Recently I’ve been watching a very good television programme called The Walking Dead, but there’re a few things which bother me about the show, the main one being that the heroes often kill people needlessly and I don’t like it very much. If I were in that world, I often think to myself, I’d be much less violent about it.
    Well, it just so happens that I had a dream where I was the living in a zombie apocalypse and so I had a chance to apply my morality to this new setting. I remember, for whatever reason, I was staying inside a giant warehouse and I had a nice little bed set up on the ground near the entrance.
    One morning, I was just waking up when I saw a gang of three tough looking armed men walking into the warehouse.
    “Good morning,” I said, getting up quickly and walking towards them.
    They all pointed their guns at me, but I said “Don’t worry, I don’t have any weapons in here, so you won’t need to use your ones either.”
    “Give us your food!” the man demanded.
    “You don’t have to steal it from me, I’m quite happy to give you a nice portion, just so long as there’s enough for me, and I don’t eat much,” I said.
    “Well, alright then,” he said.
    I popped into the back room and filled up a few sacks with food, one for each of the three men.
    “I hope that will be enough,” I said.
    “Thank you,” their leader said kindly.
    “Feel free to come back in future,” I said as they left. “Look out for zombies!”
    And as they happily walked off into the distance, I woke up and found myself in my regular bed. Of course, I then instantly recorded it in my dream journal and so it was remembered long enough to become this blog entry!

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Most nights in Corsham there is a group of teenagers who sit around in the empty town and listen to very loud and explicit songs like this. They’re often riding around on their bikes and chatting to one another with a lexicon full of obscenities. I often see them when I’m with one or both of my brothers and after we’ve passed them they’ll always say that they’re idiots and so on, but I always tell them that they shouldn’t judge them because, for all we know, they’re actually really nice people. After all, the only thing they know about this group is their choice of pass time.
    Well, it just so happens that they were sitting around outside Co-Operative Food the other day and I had a small interaction which proved one of us right. There had been a lot of rain that day and so I was wearing my extra big rain jacket with lots of buttons.
    “Your buttons are done up wrong,” said a girl in the group.
    “Oh yes?” I said, thinking I’d been wearing the jacket wrong all these years. “How should it be?”
    “Well, you see,” she stepped forward to where she could clearly point at the buttons, “you accidentally put that button through that hole.” It seems it was just a one off mistake and not a long standing problem after all.
    “Oh, yes, I see! Thank you very much, I shall fix that up right away,” I said, thankful that somebody had been kind of enough to point out my error for me so that I could fix it.
    “That’s alright,” she said, kindly.
    “Bye bye!”
    “Goodbye.”
    And so we parted ways. Of course, while I did enjoy our very short conversation due to the fact that somebody was helping me with a fashion related problem out of the kindness of their heart, I was especially pleased with the fact that she was a member of the group that my brothers perceived as nothing but no-good trouble makers. Now that we know that one of them was nice all along, perhaps they’ll accept that they aren’t all the stereotypes they think they are?

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One day, in early 2012, I was out in the university café having nice lunch with a good friend of mine. The food was delicious (I ate a cheese and onion bap), the company marvellous. All in all, I was having a wonderful time. Sadly, it seems that I was the only one of us who was having a nice time. Shortly after I’d finished eating, my friend clutched her stomach and started crying.
    “Oh dear,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
    “It’s fine,” she said, almost out of breath due to pain.
    “Well, that’s clearly not true,” I said.
    “Hey, shall we go for a walk now?” She tried to sound upbeat, but I think she was embarrassed to be around all the people there.
    “Yes, okay then, so long as you’re up to it!”
    We left the cafe but then my friend stopped moving, clutching her stomach again.
    “Would you like to sit down?” I asked.
    She insisted otherwise, but then a few minutes later collapsed onto the floor. A member of staff spotted us and, after helping up my friend, led us into a nearby building. He explained that, by the university’s policy, he had no choice but to take us to the hospital. My friend was very insistent that we not go there, but he took us all the same and after a short ride in the car, we were both waiting in the emergency room.
    “I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything to help,” I said, feeling quite sad about it. “I was really quite useless.”
    “No, don’t be silly,” my friend said. “I’ve had this happen before and anybody else would just get all worried and make matters worse, but you were just really casual the whole time, like nothing was happening. It’s very reassuring.”
    I always thought that was very kind. Since my friend was seemingly feeling much better, I was feeling much less concerned too. Sadly, however, she soon started having a panic attack because she was worried about it all and urged me to go and get a bag for her to hyperventilate into, so I got up and headed towards the nurse behind the check-in.
    “Excuse me,” I said, “my friend is having a panic attack and they’d like to borrow a bag, do you have one?”
    “What, to breathe into?” she asked.
    “Yep,” I replied.
    “Hmm,” she looked around and then spotted something. “This is all we have.”
    She gave me a bin bag.
    Since I wasn’t likely to get anything else from her, I said “Thank you, I’m sure that will be fine.”
    I went back to my friend.
    “I’m afraid she only gave me a bin bag,” I said.
    “Great,” she said, and discarded it.
    Thankfully, a few hours later we were all done there and my friend and I left the hospital. I always thought it was quite funny how a bin bag was offered by a professional nurse for hyperventilation purposes.

