Carnage

On Tuesday evening, in a peacable attempt to catch a bus into town at 6:30 pm, I was confronted at the bus stop by approximately 600 first years (frosh, as we know and love them) wearing ripped up matching t-shirts and the occasional lei. What, WHAT, was this? Apparently it was Carnage, a massive pub crawl that involves apparently thousands of 18 and 19 year-olds wandering from pub to pub to club to pub to club to club drinking alcohol and writing things on their matching t-shirts. Apparently this is a widespread phenomenon and it happens throughout the land at regular intervals. On Tuesday there was a massive flooding of buses by these pre-funked students trying to get to the first stop, so I literally had to squeeze onto the bus whilst about 30 were turned away, and the bus driver would not let anyone else on the entire way. Others who took buses into town that evening had similar tales of whoa. There was quite a bit of screaming on my bus whenever we sped up, slowed down or turned, and at one point there were also several attempts to get the entire bus involved in singing build me up buttercup.

In related news, my trip into town was linked with the watching of the away-leg of the Southampton FCs play-off match with Derby. Derby had won the first game 2-1, Southampton 'won' this game 3-2, but as that really meant it was 4-4 overall, there was a 30 minute OT and then a penalty shoot-out. Southampton lost the shoot-out and are now out of the play-offs. This is truly unfortunate. Perhaps if Paul Allen comes in and takes over they will be able to acquire some better penalty kickers.