An Unremarkable Columnist

Penny Pinching - Week 4

I’ve never stepped foot in a casino, never had a cheeky flutter at Ladbrokes, and as for the lottery, well unless we’re talking about having chips and Chinese gravy from Wok n’ Roll (will you get stomach cramps, won’t you? … you will) then no, I haven’t done that either. Working with formulae, statistics and probabilities all day means that, the way I see it, it’s pretty likely that these people are better at their job than I am at making what is in effect an uninformed, emotional and hasty guess. However, this column is charged with both making and saving you money, so in the name of thorough journalism, this week I broke my twenty-one-year gambling embargo.

After a delightful dinner at Noodle Nation (even a ‘money-saving expert’ has to splash out sometimes), I saw the opportunity to observe others at work in their natural environment – Ladbrokes – in the hope of picking up some tips before I took the plunge.

The game of choice, it turns out, is the Roulette, but don’t be fooled; this isn’t the roulette of the movies, with a vast wheel spun by a cool croupier, surrounded by cheering punters. In reality the device in question was a jumped-up ItBox–like machine, resplendent with grubby fingerprints, a coin-in slot and a surly attendant at the main desk, which some-what diminished the charm of the whole experience from the off-set. Again, unlike Hollywood would have us believe, with professional gamblers carefully placing chips in a seemingly random yet meticulously calculated pattern across the betting mat, the only acceptable strategy here seemed to be to pump money into the machine, a pound at a time, with each pound being put solely on red or black. The punter would be obliged to reinvest any winnings, seemingly until bust.That is, unless the total reached the value of a meal in Noodle Nation, satisfying the need to ‘win back the meal’, at which point an unnecessarily loud and conspicuous cash-out would take place. 

To me, the whole spectacle seemed no more than the modern day equivalent of the tuppence arcade machines. For anyone bereft of the joy of experiencing these first hand, these consisted of a glass fronted arcade machine with multiple platforms, all piled high with two pence pieces. Undulating mechanical arms swept backwards and forwards, titillating the user with the suggestion that they might just push a couple of the coppers off their respective ledge and into the collection box below. Children spent hours naively plugging in more and more coins until finally, the threshold would be reached, upon which a depressingly meagre pile of coppers would be toppled into the collection box. These would, of course, be immediately reinvested in trying to win even bigger, until they too were all gone, with no payout.

If it all sounds rather irrational, pointless, yet disarmingly entertaining then you’ve got the picture. This similarly applies to roulette machines, as I was to learn. Pumping in my first pound, I plumped for red, and doubled my money. Despite my attempts to cash-out, I was told in no uncertain terms that reinvestment was the best option. Reluctantly I once again pushed ‘all on red’. Black 21. Fuck it, I thought, and stormed out. Passing the nearby newsagent I popped in for a consolation Coke, where I thought I’d just check how much lottery tickets were, for further research and all that…

Penny Pinching - Week 3

Making money as medical test subjects has always been a great student tradition, and who can blame us? In this year’s Freshers’ Fair, one company promised over £1.5k for three months of testing, which entailed no more than 15 hours of contact time. Now I’m not exactly drawing heavily on two years of physics to tell you that that’s a good deal, and with overdrafts to pay, stash to buy, and the prospect of yet *another* summer with the financial burden of having to go to Zante on a two week bender, for some these kinds of offers are too good to resist.

Suggest this to your parents, however, and they’ll let loose an endless supply of horror stories, if not from a Radio 2 phone-in, then from a friend of ‘‘someone from the club’’. The more enterprising of you may have already tried to extort compensation from your seniors in return for agreeing not to participate, although your success will wholly depend on your powers of persuasion, and the size of your trust fund. Ostensibly, their attempts to shock even the most cash-strapped and principle-free student into a cowering mess are because they ‘love you’; well don’t be fooled. They’re almost certainly cashing in on the testing racket themselves, and want to keep you from getting in on the action. Probably.

