It’s there. Straight ahead of you.
Brick and metal and shouting. Laughing, happy faces. Flailing legs. Vomit trailing along the curb, you jump it in stilettos feeling (in your inebriated state) like you’re in a video game, kind-of-almost-nearly-but-not quite like Lara Croft, although – you’re not dodging bullets. You’re dodging piss. And vomit. And the occasional used condom.
The familiar walls waving like an old school friend, you know the kind, it’s the kind where your conversation always starts with, ‘Do you remember the time when…’ because - the only things you still have in common are the memories.
Inside this building you are staring at, through those doors and beyond those walls, there are hundreds of really fucking clever people. All getting really fucking fucked up.
Ah. The Union. Bless my soul, it transforms us all.
Don’t worry. You can’t help it. You’re drawn to it, aren’t you? You’ve walked fifty metres to this building and it feels as though you’ve just pilgramaged through desert and snow to arrive at the Holy Birthplace of the Vodka Red Bull.*
*It was an almost metaphor, verging on the literal.
It looks… Beautiful.
You made it.
You.made.it.
And the queue is… horrendous. So you queue. And you’re waiting for an hour in the queue. But it is so worth it. An hour of your life. During which you make a new friend, accuse the girl infront of you of stealing your bag (same strap, easy mistake), smack a bouncer’s bottom; lose your friends, apparently, but they have been stood behind you the whole time, chatting about life incoherently (or maybe it was just you, listening incoherently) either way, you wouldn’t know, you must have just passed out for a few seconds.
This is when you look down, to your feet, vision swimming, and you see swollen ankles - when did your ankles ever get swollen? And you’re wearing flats. My oh my, where did the stilettos go? You realise that you are clinging on to the metal railing of the smoking area for dear life, you realise you cannot stand the pushing in the queue, you realise you have lost your voice, you catch a glimpse of your reflection in the mirror of your friends glasses – glasses, when did they ever wear glasses? And suddenly, that’s it.
“Nooooooooooo!!!”
You are staring at a middle-aged lady who looks mildly like yourself, wearing nothing but big knickers and a see-through shirt; you are a member of the PTA at your children’s school, you have more friends than they do and at their parties you invite more guests, get pissed up and initiate the food fights (then blame it on next door’s stroppy seven year old.) Your husband is always away on business trips, your baby-sitter is on speed dial, and when you can – twice a year, tops – you manage to travel this far and in this amount of clothing to the place that you still call home.
The University.
And that is when you realise. You have become a LOL.
No. I don’t mean a ‘LAUGH OUT LOUD’: Quite possibly the worst acronym anyone ever created, the fact that it even exists stands to convince me that perhaps God doesn’t.
I mean…. A LADY.
A Lady. On. the Lash.
Last Friday I returned to the Union. And Yes.
We Fucked Shit Up.
At University there are cliques.
Yes. It is true.
It is because each different subject requires a different mind, and therefore you end up with these separate breeds of humans, all feeding off one another’s traits. Now. I’m not accusing anyone. I’m just saying.
There are those that study mathematics: logical. Emotionless. Practicalities come first.
There are those that study physics: arrogantly confident that all the hard work will be worth it. It’s science.
There are those that study biomedicine: They just want to do some good in the world.
There are those that do geography: The hippies of 2011
There are the history students: Well-rounded, level-headed (well, if it’s worked in the past.)
The English students: The most attractive, faces as nice as their words.
Then there are the drama students. Always referred to as ‘The Drama Lot.’ Or even ‘The Drama Kids.’ So….
The student body as a whole: The generation of the misunderstood, of the ‘I have everything and this means that when I can’t return it I’m going to be really fucked;’ the generation of the drink first, of the think later, of the – ‘my mum and dad slaved away to make this money so I could go study and they said ‘do whatever you enjoy,’ so here I am, pissed and enjoying it.
The generation of divorce where we are all allowed to be selfish, the generation of the obsession with the qualification, the generation of high expectations, of being given everything and then not quite knowing what to do with it. The university is where the ‘forever young!’ dream was conceived.*
*I have made generalisations. I am sorry.
Never before have you understood why recent graduates declare ‘I Hate Students.’
