Previously in ‘Freddy the Fresher’: Freddy arrives in Oxford – Freddy falls in love – Freddy has his heart broken – Freddy reconciles himself to his life.

 ***

Oxford…shit. I’m still only in Oxford.

It had not been a good Christmas for Freddy. The break had been punctuated by power cuts and flooding, and he’d had to spend Christmas sharing his bedroom with his grandfather, whose snoring felt like a passing train.

‘Glad to be back?’ Over-Eager-Twat asks him, a smug grin on his face.

‘Yeah, really excited for this term.’ Why, after months in Oxford, was he still lying about his levels of excitement? Why was he still pretending that he didn’t hate this place? Without Bernadette…without Bernadette…well, that’s another story.

Under the terms of his New Year’s resolutions, Freddy had decided to have a better time. He had decided that he would drink more, party harder and generally ‘put himself out there’. He’d do his work, of course, but not worry about it too much. If I fail, I fail, he thought, and I’m back where I started. No better, no worse.

On the penultimate day of 0^th week, with collections looming like a ninja from the ceiling, Freddy decided that the first change he would make would be to visit a new library. (DISCLAIMER: His desire was in no way motivated by a profound longing to avoid bumping into Bernadette at the SSL).

Wearing a hoody and dark glasses, Freddy left Judas College and wandered through town, avoiding eye contact with anyone. This isn’t really putting yourself out there Freddy, his internal devil’s advocate told him. Shut up.

Skirting down Mansfield Road (past ATS, scene of that fatal chicken malay satay baguette of love), Freddy headed to the Vere Harmsworth library, occupying a booth from where he had a strategic view of the entire library.

After a few minutes of feeling generally paranoid and agitated – to the extent where he could hardly sit still – Freddy got up and headed downstairs, looking for the water fountain. Nothing cools off a young stud like an icy drink.

Arriving, he noticed another young man standing by the cooler, staring blankly at the cover of a copy of Time magazine. He was looking deep into the eyes of Janet Yellen, and she looked back at him.

‘You can open it, you know? I think they’re for everyone.’ 

The man looks up at Freddy and Freddy realises that this is someone even more paranoid and agitated than himself. The man nods and places the copy of Time back on the shelf.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,’ Freddy blurts out, proffering a hand, ‘I’m Freddy.’ The man grasps it and gives it a light shake.

‘Nick. Are you a fresher?’ Freddy nods and asks: ‘You?’

‘Finalist,’ he says, and skulks back off into the library.

***

‘Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you…’

His macro class sing it with a pointed lack of enthusiasm, but their new tutor, a blustery old man with a smiling red face, conducts them along all the same.

‘Happy Birthday dear… Freddy!’ Two or three people get his name wrong, which, considering he’s only been here for about four months, isn’t too bad going. There’s muted applause at the end, mainly from his tutor who is wiping a tear from his eye as though he’s been moved by particularly profound music.

After their class he heads back to his room and sits on his bed, alone, considering how it feels to turn 19. He certainly feels older than he did this time last year, when he celebrated his 18^th birthday by going to the one nightclub in Worthing with his dorky best friends (both of whom are now Kettheads at Goldsmith’s).

Outside his window a pigeon is pecking away at an almost-empty bag of chips. He wonders, briefly, how those chips came to be purchased on his windowsill. Probably a hate crime, he thinks, with resignation.

That evening he is taken out to dinner by his parents, along with a select group of friends that includes one of the Kettheads (down for the night), three college chums who are surprised to be invited, and Nick, the miserable finalist with whom he has struck up a tentative friendship over the past few weeks.

The nine of them cram into the upstairs part of the Golden Cross centre Pizza Express, and when the waitress comes, Freddy’s father produces a ring binder file in which he has sorted a collection of printed Pizza Express vouchers. The deal works out that they can all have free dough balls, which they enjoy.

Freddy’s mind, however, is, unsurprisingly, on a subjunctive history of what could’ve been, if he was still seeing Bernadette. Perhaps they’d be out for a meal, just the two of them… Perhaps she’d cook for him, and they’d eat it together in bed…

‘Freddy!’ he looks up, and sees his mother holding a package, wrapped in glittery silver paper. ‘Here you go,’ she says, smiling, and handing the present down the table.

Freddy unwraps it with all the enthusiasm of peeling a rotten satsuma, and, once it is open, he pulls out the box set of the complete West Wing. He smiles, ‘thanks Mum,’ she smiles back.

No-one else has brought him a present, thus the ceremony is concluded and they can all return to their American Hots, Sohos or Quattro Fromaggios. Conversation, it seems, isn’t a necessity in this disparate group of misfits.

