The run up Easter break is superb for over hearing the ridiculous, self congratulatory and downright banal conversations taking place across Leeds University campus. Here’s a snippet of the finest aural gem to which I have been privy this month.
Location: The Old Bar, Leeds University Union
A Tuesday lunchtime. Two unfeasibly beautiful people are hunkered over a table deep in conversation in the decidedly dead and shabby surroundings of the Old Bar . They are eating an ironically purchased Styrofoam tray of chips with gravy sauce like two Michelin starred chefs cooking beans on toast for each other with smirks on their faces.
The girl looks like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Kate Moss, somehow making a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a netball team hoodie look like haute couture.
The guy is impossibly handsome, even sat down he is clearly well over 6 foot 5 and bedecked in some kind of spotless looking rugby gear. A Greek god sculpted from bronze with a healthy tan and a main of thick dirty blonde hair grown out and peppered with natural highlights that suggest long holidays in exotic locations.
Together they look like some kind of eugenics experiment, the product of generations of perfect breeding. What handsome children they will make, I think. I feel like a knackered Mexican pack mule that has accidentally wandered into the winners enclosure at Aintree in the presence of these pedigree specimens.
They are engaged in a flirty, knowing conversation about the upcoming half term.
Beautiful Girl: “…the 9th? I’d love to but I’ve got at least three house parties to go to back in Kent that night, it’s awful.”
Yes it’s awful, I think. Being young, white, rich, educated and independently wealthy at the age of nineteen must be a real drag. All those people in the third world walking miles every day to fetch a drop of malaria infected water, kids in Palestine having their family homes bulldozered before an afternoon suicide bombing in their local market and countless Chinese peasants bent double in the paddy fields, living hand to mouth every day of their lives don’t know how hard you have it.