What those trying to warn students of the risks of medical testing are overlooking is that contracting a mild form of a serious illness is an unrivalled asset to any student. Some might go so far as to describe it as ‘banter’. Picture the scene: you’re working the Park End lounge room (standard), despite carrying a potent and highly infectious disease that was *worth it* to pay off your overdraft/for that phenomenal time in Amsterdam/to buy your own fucking washing machine so you’ll never again return to find a layer of dust and washing powder all over your freshly washed garments. Not that I’m bitter.

Anyway, on approaching a ‘looker’, it’s your move. Previously you’d be stuck with such lead balloons as ‘I swear so many people have that dress!’ or ‘Did we crewdate once?’. However, with your new found asset you’ll never be short of a sob story about how you’re coping with your condition day by day, with highs and lows, etc etc; just substitute ‘highly infectious’ ‘for ‘impossible to catch’ and you’re good to go. Just don’t mention any of your other diseases that are ‘impossible to catch’.

Whilst there are many who won’t hesitate to dissuade you from medical testing, when I was asked by my editor, ‘How against sperm donation are you?’ I thought the answer was pretty clear cut – ‘Where do I sign up?’ However, a quick internet search stopped me in my tracks, as I read about the legislation that gives any donor-born child the power to legally track down and contact their biological father after a certain age. The thought of previously unknown offspring unexpectedly bursting into my life already keeps me up at night, so to increase the chance of this happening to ‘actually-pretty-damn-likely’ for a quick cash-flow fix seemed madness. A peek on a leading clinic’s website revealed the worst; one satisfied donor enthused, ‘I try to donate sperm once a week, but work commitments mean that it’s not always possible. I continue to keep in close contact with the clinic, and I find the payment helps cover my weekly train fare to London.’ Train fare to London?? What do they take us for, a bunch of tossers?

These words fall like Dominoes, Joly knows

I talk to Dom Joly about rock throwing fans, the Twitter revolution and the Ben Hur of hidden camera movies.

‘I have a traffic light system – green means I can do what I want, orange means they’re slightly smarter but I can probably get them, and red means just released from Broadmoor – move away!’ Hearing Dom Joly describing how he decides whether or not to prank his victims is listening to a master deconstruct his craft – the man, for many, is the original prankster. His show, Trigger Happy TV, spanned two seasons and two specials, has been sold to over seventy countries, and even the soundtrack was a bestseller. However, the original idea was to make a political satire show, Joly explains.

‘[Trigger Happy] would have been an attack on Cool Britannia, but the woman who was the commissioning editor had just finished doing Brass Eye and basically just couldn’t face any more legal stuff and she just said can you make a really simple show – I don’t want anymore lawyers ringing me up. And actually it was a blessing in disguise because if I’d made the satirical show, it might have been good, but it wouldn’t have got such a wide audience, I don’t think.’

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an intelligent, pithy political satire on the BBC gaining the worldwide recognition that THTV did – typical sketches include Joly in the role of a park-keeper, accusing elderly park goers of misdemeanours from setting of fireworks to pushing people in the pond, or dressed as a traffic warden, ticketing motorists stopped at traffic lights for illegally parking on double yellows. That said, surely some of the socio-political commentary planned for the political satire influenced a show which was, more than a prank show, an observation of Britishness, a facet echoed in its handpicked indie rock soundtrack? No, apparently; ‘I hate things trying to make a point, trying to teach you something – the stuff I make is pointless’. Fair enough. But perhaps the question is really, how did a man now famed for pranking, travel writing and a not-all-that-brief spell in the Celebrity Jungle come to be writing a political satire show in the first place? 

After graduating in Politics, Joly first interned for the European Commission as a diplomat in Prague, before returning to the UK to do political television around Westminster. After 6 years of working as a political researcher for ITN, New statesman and other, he landed a job as the political researcher on The Mark Thomas Comedy Product – a blend of surreal stunts and political journalism that was both satirical and insightful in equal measures in a pre-Brass Eye time. After being asked if he wanted to ‘drive a tank through the McDonald’s Drive Thru’ – ‘yeah, course’ – he started to get into comedy, and in his own words ‘I haven’t really done a day’s work since then’.

