Carnies and castaways

When I arrived in Manchester on a windy Monday, I had already missed freshers' week. As a result, I wandered along friendless for a couple of days. There is a picture of me taken by another postgrad student, sitting cross-legged on the grass during an early barbecue. I'm sitting on my own, smiling somewhat uncertainly for the camera, the only black face in a sea of smiling white faces. There was a certain joyful giddiness about being completely unknown to everyone else. No one in the entire city knew my name and it was oddly liberating.
My first friend turned out to be something of a false alarm. We went out for a drink, and he seemed like an interesting-if somewhat withdrawn- guy. Relations became a bit strained many weeks later when he came out with the rest of my friends and sabotaged our weekly quiz not once, but twice. He accomplished this by whining and moaning his way through what would ordinarily have been a fun event including displaying such charming tics as insisting on answers that were clearly wrong and sulking when he didn't like the question. Mind you, one of these events was also attended by a muscular heavy-metal loving Iranian who wore only shorts and a vest every day, irrespective of the weather or occasion. He looked at us as if we were the biggest geeks he had ever encountered-"You mean you just sit here and answer questions?" He asked in disbelief. We informed him that yes, that is what a quiz generally entails. He had achieved notoriety early in the first semester by nearly strangling two girls in a club for refusing to dance with him and then dancing with each other a few minutes later. "Are you lesbians?" is what he supposedly screamed at them. Being a man who normally only spoke in single syllable grunts, it was hard to tell exactly what kind of thought process he was engaging in at the best of times. Nobody really wanted to know exactly what he thought of suspected lesbians who didn't want to dance with him.
During my first week, I ended up having dinner with the international crew. I had already become mildly acquainted with some of them. One was a Japanese guy who later started refering to me as 'the philospher' because apparently he always saw me reading the newspaper ("Why are you always reading?" He'd ask- as if it was some bizzare sexual fetish I should keep behind closed doors. He asked me this about 200 times over the course of the academic year. After a while, I could have this discussion without even putting my brain into first gear)
So anyway one evening, I was sitting with the International crew, none of whom appeared to have a particularily joyful disposition. It was one of those 'who just died?' sort of gatherings. Turning to the fellow next to me, I enquired where he was from. (This was my first mistake)
"Iceland" He replied gruffily. And then I made a rookie mistake and said the first thing that popped into my head. (My mental folder marked ICELAND was not one I have needed to dust off frequently over the years)
"Aaah, the land of Bjork" I said with what I thought was the right tone of merriment. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say it was a fair comment to make in the circumstances.
My neighbour gave me a look that would have curdled milk "Bjork is a bad example" He said with such spectacular grumpiness that you could have set an opera around it. Our budding friendship died a fiery death at that moment and-to the best of my knowledge-nobody mourned. Mind you, it was not my only faux pas in the surprisingly dense and unpredictable jungle that was 21st century friendship. It was a bit like Platoon without, you know, the guns and death.In another inglorious incident, I posted something on the facebook wall of a new friend in response to a friendly post she'd put up on my wall. Unfortunately, I accidentally refered to her by a different name. The four horsemen themselves would have cowered in fury at the wrath that was unleashed on my facebook wall in response. Our friendship was never the same again even though she subsequently acted like nothing had happened.
Eventually I gravitated towards a group of characters in a series of events that would have looked cool as a montage in a film but which may not have the same degree of glamour if described in a blog post. We will skip those bits. Each one of them were wonderfully fascinating characters in their own right and I found myself in situations of supreme comedy. One night, I tried to get my drunk friend to get into his bed as he was running riot in the corridor. I was sober and he was drunk, so this should have been fairly easy but it wasn't. This endeavour was first held up so that my friend could throw up in his sink while I stood around making sympathetic noises. Then as I looked around his room, I realised that a few meters behind him was the book 'La nausee' ('Nausea') by Sartre.
"Mate isnt that hilarious?" I said and I started laughing "You are throwing up right next to a book called nausea!" My friend looked at me with red, bleary eyes. He wasn't laughing which was understandable. And then suddenly he made a wild dash out of his room, made it a few meters into the corridor and then slammed his head into the door with tremendous force.
"Mate! Where did that come from?" He asked in disbelief clutching his forehead-as if the door had jumped out of the bushes and ambushed him. Later on he scarred his arms by crashing through the glass in the door during an ill-advised race in the corridor with another friend. He spent the next week in hospital reconsidering his relationship with alcohol.
There were disjointed football games in which I once again rued my failure to achieve competence on the pitch. There were drunken singalongs in the club (and the sort of gushing hug-a-thons that only drunk people can have) and rowdy quiz nights every Tuesday- nights which achieved ecstacy when we won. Junk food at 2am, late night conversations in the common room and Playstation. I tried to break up impending fights (James: "Where is he? Let's go kick his ass!")and sort out sulking friends. There were summer barbecues, 'polite' pints, late night TV sessions and rambling hilarious conversations. I made several interesting friends at a point in the year when it was too late and drifted apart from others. I watched relationships bloom and shatter and occasionally I gave advice. There were triumphs and disasters all around me every day. I just happened to be there.
I was a castaway.
And it was fun.