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I mentioned before that a friend of mine once randomly decided that it would be fun to tie me up, well, about a year later he had a new fun idea. One morning as I got out onto the school playground with my friends Ben and Sarah, I found that he was doing a sleeper hold (which he had recently learned) on several people I knew. When the three of us arrived, he approached us to say hello.
    “Hey, Ben. Can I try it on you?” he asked, eagerly.
    Ben, very excited, agreed. A few seconds later, Ben was in his arms, and then, after a small spasm, he was unconscious and lowered gently onto the floor. He was awake and fine again a few seconds later.
    “I guess you’ll never let me do it to you, will you, Randall?” he said.
    “Well, I suppose I don’t mind too much,” I said, not wanting to let him down.
    “Wow,” said Sarah. “I really can’t imagine it happening to you. It would just seem so weird to see you so vulnerable like that.”
    I always wondered why she said that, and at the time I said that I thought it seemed odd. I hardly seem a very powerful person! But I remembered it, because it always seemed nice.
    He wrapped his arms around my neck and started squeezing tightly. However, unlike everybody else, after a few seconds there was no spasm and I didn’t become unconscious, but he kept squeezing. He was doing it for so much longer on me, waiting for it to happen.
    “I think you’re just strangling me,” I said, but I’m not sure he could understand me because it was getting harder and harder to breathe and therefore harder and harder to speak!
    Eventually the bell rang and he gave up. I felt extremely cold after he let go, as if I had just gotten out of a warm bed and then been dumped outside, but I never once passed out. I wonder how long he’d have kept trying had the bell not rang?
    Anyway, the story all seems nice and light-hearted until we jump forward in time three years and it gains a rather more sinister twist. In the time that passed, I’d left school and Ben and Sarah were very sadly more and more becoming memories of the past. But, of course, change isn’t all bad and I was happily at a new friend‘s house and we were both sitting on the sofa having a nice chat about various things. I happened to mention the time that somebody had once tried to do a sleeper hold on me but it had failed to work.
    This quite excited her, and she was keen to try it on me herself to see if it would work. Obviously, as I was a little older, I was more reluctant, but as I had let a friend do so in the past, I felt I should let one do so in the present. I described how he had done it, and she looked it up online to see how it was done. In the end, she decided not to, because when we looked up that specific method we discovered several sites explaining that it was ‘potentially fatal’. Oh my.

(Don’t miss my latest article for Avoid Drowning.)

I remember that one winter’s day back in 2008, I was standing out on the school field with a small group of friends. It was raining a little and, of course, most people don’t like rain and so most of my friends were inside avoiding it. I, on the other hands don’t really mind rain at all, but I don’t particularly enjoy enormous crowds and since enormous crowds were inevitably inside on rainy days, I was outside.
    “Hey, let’s tie up Adam!” one of my friends said, producing a roll of duct tape.
    This was a little unexpected.
    “Yeah, great idea!” somebody added.
    Hmm.
    The person who had proposed the idea approached me and said sweetly, “You don’t mind do you?”
    Who was I to rob him of his fun? I reluctantly agreed to let him do it.
    So, I was backed against the leg of a rugby post and the whole roll of duct tape was wrapped around me.
    My friends all found this to be absolutely hilarious.
    “Very good,” I said, smiling.
    Then, the school bell rang and it was time to head inside for the post-lunch lesson. Sadly, it seems that my friends didn’t quite have time to release me before heading back inside. I supposed I wouldn’t want them to get in trouble for being late anyway. Better only one person get told off than four!
    So there I was, tied to the pole while everybody else headed inwards. I should probably be doing something about it. I thought that a good idea would be to take my Trusty Water Bottle and to squirt it down the front of the tape and hopefully loosen whatever it was that made it sticky. The plan seemed sound, other than the fact that both of my arms and my water bottle were tightly under the tape.
    In the end, I just had to push forward as hard as I could to tear it away and it worked quite well, although it was very tricky. I got in, late, and told the teacher that I had a very good reason, but they didn’t even need to hear it because I was a good student and they trusted me, so, no punishments for me!