Looking at a run-down of Joly’s activities since then, it would be hard to agree with this. Besides continued pranking, in World Shut Your Mouth and The Complainers, Joly has written three books, stood in the 1997 general election (for the Teddy Bear Alliance), produced a number of television shows including the well received Dom Joly’s Happy Hour, came fourth in I’m A Celebrity, and somehow found time to write columns for The Independent, The Mail on Sunday and The Sunday Times. Now he’s off on a live tour, because, quite simply, he’d never done it before.

‘Everyone always assumed that I’d done stand up before Trigger Happy, and [the fact that I hadn’t] used to really bug me. When I did my book and I took it to literary festivals, they just expected me to stand there and read it, which struck me as really dull, so I started, you know, showing my holiday snaps, and stuff, and I really enjoyed it, so I thought fine, I’ll do it bigger.’ The light nature of the show doesn’t stop there – the audience can buy rocks from the foyer to throw at Joly while he performs (presumably not real ones), and during the interval a book is left out for questions from the audience, which Joly answers in the second half of the show –‘ That always gets very, very weird’. In typical Joly style, the ten tour dates have now become a full seventy, from Berwick to Brighton. So far there haven’t been any instances of mistaken location, despite the confusing fact that ‘for some reason Warwick university is in Coventry, so I almost said hello to the wrong people… Oxford’s easier’.

Whilst half of my colleagues knew Dom as ‘that guy who did the stuff with the big phone’, the other half knew him as ‘that guy who does travel columns for The Times,’ and as he admits, Joly has a certain fixation with travel.

‘I’m obsessed with it – I have wanderlust’. The weird offspring of this love of travel, a penchant for a drink or two, and a keenness to ‘take the piss out of Long Way Round’ was Dom Joly’s Happy Hour, in which Joly and his de rigueur ‘idiot friend’ Peter Wilkins explored drinking cultures around the world in a gloriously irreverent spoof on the traditional travel show. When they weren’t drunk (which wasn’t very much of the time), Joly and Wilkins goofed around in what was a mostly improvised show. The most recent equivalent is probably Team Gervais’ An Idiot Abroad (also on Sky One), though Joly is not a fan. ‘I thought it was appalling,’ he said, very matter-of-factly, ‘I quite like Karl Pilkington, and I think he’s funny, but it was just one joke – the bloke doesn’t like going abroad.’

When asked what he thought on recent pranking shows such as Facejacker, Balls of Steel and Olivia Lee, Joly revealed that he doesn’t really watch other comedy shows – ‘I find British comedy a bit dull. I watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and because I’m on tour I’ve got about a thousand Seinfelds.’ I pressed him – surely he must have seen something recently (my extensive iPlayer knowledge, which before had seemed so useful, was suddenly looking like a poor investment).  ‘Just recently there’s been some stuff I’ve liked; Campus and Twenty-Twelve’ he conceded, ‘but I certainly don’t want to watch stuff similar to what I do – either it’s really good and it makes me angry or it’s really bad and it makes me angry.’

He is, however, an avid fan of I’m a Celebrity, and jumped at the chance to be on the show last year. ‘Everyone said I shouldn’t do it, and I just thought, ‘I love that show – I’m going to do it’, and I really enjoyed it.’ That said, he found it a lot more ‘hardcore’ than he’d expected; ‘It’s as close as you can get to a hostage situation – you don’t speak to anyone, you’re very reliant on your captors, you get fed tiny amounts, and the boredom is insane. And you’ve just got to deal with it.’

The pop-culture kick didn’t stop at Celebrity – Joly is now a full-time Twitter user, with over 80 thousand followers, with whom he interacts on an hourly basis. He answers questions (with brutal brevity, mind), replies to those who insult him (which is better than Giles Coren, who simply blocked me when I offered a less than favourable review of a video of his), and even runs mini-competitions for his followers to win free tickets to his live show. More than that, he loves its practicality on a global level, ‘When I travel its incredible – if I’m in Phnom Penh or somewhere I just say ‘I’m in Phnom Penh ’  and people tell me where to go and so on – I love it.’

