bar, because you can’t have folk music without beer – in this case Double Diamond or gassy Worthington E. Brian, the professional barman who does the first two hours (after which the students take over), offers a free pint if you can drink one in less than five seconds. I have seen it done.
Bicycles start to arrive at about seven. There are striped scarves, coats; small, cheap cigarettes; most of the boys have hair to their shoulders, much of it grown out from a previous schoolboy style, so they still have a parting in the undergrowth. There are printed posters in the quads and linking passages. Hobgoblin, they announce. Avalon. With support: The Tim Wills/Steve Murray Band. After the interval: Lyonesse. With special guests: Split Infinitive.
When there are enough people in the bar, I move in among them. It must once have been a cellar, I suppose. The walls are white brick. They start to sweat.
I’ve drunk some gin in my room and have taken a Nembutal, which makes you feel detached. I’m smoking a cigarette. I really love cigarettes. I like the moist fragrance of the ones you roll yourself and I like Rothman’s King Size, advertised by a man’s hand emerging from a sleeve with gold hoops to grasp a gear lever. (Why is the pilot or naval officer still wearing his uniform in his car? Is he trying to impress an unseen woman? Is the gear lever a symbol? In which case, shouldn’t it be her hand on it?) I like the small piece of paper, like a miniature bookmark, that you pull up inside to arrange the fags in a little castle shape that makes it easier to extract the first one. (Now I come to think of it, this is one of the most courteous, customer-loving things any manufacturer has ever done. To go to the trouble of folding in this thin strip of paper, just so the smoker shouldn’t be irritated by trying to fish the first one out of a tightly packed bunch and risk squashing the others . . . Ingenious, thoughtful and quite irrelevant after the first cigarette, whose absence leaves space for the remainder to be slipped out easily. One day an accountant will calculate that the infinitesimal saving of not including the strip, magnified by the huge number of packets sold, will enable the companies to make an extra one thousand pounds a year profit, and they’ll stop doing it. For the sake of one thousand quid.) Another thing I like about smoking is allowing a small amount of smoke to escape from my lips then reeling it in