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One day last year, I was riding into Bath in order to meet my friends Oscar and Chloe for some coffee. I always aim to catch the bus which will arrive earlier than I need it to, that way, if I miss it, then the next bus will still get me there on time and this time, like every other, I was on the earlier bus.
    The bus had gotten about three quarters of the way there, when it stopped. It seemed that one of the main roads into Bath had been closed due to some kind of terrible accident and so the bus had to stop. I was listening to my iPod, but I saw that the driver had said something to all of the other passengers and then they had all gotten off. I took my head phones out and listened to see what he had said.
    “I’m going the other way, mate, so it might be faster if you walk the rest,” he said.
   “Nah, I’ll stay,” I replied.
    I was already running early, so I thought it would be fine. Besides, the walk would take about an hour or so, so, I expected that it’d be the slower option anyway. The bus then turned around and headed into another direction. For a while it was just driving along a duel carriageway and it seemed to be a perfectly normal diversion. However, after a while, I realised that we (the driver and me, that is, just to make clear that I was the only passenger who stayed) were driving along a small road that went through a forest! Could it really be the right way? Then, later still, it was driving through what seemed to be huge open moors. It was quite a creepy place, really, because I couldn’t see anything but the grass and a very thick fog. I know the area around Bath quite well, but I couldn’t determine where we were at all.
    An hour and a half later, lights began to appear through the fog and eventually the fog disappeared entirely as the bus pulled into Bath. I was almost two hours late for the meet up! But while I may have missed two hours of socialising, on the bright side, I did get to enjoy some really rather unusual scenery on the way. I have to wonder if the driver might have just gotten lost.

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I recently had a really lovely day where I visited Nando’s with a group of close friends. We ate, drank, talked and had a marvellous time. Being that most of them go to the same university as me, the conversation eventually moved on to the subject of one of my favourite lecturers (I shan’t mention any names in this anecdote). I was quite saddened to hear from one of the people there that he wouldn’t be continuing his job for much longer because the university had decided they no longer needed him. What a terrible shame that would be, I thought, and so I decided it would be nice if I were to send him an email when I got home to let him know what a terrible shame I thought it was.
    The next day when I checked my emails I saw that he had replied. I expected something along the lines of “Thanks for your email, I’m sorry to have to go, but so is the way of life” but what I actually got was a rather worried reply from a man who had suddenly been given an element of doubt about the security of his job. I especially hoped that it wasn’t true now, because what an awful way to find out if it was! I asked the person who had given me the information where they had heard it and they told me they’d get back to me. Once they remembered, they asked the person they’d heard it from and asked them about the origin of the information. I began to feel especially worried at that point, because the person they’d heard it from was somebody who was especially in the know, as they say, about the goings on at the university. Was I really going to have to break such sad news to such a lovely person?
    Thankfully, I was not. It seems that my friend had actually been told that he was no longer teaching one class (and that, he tells me, will only be for one year) but my friend had either misremembered, or misheard, and been lead to believe that his time at the university was coming to an end. I emailed him as soon as I knew and everything was set straight.
    I think this anecdote perfectly illustrates the unreliable nature of rumours and gossip. I have a rule never to believe anything about anybody (or anything) unless I have direct first hand evidence of it. Sadly, since I trusted my friend, I let the rule slip this time and it lead to somebody having to go through unnecessary worry. Even when nobody has bad intentions, false information can find its way into circulation, and it’s important to always remember that.