After the tour, a hard earned break is in store, before a return to what is an increasingly packed schedule for Joly – round the world in a week for I Newspaper, a television show for ITV, starting work on his new book ‘Scary Monsters and Super Creeps’, in which he’ll be looking for mythical beasts in the Congo, and then getting onto the long awaited ‘Trigger Happy film’ that fans have been waiting on for years now. ‘People are saying it’s the Trigger Happy movie – it’s not,’ Dom insists, ‘It’s the people who made Trigger Happy (Joly and his cameraman Sam Cadman) and it’s hidden camera but it’s got none of the characters. It’s on a huge scale, so I’m calling it the Ben Hur of hidden camera movies.’ 

With so much work in so many areas, both in the past and in the immediate future, does Joly feel there is a lack of direction to his career? ‘I’m a completely confused idiot – I have no career plans whatsoever, and I’ve just sort of muddled my way through. I guess I get bored really easily […] I normally don’t know what I’m going to do, so when something interesting comes in I can say yes. I just love doing different things – I’ve blagged ten years of doing nothing, pretty much.’ Joly clearly isn’t one to shy away from a project that excites him, no matter how disparate from his previous work it is. From where I’m standing, far from lacking direction, Dom Joly’s career has one only clear bearing, and that’s up.

Penny Pinching - Week 2

With term fully underway, it’s quickly become clear that despite my best efforts, my outgoings are outstripping my incomings at a rate of knots, and so this week I’m bringing you a serious guide to my favourite money saving method, based on a philosophy I like to call: ‘Washing – it’s optional, right?’

As anyone who lives in college can attest, washing machines and dryers are horrendously overpriced, and that’s assuming that they’re not broken. Having to wait over a week for them to be repaired, trekking to the laundry at 2am in an attempt to find a free machine, only to return an hour later to find someone’s already dumped your finished load on the dusty, washing-powder-streaked side starts to get a little old after a year or two; however, it’s easier than you might think to avoid this whole debacle entirely.

Bed sheets are, unless you’re regularly sharing your bed, a very personal aspect of one’s life, and as such I find that building up a solid relationship with them is essential. Now everyone knows a relationship can’t blossom overnight, so despite the protests of your friends and colleagues (and possibly even lovers), I urge you to at least try the ‘one-change term’ – bring two sets of sheets, and change them in 4^th week – job done. If this seems a little extreme for you, with three sets of sheets (and who doesn’t have three sets of sheets lying around), the two-change-term is a little more work, but just as effective in avoiding those pesky machines.

If the topic of saving on washing ever pops up in conversation (and let’s face it, it’s a winner in the Park End lounge room), girls in particular seem to love telling guys that our underwear can be worn ‘inside-out, back-to-front, and inside-out-back-to-front’ – the 4-shot pants. Well let’s debunk this myth once and for all; underwear is cut a certain way – it’s the equivalent of saying, ‘Oh, you know how you can reduce the wear on the seat of your jeans? Put them on backwards every other day’ – try floating this the next time some weirdo starts chatting you up with money saving chat over a VK Orange and see how it goes down. Honestly, there’s enough going on down there that an ill-fitting, scratchy and uncomfortable (you know buttons? And stitching? They’re on the outer side for a reason) pair would ruin anyone’s day.

People, and by people I mean girls, also go on about dry shampoo as if it gives you a previously unattainable level of attractiveness, solves your recurring pimple problem and does your tute sheets for you. I can assure you that, as it’s just glorified talcum powder in a bottle, with the added ‘benefit’ of coming in a variety of revolting fragrances, it’s about as pleasant as filling your hair with a fine chemical dust can ever be, with the added features that most of said dust won’t comb out, and will, if you sensibly opted for the fragrance-free version, make you smell like you work in a talc factory. This is not attractive to anyone.

So while I’m all in favour of saving some dollar here and there on sheets, clothes (do t-shirts ever need washing?) and sports kit (both cost-effective and a legit tactic to ward off a closely marking opposition player), I’m certainly not going to extol the virtues of, say rubbing your face with sand to reduce oily-build up between showers, or chewing parsley between brushes to keep fresh and ready for action. Because that’s literally mental.

