Wednesday 31 January 2007

So, it’s the early hours of the morning and I’m walking in a nonchalant way across the Meadows Quad.

Above me is the sound of a window being opened or closed…probably someone closing it on their way to bed so as not to wake up shivering at four in the morning. Suddenly through the cold night air comes the faint whistling like a slightly feeble mortar shell and the clatter of something a bit plasticky on the paving stones. More window noise. Then, the just-discernible whirr of a bee trapped in a crisp packet bouncing around on the floor.

I change my path a bit; this is obviously some kind of practical joke. It’s now whirring like an over-wound toy soldier and is clearly shortly going to explode, much to the amusement of whoever is making the racket with that window. My eyes scan around for the source of the sound; I spot that it’s faintly silver in the moonlight.

Suddenly, I am accosted by a voice with a slightly northern lilt: “Eh, mate, you wouldn’t mind chucking that back up here would you?” An at-least-topless possible Scouser (unfortunately male) leans out of the suspect window.

I tell him I’d rather not, still expecting some hilarious jape is being pulled. I look a little harder and notice that our little silver friend dancing on the paving is shaped like a bullet. A six-inch bullet. Perhaps it’s not going to explode after all…

“Do you know what it is?” he enquires of me.

“I don’t think I want to find out,” I tell him, unfortunately having found out using my unenviable powers of deduction.

“It’s a vibrator!” he explains helpfully.

By this point I have thankfully pretty much made it to my destination staircase and am free to collapse into the doorway in hysterics and think about what has just happened.

So, first: what the Hell kind of flamboyant sex game ends up with the vibrator not only flying out of whatever it might be in, but flying out of the window and falling three storeys to the stone floor below?!?

Second: did he seriously expect me to throw it back up to him? I mean, there aren’t many places it can have been and none of them are good.

Third: most of the places it might have been are sticky, or at least lubricated (I hope, for the sake of the vibratee). Did he really expect me to be able to throw a vibrating, slippy object up three storeys into a window less than a metre square, even if I was some kind of weirdo who might get kicks out of throwing someone else’s vibrator? (Anyone who says I get kicks out of throwing my own vibrator is lying.)

Fourth: are not all my worries about sticky things and where it’s been compounded by the fact that this is the kind of guy who gets himself involved in vibrator games which end up with the vibrator flying out of the window and falling three storeys to the stone floor below?!?

It was gone when I walked back to my room with the stuff I’d popped to collect, so how it returned up the stairs to the room of exuberant toy-assisted sex (assuming that’s what it did) will forever be a mystery to me. Did some passer-by kinder than I manage to get a hole in one with the challenging and unhygienic projectile in a modern-day Parable of the Good Samaritan? Was the possibly naked possible Scouser involved in a mad nude dash downstairs to retrieve the literal object of his desire? Or was it all a waking dream, an indication of impending schizophrenia and my subconscious telling me that I’m not getting enough sex all rolled into one?

I think it’s the possible Scouser who has some more serious questions to ask himself. If the Queen had been walking underneath it could all have ended so differently. She might have wanted to join in. Eurrgh.