Until now.
There they are, animatedly spiriting time away in their little animated bubbles, with their little animated flat mates, on all of that glorious money that the government gives them, smoking in the communal kitchen area, forgetting their own names more than three times a week, and complaining about the work.
Oh. The glorious work.
Last night you opened all of your old seminar booklets and re-read them twice through – each ! - the second time, taking notes.
It was like a shot of energy drink taken straight into the eyeball.
I warn you now, if you are graduating next year, hold on tight to those booklets of work. They are like tokens of sanity, waiting for you patiently in your brain’s moment of desperate need.
And now you are a burning ball of twisted resentment.
Everybody hates the students. But boy oh boy… Everybody hates a POSTGRAD.
And we have no-one to blame except ourselves.
So that was how it started. The idea of the LOL, I suppose.
Reunited. Reincarnated. A bunch of all the oldies, coming out of their dusty closets to play. Desperate to prove we still had it in us. But we had more than just ‘it’. We had the burning passions of being gratefully reunited with the binge drink. We had the wisdom, baby. We had an inbox full of email rejections and mortgage payments and phone bills way over the limit; more importantly… we had each other, and the knowledge of a lesson learned – make the most of it!
The Union transforms our very souls. And on Friday, The Ladies On the Lash were unrecognisable.
Funny. In our desperation to ‘shoot that bitch down(?)’ we ended up contradicting our very observations of the students union.
You know you’re a Lady On the Lash when –
- The respectable (as of yet) ‘Newlywed’ Friend, ushers you into a corner and tells you in hushed tones that you have insufficient funds in your account and that she couldn’t get you any money out.
- You laugh at the above point, thinking the laugh is a raucous sound, not realising it is an evil, cynical chuckle, before you consider – ‘why are you even laughing, how can you afford the petrol home?’
- You go out anyway. Making money out of nothing is not so hard if you simply ask.
- You convince yourself that it’s not pity, it’s love.
- You all arrive in individual cars, pulling up as though you have all just come from really important places, but of course, tonight the outside world does not matter.
- You drive in convey to the university, like participants entering Noah’s Ark, except… one by one. We’re adults now, obviously. Car-sharing is not the correct etiquette. Listening to individual radio stations and singing really loudly as though one another might hear the other’s animal cry, and respond with the signal ‘you are not alone.’
- There is a boy in your group who insists he is a Lady On the Lash, despite the fact that his parents simply think it’s because of his ‘eccentric’ behaviour. Oh come on. He’s gay.
- The theme tune is ‘It’s Ladie’s Night.’ And you always said you’d never turn into you mother.
- You give yourself nicknames. Several awful suggestions ensue, but you run with them ‘cause you don’t give a shit, yeah, you’re here to shoot some bitches down.’
(Names as follows – Anna Rexic. Lucy Lastic. Pat Mc Crotch. Selma Body. Tess Tickles. Jenny Talia. And the boy himself – Bill. E-mick.) I’m sorry if you think badly of us right now.
- Hello. I am ‘Pat Mc Crotch.’ Nice to meet you.
- Boys suddenly think a lot less of you. They blame it on your oncoming menopause.
- You make up a rap and it goes like this:
(Feel free to give it a go.)
‘I’ve got my bikini wax, and my sexy undies,
I’m gonna’ get it out, to all and sundry,
I’m gonna’ go out there, and get on it hard,
Then I’m gonna’ flash you all, my business card…’
yo, yo. L-l-l-l-l-l-ll laaaadies on the lash L-L-L-LADIES, ladies.
- You have a filofax. You start to compare diaries.
- You realise you won’t be out next until after Christmas. (The Newlywed has prior engagements spanning up until March!)
- You pull 'corporate' poses in photographs, as though you can demonstrate your career (and therefore your power) through your new found physicality. For example I lifted up Newlyweds skirt. As a demonstration of my desire to break boundaries, to lose inhibitions and to open to the mind to all the creative elements. Of stripping.*
*mental note: possible career
- Last but not least, you got thrown out of a friends house, looking like this –
Yes. I am appalled. But don’t blame us. It’s the post-university lifestyle. It’s called ‘Real Life.’
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