Penny Pinching - Week 1

Unless you’re a member of the Bullingdon Club, go to Christ Church, or have managed to wangle some extra pocket money out of your college’s bursary scheme, you will be well aware that life as a student is wrought with fiscal uncertainty. Sure, the student loan is a significant boost to the old savings account, but once you factor in croquet cuppers stash, nights out and a subscription to Good Houseke- sorry, GQ, there’s not really much left to be getting on with. As someone with little dignity and a penchant for online shopping, over the next 8 weeks I’ll be trying a variety of money saving methods so you don’t have to.

A new term, with fresh prospects, no exams (if you’re lucky enough to be in the second year), and some cracking weather means it would be a shame not to exploit the finer cultural, scenic and epicurean sides to our fine city. By which I mean, getting bladdered at every possible opportunity.

The thing about university clubs is that there are lots of them. Too many, if I’m being honest with you – I can say for certain that no sleepless nights would be had on my part if I was informed that Blind Wine Tasting was cancelled for the foreseeable future, or if (just picking at random from the OUSU website now), ‘Oxford Uni Conservative Association’ was shut down. I don’t even know what Conservatives are – for a while I was pretty sure it was something to do with an ugly extension that poor people use instead of a morning room, but my granny kept banging on about Johnny Foreigner, who I presume is some kind of figure head to these people. Anyway, whilst the majority of us would not be particularly peeved if Underwater Hockey practice was cancelled due to a spate of drownings, the outcome is that a great number of meetings are held all over Oxford with embarrassingly few attendees. Naturally, in an attempt to draw a crowd, many of these offer free wine. I think you can see where I’m going with this. In exchange for a brief/moderate/awkwardly long conversation with an art nut/keen green/proud biologist, you can scarper at the first chance, with at least a couple of glasses of Tierra’s finest inside you, and in the best case scenario with a couple of cheeky bottles of red in tow. My editor has asked me to stress that this is a hypothetical situation, and even in the hypothetical situation, they were gifted by the club president anyway. Probably.

A quick search on ‘how to get drunk on the cheap’ online yielded some… interesting suggestions, but as a devotee to the column I embarked on a night out as per its instructions. The results were a mixed bag: I can exclusively reveal that losing sleep (not napping during the day counts, right?) and missing dinner (to be fair I forgot to book hall) gave me a dizzy and nauseous turn, rather than heightening my pre-lash buzz. Avoid. The dubious doctrine of get your drinks over the counter sounded mental earlier in the day, but after a couple of tasty lagers I was more than game for a cheeky shot of Listerine. The minty freshness is only topped by a pretty savage afterburn, followed by more of that nausea from earlier. Avoid. The pinnacle of the internet’s wisdom was simply learn the art of flirtation. If you have ever had a girl buy you a drink in Oxford, please write in so I can learn your secrets and pass them off as my own in a future article – ‘VK Orange? Classy choice. Mine’s a vodka Red Bull’ went down like a lead balloon. Baffling.

Agony Uncle - Week 8

I’ve always considered myself as something of a big deal with the ladies, and last term I had my pick of the girls in Kukui, was going on multiple dates, and once even got off with a bloke, such was the height of my attractive powers. However, my recent success has been less than impressive – the freshers don’t seem interested in my tales of the time I got chucked out of Anuba, my own year are all dating alumni, and even the girls at Fuzzies are more interested in the pink, posturing prats from the local poly. How do I get my mojo back??

B.R.

Losing your mojo is a hard thing to come to terms with – having ridden the wave of promiscuity, your dry spell is harder to deal with than usual.

The most important thing is for you to meet new people, and what better way than through friends? Everyone has that friend who’s a bit of a player (read: massive (man)whore). Simply get the word out to their circle of friends that you’re up for anything, and if they’re bright they’ll pair you up with your ideal match, i.e. the easy one.

If it’s freshers you’re after (and, let’s face it, who isn’t), you have to remember that these people are little more than giggling school kids, fresh out of college and with maturity levels to match. The boasting, guffawing tools who simultaneously captivate them and disgust your refined sensibilities are the ones doing what it takes to get their attention. If you can’t face lowering the quality and raising the quantity of your conversations, then you should seriously consider Park End, where gradually lowering your standards throughout the night is a fail-safe fall-back.

