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I decided on a porn film starring Christian and another guy he was currently fucking. A porn film, but different. It’d probably been done many times before and called “soft porn,” but my gimmick was to make it as sexually arousing without showing a single erect penis or actual anal penetration.
I think I succeeded. It certainly gave me a hard-on, and I noticed some of the male members of the group watching it with their hands in their laps.
Journalism followed a similar course. We read on Tuesdays all the papers and discussed why one particular story was on page one of the Sun and page sixteen of the Telegraph. Obvious really.
We discussed various interview techniques from the tentative via the sympathetic to the full-on, and the various shades in between. Then there was article arrangement on the page, easier to do on a computer but still fiendishly difficult. Should we cut this particular article or continue it on a different page? Where to put the pictures. How to get the pictures. Was a long-range camera legal to photo the bare-topped celebs or indeed royals as they sunbathed in the Maldives?
Of course likewise we had to produce our own publication, limited to events around the campus, and this time I decided to exclude the sexual side, though Christian was, as always, very willing to contribute.
My first story concerned a robbery from a room on staircase six. My interview with the student went rather like this. “Yes, it was my stock of weed. The whole lot gone. Bastards! No, I’d prefer not to give my name.”
My next article was headed “Crisis as students return drunk.” Crisis, what crisis? The article went on, “Is this a real problem?” Finally I tried to dramatize the idea: “Your faithful reporter investigates what could be a growing problem, one of ‘Institutionalized Alcoholism.’”
Finally I turned to the college as a whole. “Are the courses too hard, too easy? Are the tutors up to it?” I demanded, but then had second thoughts. Careful, I told myself, I could be treading on corns here. Would I be committing slander? No that’s spoken. Libel perhaps? Now that in itself could be a good story. “Student newspaper sued by university don.”
I decided to leave it till tomorrow and curl up with Christian.
Then I had another idea with more general appeal.
What do the real football fans (i.e., Jacob) think of us privileged guys? I wrote him an email with a list of questions. Please answer ASAP, deadline to meet!!! Love.
I got a long, rambling answer full of complaints. We were snobs, overindulgent, self-opinionated, and pampered (pampered! with student loans at £9,000 per annum, repayable once I earn a salary of £21,000 p.a.).
Anyway, it seemed good copy, and I produced my newspaper, which was then deconstructed and my infantile errors exposed. I’m glad I’ve got a fairly thick skin.
And so the undergrad years went by. Looking back, they did seem to have gone in the blink of an eye (and I’m still writing in bloody clichés). I got my degrees (Hons 2.1), both of them. My parents were happy, I was happy, and I think Jacob was happy, though he didn’t say much. But he must have been happy to see me, for he smiled and gave me a hug.
Then I left university with a debt (plus 6 percent p.a.) so huge that I knew I’d never pay it off—unless I married a millionaire.
Chapter 4—Falling in Love
I WAS sorry to say goodbye to Christian. We both shed a few tears and promised to keep in touch, though I doubted if we would. The most important thing was to get a job. Jacob had done well, I thought. He was now a branch manager in Bristol, the youngest one they’d appointed in that particular company. Not sure how he managed that, but good for him. It enabled us to keep in touch and not just at the other end of a phone or Skype or email. We went to the pub to celebrate my degrees, his move, and his promotion. After a few drinks, and I had planned to get rat-arsed, he got maudlin.
“I always wanted a job with more glamour,” he confided.
I hadn’t known that so I said, “More bezazz?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
I didn’t either, so I tried to cheer him up. “Look, Jacob, you started at the bottom, got to shop manager, now branch manager. You could get area manager. You could get anywhere, become another Terence Leahy or Richard Branson, multimillionaire.”
But he refused to cheer up. “No way. This is as far as I can get. I’ll stay here until they retire me at sixty-five or whatever age they’ve raised it to, if they don’t kick me out in favor of a younger man.”
“Or woman. Look at the pressures on firms to be PC. No sexual discrimination. Come on. Have another drink, and we’ll go to one of the clubs and pick up two nice twinks and have arse-grinding sex.”
But even that enticing prospect didn’t seem to have sufficient allure.
“I think I’ll just
have an early night. I’ve got to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”
I did my best to persuade him, but he could be really impossible to change once he’s got an idea in his head.
So I went myself and got lucky, though it wasn’t with a twink but with a guy of about my own age called Lex, who had his own flat (rich parents). Lucky bugger, but the sex was good, and he didn’t just kick me out immediately after the first orgasm—or the second!
The immediate urgency as I said was that I had to get a job. I was well qualified, in fact overqualified to start as the tea boy on a local paper.
Lucky for me a job fell vacant for a journalist locally. I did of course have to attend an interview, but I thought it went down well and indeed was informed actually at the interview, no anxious waiting around, that I’d got the job on appro (which was fair enough). The guy I replaced had had a heart attack, so it wasn’t all that lucky for him. The salary was only £15K, which meant I didn’t have to start paying back my student debt straight away. I’d follow a senior reporter around for the first few days and then be on my own.