In the past I’ve mentioned some of the downsides as working as an MDSA and in today’s entry I’m going to do so again, but before I do, I’d like to say that I really loved being an MDSA. If you read my blog posts you might come away with something of a negative impression, but that’s only because entries that went something like “One day I picked up loads of rubbish and put it into a bag and I really loved it because I love most things” would probably not be of much interest to you.
    The leader of the MDSAs was a rather mean lady and I realised this on one of my first days. Every day, two MDSAs would clean the inside of the dinner hall and the third would go out onto the school field and pick up as much rubbish as they could. On one particularly rainy and gloomy day, I offered to go out and do the field and so I did. I got absolutely soaked and a few minutes after I came back in, our leader had something to say to me.
    “You’re so lazy! I haven’t seen you do anything in here all afternoon. Let me guess, you arrived really late? You need to take this job seriously and arrive on time or you won’t be staying here,” she said in her rather characteristic grumpy voice.
    “I’m not lazy,” I said in my defence, “I was out doing the-“
    “I don’t want to hear it!” she said, angry that I was answering back. “Take this and put it outside!”
    She shoved a large black bin bag into my hands and so, in order to avoid a pointless argument, I took it outside.
    But now, for perhaps the first time ever, let’s step out of my point of view and take a look at her rudeness towards the other MDSAs. My dear friend Rory was, for a while, one of the other MDSAs. Unlike me, Rory didn’t find the job to be really fun and lovely, instead he saw it as nothing more than another job and a source of money. Since it was quite boring for him, he would often bring along an MP3 player so that he could listen to music while cleaning up messes. But, our leader, she didn’t like that.
    One day, Rory was enjoying a nice piece of music as normal, and he went over to pick up a piece of rubbish she snuck up behind him. He had quite a shock a few moments later when his earphones were violently yanked out of his ears and he was rudely told “No earphones!” Poor old Rory.
    Of course, it was very nice to be working with Rory, and every now and then (during the few moments when the hall was litter free) I would go over to him and we’d have a brief chat. While doing this job, I also befriended a very nice student named Tonicha who would always call me over for a brief chat when she realised that I wasn’t really doing anything. Our leader did not like this at all and she would often shout at us to “Stop talking!” and get back to work. You might think that that sounds like a reasonable complaint, but the problem was that we’d always have the hall clean by the end anyway and that she was actually good friends with the third MDSA and would often stop her for a long chat! Even on very busy days.
    But, I think, at that point, I could just about live with it. She did kind of spoil what was otherwise a wonderful job, but some people are just a bit grumpy, I supposed. But before long, the straw which broke my camel’s back came along. A large group of children had been eating rather messily and, when they had finished, they left behind them a disarray of chairs and discarded pieces of food. I pulled a bin over and then just stood there getting all of the food and rubbish into the bin. Once that was done, I’d pop all the chairs neatly back to the sides.
    I had just about put all the rubbish away (there were one or two items left on the floor) when our leader came out once again to have a word with me.
    “Don’t just stand there!” she bellowed. “Put those chairs away.”
    “Oh yes, don’t worry,” I said, perfectly earnestly, “I was just putting all the rubbish away first.”
    She walked on past me, grabbed one of the chairs and hurled it at me. I jumped out of the way to avoid being hit.
    “I said ‘put the chairs away’!”
    It was at this point that I decided I would write a complaint to the people above about her rude attitude. I wrote it up that night, showed it to somebody (who was impressed by ‘how polite’ it was) and handed it in to the correct people. That was that, I thought. From now on, I hoped she would just be nicer.
    It seems that my plan didn’t go smoothly at all. The leader of the MDSAs had also held another position at the school and the day that she had been informed about my complaint, was the day which was her last with the other job. She had just been preparing for a nice little celebration to commemorate her time at the other position, when she got a message telling her about my complaint. I wasn’t there, but I’m told she just broke down in tears. I have to say that, when people are rude to you, it’s very easy to dehumanise them, and I believe that I had been doing that with her to an extent and when I heard how upset she’d been, I felt awful. Obviously, she had her reasons for acting rather meanly towards me and others, and while that may not have been justification enough, she probably had problems which made constant politeness hard. So, really, at that point I felt terribly sorry for her.
    We all had to have a discussion about it, and oddly Rory’s earphone thing was considered acceptable. But after that, we never had any problem from her again. Indeed, I can scarcely remember her talking to me at all after that unhappy experience was over.

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