And then, at the end of the evening, once he has waved his parents goodbye at the train station, he goes back to his room, sleeps alone and dreams of the pigeon at the window.

Tap tap! The pigeon’s beak rings against the window – his eyes open – tap tap, the pigeon strikes again. He walks over to the window and opens it. The pigeon hops in and flutters over to his bed, where Freddy joins it. Gently, he gets back under the sheets and tries to fall asleep whilst the pigeon whispers to him and strokes his forehead.

‘My name eez Patrice,’ he says, with a thick French accent, ‘and eet is all going to be alright! Get zum sleep, leetle boy…’

***

‘Try it!’

Freddy looks over his shoulder nervously. He would be nervous about this even if he was doing it with one of his close friends, but because he’s only just met this shifty red-chinoed man he’s all the more nervous.

‘There’s no one here, mate. Just snort it up and we’ll be cooking!’

With one final glance behind – backwards towards his childhood, towards his pet dog Snuffles, towards his family who love and trust him – he leans in to the toilet seat and snorts up his lines.

‘Shit…’ he says, leaning back, whilst Red Chino guffaws with bilious laughter.

‘Total head fuck, no? Let’s get out of here; you’ve got to hit the books during the first part of your high, otherwise you won’t get the full effect. 

Red Chino hastily wipes down the toilet seat, scattering the surrounding area in a light dusting of what looks, to Freddy’s untrained eye, like icing sugar. Delicious.

As they exit the toilets, they see a lanky, tousle-haired boy entering after them, carrying a stack of surgical looking swabs and humming ‘Bailando por el mundo’ under his breath.

Freddy frowns and scampers out onto the staircase that leads up to the Lower Camera. In an attempt to appear nonchalant, he takes a long drink from the water fountain and browses the posters, taking an excessive amount of time to study the Labour Club’s action-packed term card.

Once he is convinced that no-one suspects a thing (not that anyone is around to suspect anything) he plunges down into the Glink, in order to really matter out some brilliantly gacky Economics work.

It takes him about five minutes before he realises that today’s work is PURE SOLID FUCKING GOLD. It’s unbelievable, but he reckons he’s cracked Economics; not just at a university level, but for all humanity. There’s a Nobel Prize for him here.

Swelling with pride, he looks around at the people who are studying diligently around the room. His mouth falls open.

Bernadette is there, scribbling away on a piece of paper and not looking up. Fuck, Freddy thinks, I’ve got to have sex with her. I can have sex with her. I can do anything I want. But I’m starting to sweat…it’s too hot in here…

In order to solve his heat problem and also show off his abs which he momentarily believes he’s been cultivating, he pulls off his jumper and t-shirt and lies back, shirtless, exhaling loudly until Bernadette looks up.

A shocked look passes over her face at the sight of Freddy, sitting topless in the Gladstone Link, winking at her and rubbing his thigh.

She begins to pack up her books, stuffing them into a Fleet Foxes tote bag, before standing up. 

Before she walks away, however, she strides over to Freddy, leans in and whispers in his ear.

‘Meet me in the toilets…’

I must begin with a confession; rather than eat in the restaurant itself, I ordered a takeaway. As cash-strapped students we had balked at the idea of not being able to BYOB. In my defence, to receive the 15% discount, I went to collect the order. In doing so I ended up waiting nearly 20 minutes (having already allowed for the 50 minute wait time the owner had stipulated). With a growling stomach I sat watching the fully booked service and could see that the diners were ostensibly enjoying the food, and being looked after very well by the family that runs it. Lucky them. Also worth noting were the certificates on the wall for winning the Asian category in the 2013 Oxfordshire Restaurant Awards, as well at the Oxford Boys’ Curry Club Golden Popadom Award. The latter sounds fantastic – if there’s a Girls’ Club then sign me up. Poor marks for the long wait, but understandable given the packed restaurant, and in the end certainly worth it. So, can you write a review of a takeaway? I think so.

Having never, to my knowledge, tried Nepalese food, and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the new vocabulary, I directed my uninitiated eyes towards the Chef’s Specials. I plumped with a lamb patan masu; spiced lamb with green chilli, peppers and tomato sauce. Here, I made a mistake I’ve not yet managed with curries in the UK. What the internet neglected to mention, which the hard copy of the menu in the restaurant informed me of, were the three red chillies sitting next to the title of the dish, denoting ‘v. hot’. I like ‘spicy’ food as much as the next person, but when the only other dish on the menu to receive this label is a vindaloo, you know things might get interesting. After trying a couple of mouthfuls, the runny nose, flushed cheeks and streaming eyes was invitation enough to add the entire pot of raita to it. I have to say, however, that despite the challenge it presented, it was delicious. From my more heat-hardened friend, I quote, “It’s the best curry I’ve ever tasted.”

