Clare sex gremlins have regular orgies on College roof
DeClare your love for me
Do you know the Clare sex gremlins?
They live in the attic sets of Clare Old Court, crawling about the rooves of the College at night, creaking each others windows open in the early hours of the morning, looking for sex.
“It’s an epidemic,” one gremlin told us. “We booty call each other nearly every night. It’s getting a bit out of hand. My neighbours are all sex pests.”
Life at Clare is peachy – if you’re in the right crowd
Apparently having an attic set started off as a really peaceful, lovely situation. “Now, though, I dread that rapping of fingers on my window panes every night. I haven’t had a moment’s peace all term.
“There actually is such thing as too much sex.”
The Clare gremlins are a small and exclusive group: they think of themselves as ‘the enigmas of Clare College’. They dress mostly in black. They eat lunch alone in the screened off corners of the Buttery, or together, reading their respective Penguin paperbacks, and not talking. Clare Ents is the bane of their existence.
Another gremlin told The Tab: “It started off as a kind of escapism from the repressiveness of Old Court.
“We didn’t fit in at Clare, and we found we had that in common, along with our attic sets, and a sex drive. It was kind of a release.”
The Gremlins are solitary creatures by day
These wayward types have a dark glamour about them; an air of The Secret History, if you will. Whilst the College’s gazette, Clareification‘s gossip column, ‘Clareifornication’, (which is a pun on a pun on a pun and therefore not a pun), is concerned with the silly, alcopop-fuelled, brash hookups of College hoi polloi, the Clare sex gremlins have their own dramas going on.
“Sometimes,” said one, “if no-one has climbed into my room for a few days, I start wondering about the others. Are they carrying on without me? But they always come – literally – crawling back.”
Scampering about on the rooves of Clare is a strictly forbidden practice, of course. But it’s an age-old one. A famous Clare tradition is the ‘naked lap’ where students strip and sprint round the perimeter of the balcony.
“Ugh, that is so juvenile,” one grem explained.
“No, the reason we use the rooves are twofold: Its practical, and its anonymous. It takes two seconds to get across the roof, but five minutes to tramp down the stairs, across Old Court and all the way back up again. It’s exhausting, and people see you doing the walk of shame. The rooves are much more convenient.”
Clare has become a hotbed of illicit rooftop sex
It is precarious at the best of times.
“It was tricky during the winter. The sleet made navigating the rooves lethal. I’ve had a couple of injuries from trying to get up and down the ladder. Sometimes the slates fall down into Old Court, and its always a dicey moment.”
Will they continue their arrangement into Easter term?
“To be honest, I’m sore all over. My knees are in a complete state from crawling across roof tiles, I’ve twisted my ankle three times this term, and I’m just generally quite stiff. Hopefully I’ll recover over the holidays.”
Here’s to a summer of love.