At the end of the day if you’re worrying so much about your lack of success then it’s only natural that, faced with a girl, you’ll either clam up and awkwardly stare at her chest until she leaves, or blurt out the result from your last sexual health test. Just pluck up some courage, make a move, and use a wingman to help you avoid grenades – it’s a warzone out there soldier. 

Agony Uncle - Week 7

My boyfriend is a finalist, and to be frank it’s starting to get more than a little trying. Despite claiming that his thesis (which I’m certain is just a fancy word for dissertation) is due in two  weeks, I know he’s spending the majority of his time playing Xbox and eating Gu desserts. Should I be worried he’s more concerned with prestiging on COD than spending time with me?

M.J.

The fact that you can casually name-drop Call of Duty terminology is my first concern – while impressive, this isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to make you look cool. Really. No matter how much your boyfriend talks about his favourite games, it’s important that you don’t show any awareness of the intricacies of them around other males, as this runs the risk of them starting a conversation solely based around pixels on a screen, and then you really are in trouble.

Worrying knowledge of games aside, it strikes me that you’re being more than a little selfish here. Being a finalist is hard work – I should know: I’ve been a finalist twice so far, and rustication is certainly a viable option this year as well. It requires an innate ability to put work off until the last moment has long gone, and the level of procrastination necessary to reach these heady heights of ‘screwed’ (the technical term) is, at times, superhuman. You are certainly underestimating your man in assuming that Xbox and Gu puddings are all he’s doing to stave off starting his dissertation (yes, you’re right).  The library schedule of a committed finalist might consist of the following: 

10.00: Enter library.

10.01: Begin reading.

10.02: Load Sporcle: ‘Countries of the World’

10.40: Load Sporcle: ‘States of America’

11.30: Just checking Facebook…

12.30: Lunch already?? Sweet!

And so on. As well as Sporcle, Facebook, checking Nexus and searching YouTube for videos of kittens (we’ve all done it), a strong social calendar helps to pad out the procrastination with faux-engagements – crewdates, coffee with a ‘friend from school’, and pub trips with tutors are all seen as legitimate excuses to put those books down and get in a few hours of down-time. Well, it’s either that or he’s seeing someone else, and let’s face it – that’s a lot more likely isn’t it?

Agony Uncle - Week 6

My best mate has a thing about being suddenly very interested in whichever girl I’m currently dating. It’s not just limited to the cheese floor of Park End when I’m not looking – he chats to them in cafés and stalks them on Facebook.  I’ve come to accept this as semi-normal, but everyone else tells me it’s really weird. What to do?

J. J. J. F.

Ahh, the mate-who-fancies-your-girlfriend – it’s a cliché for a reason, and that’s because it’s really common. As with all common ailments the best treatment is prevention, and then we have to look at the root causes. It’s often a case of male pride – boys’ ratings of girls are pretty much fully dependent on the opinions of their peers. Most lads out there will be familiar with locker room ‘banter’, where reputations can be made or broken simply by whom you profess an admiration for.   So when a close friend implicitly makes the ultimate declaration that a certain girl is a fittie  (by entering into a public relationship with her), it’s natural for all the other knuckle draggers around him to sit up and take note.

Consider the male thought process: ‘John likes fit people, John likes Sophie, ergo, Sophie must be well fit, ergo, *I* like Sophie!’ Assuming that this can’t be prevented, what can you to do about it? Well, if you’ve already implied that your friend has a serious and incurable STI (which you no doubt have), you can extend your slur campaign onto Facebook – just ‘like’ the 451st photo of your girl from your mate’s account to give the impression that they were looking through hundreds of their photos. Just make sure you don’t accidentally do it from your own account – that would be weird.

You can also try to disrupt the initial logical process, as, *gasp*, being a ‘fittie’ is not the only thing that need determine guys’ ‘ratings’. Choose something you know he dislikes, imply that it is your shared love of Brahms/Star Trek/stamp-collecting that brought you together. Thereby, ‘John likes Sophie’ entails ‘Sophie likes weird shit that I hate’, and his feelings should subside. Alternatively, you can just play to his known fears. Spiders? Commitment? Sexual potency? You could always let on that you yourself have a serious and incurable STI, and disclose your prevailing guilt for not having told said girlfriend. Then he might not want to run the risk.

