person: your college roomate (freshman year)
Posted: Sun Dec 10, 2006 12:58 am
The student halls in my first year at Uni in London were a huge fortress like complex on Drummond Street, where all the good vegetarian restaurants are. They contained apartments that housed five or six people at a time in their own rooms, but there were smaller flats with just two rooms in. When you applied, they asked you your interests so that they could match you with like-minded folk. For my interests, I wrote 'PUNK'. Meanwhile in Malaysia a lad named Mahathir was filling his form out, and his interests were 'DEATH METAL'. Consequently we shared one of these flats.
Mahathur said I should just call him 'M', which I refused to do beause he didn't think anyone English would pronounce his name correctly. In this he was in fact correct and I spent the year calling him something that didn't sound like his name should sound at all. But I still felt better calling him a name rather than a letter, even if it wasn't the right one.
He was a good lad; we had a lot of laughs. One night he cooked some mushrooms that he had been promising to cook for me for a long time. They were fucking awful. Imagine if I just fried some mushrooms up in a big load of oil and gave you them in a bowl, with the oil. That's not food, is it? However, I refrained from casting aspersions on the quality of Malaysian cuisine in general based on Mahathir's mushrooms. It would be quite funny to visit Malaysia and find that this bowl of mushroomy shit was the national dish.
I once spent the best part of an hour shitting myself crying after he misheard my drink request in a pub and ordered me a pint of Old Speckled Head.
I went with him and his friends to a Chinese restaurant once, which I'd never seen before, in Chinatown. They ordered my food in Chinese. I was made to feel a bit guilty for not eating meat while they were all eating lots of it. If it was now I would be eating lots of it, but I sat there with my steamed vegetables and listened to the Chinese conversation. There were portraits of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin on the wall.
Aside from his DEATH METAL he also liked to listen to one particular singer, a lady who seemed like a Chinese Celine Dion, when he was going to sleep. One weekend he went away and left the cd on repeat, so I heard the same terrible song about ten times before I went and pleaded with the building supervisors to unlock his door and turn the damn thing off.
One night my girlfriend got cramp in her leg in the middle of the night and emitted the weirdest noise I've ever heard come out of a woman. It was a long, billowing moan that got louder and louder as it went on. She only did it the once but t was really fucking weird. When it was over, there was hysterical high pitched laughter coming from next door, for a long time.
Over the course of the year, he got into body building in a big way; big vats of protein powder in the kitchen and all that. So the quite tall but regular-built lad who I first met was fucking huge by the time we moved out of there.
I think he was doing Electronic Engineering or somethng, so I guess he's probably doing alright somewhere. He was a really nice lad, would do anything for you, always with a positive attitude, liked a drink, oily mushrooms and DEATH METAL. That year was a very good year.
Salut Mahathir, where ever you may be. It was a good year we had in the fortress on drummond Street.
Mahathur said I should just call him 'M', which I refused to do beause he didn't think anyone English would pronounce his name correctly. In this he was in fact correct and I spent the year calling him something that didn't sound like his name should sound at all. But I still felt better calling him a name rather than a letter, even if it wasn't the right one.
He was a good lad; we had a lot of laughs. One night he cooked some mushrooms that he had been promising to cook for me for a long time. They were fucking awful. Imagine if I just fried some mushrooms up in a big load of oil and gave you them in a bowl, with the oil. That's not food, is it? However, I refrained from casting aspersions on the quality of Malaysian cuisine in general based on Mahathir's mushrooms. It would be quite funny to visit Malaysia and find that this bowl of mushroomy shit was the national dish.
I once spent the best part of an hour shitting myself crying after he misheard my drink request in a pub and ordered me a pint of Old Speckled Head.
I went with him and his friends to a Chinese restaurant once, which I'd never seen before, in Chinatown. They ordered my food in Chinese. I was made to feel a bit guilty for not eating meat while they were all eating lots of it. If it was now I would be eating lots of it, but I sat there with my steamed vegetables and listened to the Chinese conversation. There were portraits of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin on the wall.
Aside from his DEATH METAL he also liked to listen to one particular singer, a lady who seemed like a Chinese Celine Dion, when he was going to sleep. One weekend he went away and left the cd on repeat, so I heard the same terrible song about ten times before I went and pleaded with the building supervisors to unlock his door and turn the damn thing off.
One night my girlfriend got cramp in her leg in the middle of the night and emitted the weirdest noise I've ever heard come out of a woman. It was a long, billowing moan that got louder and louder as it went on. She only did it the once but t was really fucking weird. When it was over, there was hysterical high pitched laughter coming from next door, for a long time.
Over the course of the year, he got into body building in a big way; big vats of protein powder in the kitchen and all that. So the quite tall but regular-built lad who I first met was fucking huge by the time we moved out of there.
I think he was doing Electronic Engineering or somethng, so I guess he's probably doing alright somewhere. He was a really nice lad, would do anything for you, always with a positive attitude, liked a drink, oily mushrooms and DEATH METAL. That year was a very good year.
Salut Mahathir, where ever you may be. It was a good year we had in the fortress on drummond Street.