To accompany this I picked something off the short, but different, vegetarian menu: bodi, tama, aloo (black eyed beans, bamboo shoots and potatoes with ginger and garlic to the layman). A somewhat milder dish, I ate it first when I knew my taste buds wouldn’t have gone into complete shock. It was not dissimilar to a dhal, but the Nepalese spices were completely different to those from neighbouring India, and perfectly balanced.

To be tried another time are the momo starters, which, as I was eyeing up the diners’ plates in the restaurant, looked exceptional. The menu now sits on our mantelpiece in pride of place, awaiting the next opportunity for a takeaway, which, as far as I’m concerned, should be tomorrow.

When I was a kid, I was the fussiest little thing any parent could hope to avoid. Not a vegetable, nor anything green, would pass my lips, and until the age of at least thirteen I survived largely on a diet of Haribo and chips. Worst of all if anything was vaguely ‘weird’ – this meant extracting gherkins from McDonalds burgers with much complaint – and all strong flavours were off the cards. Horseradish became enemy number one, striking even more fear into my heart than even the most overcooked cauliflower could muster. Every Sunday, my parents would settle down to lunch and proceed to, in my young eyes at least, ruin a beautiful joint of beef with swathes of horseradish sauce, going so far as to commit the cardinal sin of blighting even Yorkshire puds with this foul concoction.
So why, I hear you ask, am I here to defend what was once my worst enemy, bringing misery to my every weekend? Much as I’ve learned to enjoy good wine and the company of beautiful women in time, the joys of horseradish is one of those things that I’ve only managed to love as I’ve grown older. This humble root is not native to the UK, but in true British fashion we have adopted and embraced it to make it a central part of our food culture, which I now realise is wholly sensible.

Even if you buy a ready-made sauce, which is of course the easy option, what can you do with your horseradish? Although tradition demands it should accompany a good beef roast – this is indeed a wonderful thing – the versatility of horseradish sauce goes way beyond Sunday lunch. One of my favourite sandwiches has to be smoked mackerel piled into a crispy white baguette that has been spread liberally with horseradish sauce. Think beyond the confines of British towards the plant’s Asian roots, however, and you can have all sorts of gastronomic fun. I personally loathe wasabi paste, or at least the processed stuff we get in tubes over here, being as it is a hit of heat with little flavour of its own. Replace it with horseradish sauce, however, and you get the spicy kick sushi so badly needs but with a depth of flavour unmatched by the native Japanese offering.

So, I implore you, forget all you have been taught and rescue horseradish from lm, the doldrums of Sunday cooking – even if you are determined you hate it, I promise you won’t regret it.

This week sees a jet-setting makeover for Creaming Spires. Christmas was busy for your tawdry journalist sans frontiers: romantic opportunities arose in the form of a francophone skiing holiday, complete with sexually-charged chairlift rides and steamy vin-chaud piss-ups.

Sex transcends language barriers. In the incontrovertible words of Jason Derulo, “Been around the world don’t speak the language/but your booty don’t need explaining”. Who would need to explain my booty? How might they do so, and why? The language of sex is surely universal, constructed of a grammar of magnetism, a vocabulary of blow-jobs and bases.

However, my conviction that my body could “do all the talking” first wavered last summer, following an ocean fumble with a Dutchman named Jelle. Though the spelling conjured up an immediate “…and ice cream”, “Jelle” was actually pronounced “Yolo”, and it was possibly this invitation to hedonism rather than actual attraction that led me to romp with him into the waves of Barcelona beach, flinging bikini bottoms to the four winds. But the throes of watery passion were somewhat marred by Mr Yolo’s sex-clamations learnt from American porn. “FACKING GUT,” he cried repeatedly, as my flip-flop bobbed balefully past.

A year on, I again find myself naked and desperately trying to decipher the amorous whisperings of a continental lay. Unadulterated animal desire has got us this far, but it cannot convey such complicated ideas as “would you mind licking my left ear a little more softly?” Mime (tricky in the chalet darkness) gets me a condom and a sheepish “voilà” from Monsieur Amour: I smugly attempt wordplay on the similarity between the French for condom (préservatif) and his optimistic supply of contraception (présomptif). Sadly, it emerges that the latter is a false friend used mainly in medicinal law and a confused ‘ouf’ cements my suspicion that passion can indeed be lost in translation. I leave the chalet in yesterday’s clothes and board a 6am coach, the first leg of my international walk of shame back to London. Alas, the language of love is not universal.