Agony Uncle - Week 5

With V-Day looming, my high maintenance girlfriend is expecting big things, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to meet her expectations. Help me out with some fail-safe gift ideas, please?!

A.C.

These things are always very delicate matters – the difference between dinner at KFC and a trip to the Old Parsonage, however minor it might seem, is the kind of thing that’ll ruin a relationship in an heartbeat. This does of course assume that you’re not united with your partner in a love for low quality, factory farmed but oh-so-tasty fried chicken, in which case just don’t skimp on the sides – they’re the best beans and gravy for miles around (as I’m sure you know).

I personally tend to take a temporal approach to big events like these. If you’ve only been dating for a few weeks, an inexpensive crowd pleaser is a cheeky boutique I’ve found called Claire’s Accessories. I say crowd pleaser – the last time I bought a girl a pair of earrings from Claire’s I was 14; in return she bought me some Family Guy stickers, a t-shirt, a belt, some American sweets, and a leather bracelet. I thought I did pretty well, all things considered.

Once the one month barrier is crossed, things get a little less simple. Relatively this can still be perceived as a short amount of time, yet context is everything. If your significant other had happened to buy you a remote-controlled helicopter for Christmas, for example, two months later you’re going to have to come up with some seriously good shit. For those of you in this ‘I’m-not-fudging-around’ territory, I suggest you head down to the emporium known as Accessorize. Whilst the high prices and snobby clerks can be intimidating, believe me, it’s worth it. When she opens the box to that ring which spells out ‘love’ (a guaranteed winner), and her eyes light up like someone who’s just won a tenner on a scratchcard, you’ll know you’ve done good.

Finally, the long term – the two, three, even four monther. Unfortunately if you’re here then you’ll be making a serious dent in the old finances. At this stage some quality jewellery or even a pricy ring isn’t going to do the trick. It’s about knowing each other. Little touches, like asking for BBQ sauce with your bargain bucket rather than ketchup, repackaging the Primark pumps in a Russell and Bromley box, and plumping for Prosecco (because Cava is so last year) – these are what make a real relationship.

That said, if you’ve made it this far then you’re far better prepared to deal with it than me anyway, so feel free to ignore everything I just said. 

Agony Uncle - Week 4

Whilst I enjoyed my first term immensely and made plenty of friends in college, I’m starting to become a bit envious of those with friends in other colleges. No one else from my school came to Oxford and sometimes I feel like I’m missing out. Help!

R. H. Jr

Call this a problem? Try explaining to the Jesus porters why you were asleep in their flowerbeds wearing bondage trousers and a gimp mask. That’s a problem. Let Uncle break it down.

Your first port of call would be your subject – forced interactions like lectures, labs and tutes give an opening with potential friends. Maybe open with, ‘How are you getting on with the tute work?’, or for the more adventurous among you, ‘Let’s start a study group so we can maximise the efficiency of our work.’ Ahem.

You could become a ‘sporty wanker’, as Giles Coren puts it, and open up your life to a whole new meaning of the phrase LAD-positive. Repercussions could include exclusion from your college bar, an invitation to Vinnies, and a tendency to say the word ‘blues’ a lot, when in fact you play for 21s, which is really just the 3rd XV. Just saying.

The plus side of being part of a sports team is you get to go on crewdates - you know, those things where you drink around half of Oddbins discount rack between 10 to get over the forced-awkward-intimacy of the situation. A quick search on thestudentroom informs me that there is now a site where you can organise crewdates online, and given your lack of initiative re:friend-finding so far, this might be the safest option for you.

But all of this is presuming that you actually want to meet people at other colleges. You say that you’re feeling left out because ‘everyone is doing it’ –  well let me tell you, I felt the same way about dogging until I went along and found out that not only was it not a communal dog walking group, but that they’re not the sort of gatherings to which you take a friendly yet defenceless animal. People in other colleges are just as obnoxious as those in yours (you seem to have the opposite opinion of them to everyone else in the university), and they really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Like Seal not actually being a seal. Let. Down.