Scroungers
an excerpt

The following document profiling my dear friends and I could not have been completed without various bitching, gossiping, tittle-tattling, hearsay, and of course, the conducting of actual ‘interviews’. I would like to take this moment to acknowledge the hard-won but ultimately worthwhile cross-examination of one mulish interviewee in particular, Stephen Verne, who isn’t really the type to talk about himself in the slightest—well alright, that may be a slight lie; Stephen Verne does actually quite enjoy to talk about himself. A lot. Just not, you know, about deep, dark, personal issues that we’re all really interested about, like his childhood, or his son, or why he doesn’t have many male friends, or his ex-girlfriend and what it was about her that made him obsess over her so—but all of that will come later. Anyway, Steve agreed to let me grill him on the basis that this was a Memoir of the Most Interesting Parts of Our Life and Times at London University, that it was a personal document for my own gratification, and that it would never, ever be published.

…Er, if you’re reading this, Steve: Sorry. But I recently got married, and the wife, the doctor, and three uniform sets of unwavering blue lines all say that there’s a baby on the way. I’m sure that you, being a father yourself, would understand why I’ve chosen to sell us all out. (Except myself, of course.)