remembering

When I was in my first year at liverpool uni, I stayed in catered accomodation.

We soon learned that the food you got on the visitor day, and your first week as a student, was basically composed at the expense of the rest of your term's allocation.

The food for the rest of the year was absolute garbage.

If you were vegetarian (as I am and was), you were catered for. And by "catered for", I mean "laughed at".

You were given a laminated card to say you could claim a food-hall-meal, and if you were vegetarian, you had the same pass with a hilarious red-stamped "V" in dripping red ink.

Not that something so daft bothered me, but it truly did seem that they chose a stamp and ink that would *actually* look like dripping blood to mark the veggies out from the crowd. Given an over-developed Irony-gland, I laughed my arse off.

Being the minority, it often meant you could jump the queue, which ruled, except that you were jumping the queueing hordes to obtain cardboard.

The shit they fed us would not, and trust me, I will LIVE on cardboard, feed a fucking maggot.

It basically consisted of the european Pulse Mountain plus a selection of interestingly reformed pieces of potato. The potato was often the best part of the meal.

However, being a deathboy, I rapidly found joy from our pain and learned to enjoy the filth we'd basically paid a year's worth for (then gone and bought chipshop couisine for the whole year so we could actually survive)...

... we made spaceships.

The whole food court was lined by a conveyor belt, onto which you placed your finished tray of gruel.

A staff of demonic dinner ladies patrolled the halls, but in between their watch, it was possible to construct landing craft.

Basically, you got as much of a chicken as you could (I'm vegetarian, but I'm quite happy to fondle greasy meat in the name of comedy) and posed it like some kind of stricken astronaut. Add a plastic water-beaker as an ad-hoc helmet, then build the vehicle up on a base of anything not-potato (and therefor edible).

A lake of mushy peas presented the ideal spot for a bed of cardboard-pasta, onto which we would place our chickenny volunteer, often made of the limbs of several willing participants, add the helmet, then pile the materials on to create a defensive hull and numerous specialised out-board modules for kitchen-exploration.

The launch was always problematic, particularly after they realised how much fun it was - the Dinner Drones would look out for particularly stacked dinner trays and disassemble them before they hit the kitchen inlet. The task was to distract the fat fuckers while your Capsule obtained resonance.

A successful launch meant a fat fucking hitler-bitch noticing the impending doom of a three-plate-high NASA-probe, one metre before it hit the kitchen intake and diving like a waddling Forest Gump towards the payload in slow motion, followed by the sound of whoever was unfortunate enough to work tray-duty in the kitchen screaming in anguish as a giant pseudo-potato-structure defied the weird magnet arrangement they had to fish out cutlery and a besuited chicken-monster launched itself, helmet-on, onto the magnet, shedding a launch-craft of beans, plastic, condiments and flyers.

We saw it as getting our money's worth. I had to buy noodles, chips and bread the whole year... the one time I ate the meal, I got the same food poisoning I'd been laughing at my mates having.

They caught us half the time, but never managed to formulate a reason to stop a student who'd paid from doing what they chose with their supposed main meal.

Secretly, I felt sad for the pleasant, bald-headed-cook, but mostly, I felt the thrill of revolution and the splash of mashed potato.

If you ever go to liverpool university, I advise self-catering.