Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [38]
We would breakfast on the street, smoke pipes in our dressing gowns, and race each other up the steep hills, carrying books under our arms en route to lectures.
We had all sorts of strange visitors endlessly coming in and out uninvited, including several regular homeless guys off the street.
Neil was one such guy, and he loved coming round leading us on daytime raids of the industrial bins around the back of the local Sainsbury’s supermarket. We would sneak round in our car (as subtly as we could with an old, smoky Ford, full of students crammed in the back). One of us would then leap out, diving head first into the compressor, before throwing out great sides of salmon and bundles of out of date hot cross buns, to the eagerly awaiting arms below.
We also went a couple of times a week to help out in the soup kitchen at the homeless centre down the road from us, and got to know ever-increasing numbers of colourful folk around us.
Sadly Neil died soon after, of a drugs overdose, and I suspect not many of those Brunel homeless characters are still alive today. But it was a formative time for us as friends living together and taking our first tentative steps in the outside world, away from school.
Highlights of The Brunel featured the likes of Mr Iraci, our landlord, coming round and being greeted by myself, stark naked, painting cartoons on my bedroom wall to liven the place up a bit; or Eddie showing another pretty girl his technique for marinating venison in a washing-up bowl full of Bordeaux wine.
Our housekeeping kitty of funds would miraculously evaporate due to Hugo’s endless dinner parties for just him and up to ten different girls that he had been chatting up all week.
Stan developed a nice technique for cooking sausages by leaving them on the grill until the hundred decibel smoke alarm went off, indicating they were ready. (On one occasion, Stan’s sausage-cooking technique actually brought the fire brigade round, all suited and booted, hoses at the ready. They looked quite surprised to see all of us wandering down in our dressing gowns, asking if the sausages were ready, whilst they stood in the hall primed for action, smoke alarm still blaring. Happy days.)
I also fondly remember Mr Iraci coming round another time, just after I had decided to build a home-made swimming pool in the ten foot by ten foot ‘garden’ area out the back.
I had improvised a tarpaulin and a few kitchen chairs and had filled it optimistically with water. It held for about twenty minutes … in fact just about until Mr Iraci showed up to collect his rent.
Then it burst its banks, filling most of the ground floor with three inches of water, and soaking Mr Iraci in the process.
Truly the man was a saint.
CHAPTER 34
Trucker and I did quite a bit of busking together on our guitars, doing the rounds at various Bristol hot spots.
This included the local old people’s home, where I remember innocently singing the lyrics to ‘American Pie’. The song culminates with the spectacularly inappropriate claim that this would be the day that I’d die.
A long, awkward pause followed, as we both realized our predicament.
The home wasn’t a long-standing gig after that.
We also played together with another friend of ours called Blunty, who went on to become a worldwide singing sensation after he left the army, under his real name of James Blunt. I am not sure Blunty will consider those jamming sessions as very formative for him, but they make for fun memories now all the same.
Good on him, though. He always had an amazingly cool singing voice.
During this first year at The Brunel, though, two key events happened.
The first was finding such a good buddy in Trucker. We had hit it off at once. We laughed together masses, and found that we had so much in common: our faith, a thirst for adventure and a love of the fun, quirky things and people in life.
Together, we signed up for the university OTC (Officer Training Corps), which was a marginally more professional outfit than the Army Cadets. It was, though, full of overly serious