Tab Rates vs. Tab Slates: Week Six

Tab Rates

Nostalgia. But none of this slushy, life-is-so-short-and-its-moments-so-beautiful nonsense. It’s not that short, frankly, and many of its moments are ugly, venal and degraded. Well, if you spend a lot of time cruising in Life they definitely are. Remember that Facebook group started by some eager beaver from your matriculation year the summer before you started at Cambridge? Find it in your ‘Groups’ (nearish the bottom, way below all those groups started by morons who’ve lost another phone). Now revel in the judgements-based-on-wall-posts that you made before you started. “On my gap year in India building homes for blind, deaf and dumb orphans with amputated limbs and a unique strain of leprosy that modern medicine is yet unable to eradicate…can’t wait to meet everyone when I get to Cambridge!”: is she actually as much of a dickhead as you supposed? “im such a LAD mate, let’s get sum gash mate!!! cant wait to lash wid u!!”: is he actually college’s premier L-A-D or did he drop off the radar after the second Cindies of your first term, when someone saw him crying outside because he’d just chundered? “Add me if you want to chat 🙂 ”: is she actually as acutely socially-challenged as this plea for stilted Facebook chat with strangers would suggest? Actually, come to think of it, you don’t even know who she is. So probably.

D.I.Y. Haircuts. I don’t know about you, but 40-odd quid seems a lot of money to pay for an abrasive man with questionable facial hair to tell you you need choppy layers and a deep-conditioning treatment (that’ll set you back an extra twenty big ones.) Oh Raul, you were so cruel. Others came to school with swishy hair and anecdotes of hot chocolates with marshmallows and free foot massages; the Spanish hairdresser who treated my teenage locks seemed to be borderline sociopath and gave me what I can only describe as a crew-cut that ruined six months of my adolescence. I haven’t had a haircut at a hairdresser's for four years. There have been some tragedies en route but I think I’ve reached a point of competency. Just grab the scissors and give it a little trim. It always grows back anyway.

Lent. Determined to stop making a catastrophic and frankly humiliating dick of myself, I have given up drinking for Lent. The waking up with a semi-masticated Gardi’s lollipop stuck to my right breast was the last straw. As was the waking up after Churchill Springball, fully clothed, the wrong-way round the bed and with vomit in my hair. I looked shit, felt shit and smelt like regurgitated donut, probably because that was what constituted the vomit that had formed a mousse in my hair. Bleak. Personally, I blame the dangerous quantity of ‘Vod-Bru’. My justification for drinking this heinous concoction is that I grew up in Scotland and Irn Bru still holds a place in my heart. (Or rather, in my teeth. In the form of three fillings.) Now, I don’t for one minute imagine this resolution will last. But if I (theoretically) give up drinking, then my logic tells me that I might at least drink less Vod-Bru on any given night – due to guilt of failing my resolution – and therefore the likelihood of me making a catastrophic and frankly humiliating dick of myself will lower. Please don’t shatter my idealism with vicious comments below. Please.

Superficial Friendships. As in those ones you make in the toilets when you’re so drunk you’re dribbling curry and VK down your top and accosting every second girl to ask if you could, please, please just have some eyeliner? (An error, you are sufficiently intoxicated that you will draw on your eyeball. Resist. Or ask the exasperated friend whose shift it is to monitor you to make you resist.) Except, wait! Lo and behold, a kindred spirit! She’s also decked out in tin foil from her swap, and she too is looking for eyeliner! (Quick check to verify this is not, actually, just you in the bathroom mirror. No. You’re good to go.) Within five minutes you’re hugging each other, posing for (horrific) photos with your NBF and entering your name in her phone. She will wake up the next day with a series of punctuation marks in her phonebook (apparently your moniker when battered). Delete. You’ll wake up with eight mind-bogglingly horrible photos of you and some bint. Delete. But it was beautiful for the evening it lasted. It really was. I’ll miss these moments in my sobriety. Ah, the tribulations we born-again must suffer for our virtue.

Tab Slates

Those stalker applications on Facebook. I seem to appear on everyone’s. That’s really embarrassing. I have actually had to tell several people that I, honestly, don’t merit a restraining order. I’m just taking a holiday to their Spanish villa outside Barcelona this summer and therefore viewing all 136 photos of them on holiday in their Spanish villa was purely in the name of research.

The Blue Examination Form. Appeared in my pigeon hole the other day. Oh God. I’m a Part I English student who took a gap year, I haven‘t done an exam that actually mattered in years. (Disclaimer: I didn’t help any orphans, so I was not that girl in the Facebook group. I worked in a coffee shop. So obviously I am just jealous of that girl who helped orphans). I had a brief panic attack in the pigeon hole room, which ended as soon as someone fit came in and I had to pretend I was picking up my Valentine’s cards instead. By Valentine’s cards I mean the card that my Mum sent me. Which wasn’t even a token Valentine’s card from ‘Your Secret Admirer’. It was my Gran’s family birthday card, posted to me so I could add my name to it because I would otherwise forget to send her a card. But, I digress. Basically, I am now Googling symptoms I could pretend to have in an attempt to bypass examinations/get hours and hours of extra time. Is SARS still a thing?

Term. By this point, Cambridge is a sort of mass, low-security asylum, that instead of keeping its inmates inside soft-walled cells, straight-jacketed and sedated – just the way it should be – instead lets them wander about town, dazed, forgetting to look when they cross the road and copulating misguidedly in clubs in moments of drunk I-didn’t-have-a-Valentine-and-I’ve-got-three-pieces-of-coursework-due-and-I-haven’t-even-started-them-and-I’m-just-so-tired-so-so-tired insanity. I want to go home.

Ashley Cole. Slating another footballer this week is not an attempt to make myself look well 'lad'-like and as if I could actually hold a cogent conversation about football in an attempt to win myself scores of male fans. The only ‘footy bant’ (is that a faux pas?) I can manage is yelling, “RANGERS!!!” at The Tab’s Sports Editors and then going blank when they actually mention any of the players when we get into sticky Old Firm debates. No, but, really – Cheryl Cole is about the fittest girl in the world ever. I mean, I probably couldn’t talk to her for longer than five minutes, because if my accent is slightly strong (although I maintain it is the softest of Scottish brogues), hers is incomprehensible to me. (Maybe a personal failing? Must brush up on comprehension of regional dialects. Maybe there‘s a ‘…For Dummies’ series.) But really, she could do so much better it actually boggles the mind. And to be honest, whether she looked like the wrong end of a barge or not, that wouldn’t really have much to do with it. Down with Ashley Cole.