Saturday, February 16, 2013

Weekend 2: Day 9-10

My Danish friend, Leif, says that the weekend starts at about 3pm on a Friday. In reality, the weekend for us starts when our supervisor leaves the office and the lovely gentlemen of the lab plug in to Quake and open the beers kept in Leif's drawer. I'd normally be a bit wary of the inherent sexism in this statement but it's not as bad as one may think. I used to play Quake but I am atrociously bad at it and end up turning my scantily-clad-huge-breasted character (OK, that part of the exercise is pretty sexist, but I somehow doubt the creators of Quake are going to throw in some Daria-like characters to keep me happy) round and round in circles and it makes me motion sick and normally results in me throwing up in the depressingly dull bathrooms of the Rutherford building. And I can't drink the beer because of the 'take a beer, put a pound in the box' rule; it's still February and I'm still not buying. Also, beer makes me very stupid very quickly. There are other females in the lab but one of them is a super athlete that is training for The Boat Race so she spends all of her spare time being super impressive and super impressive people don't need to drink beer and play Quake. Also, I don't think she can do anything that her coach hasn't scheduled. Another doesn't play because she gets addicted to video games really quickly and would like to not get fired from her post-doc. Another is Japanese and thinks we are all just a little bit insane. I wonder if underestimation is a cultural thing.

The point, I think, was that the start of the of my weekend was heralded by the guys of my lab sitting around drinking Stellas and playing Quake while shouting across the room about how they just ate each other's rockets, gave each other hot baths, nailed each other and got fragged. I kid you not, this is the exact language of the game. All in all, a great start to the weekend. And free. I was swearing at my code. Swearing is free. Thank fuck.

I spend a lot of time with the people from my lab. That evening we went to formal hall at Trinity College as Leif's guests. This event was organised and paid for before my little experiment started so while you could argue that it's technically cheating, it didn't require any exchange of money.

Formal halls are such a strange phenomenon. You sit in a hall where people have dined in a similar fashion for centuries and the walls are graced with the faces of (dead, white) men whose names in archaic, faded print would render you a little speechless if you could step outside the surreality of the experience in Cambridge and actually appreciate the privilege. But no matter how much I talk or write about it, substantial gratitude never seems within grasp. But I am trying and I think that's what some of this experiment is about.

But a lot of this experiment is about being creative, being sneaky, being thrifty, being determined. So, when I found out that wine, which I normally cannot consume because the sulphites are a trigger for my migraines, was being served with the meal I decided to try something new to get the most out of the experience. For Christmas my mother, apparently concerned about the impact the lack of wine was having on my life, bought me something called Pure Wine and a beautiful bottle of 2011 Kalleske Moppa Shiraz which is an organic wine from the Barossa Valley produced using a minimum amount of sulphites. The Pure Wine claims to eliminate the sulphites from the wine and therefore extracts the trigger for the headaches that most people get the day after a night of heavy wine drinking.

The thing about getting migraines, though, is that you become so damn afraid of the pain, the nausea and the vomitting that you would do pretty much anything to avoid it all. So, up until now, I'd been curious about the Pure Wine but not curious enough to risk the migraine if it didn't work. Until, of course, I couldn't take my own sulphite-free wine to a formal hall and was faced with the prospect of an entire sober evening with my extremely drunk lab friends.

The drops worked wonderfully. I drank a lot of wine, although I stuck to the red wine because I know that white wine has more sulphites than red, and thus was quite successful at getting drunk at yet another event for free.

Mum, please send more Pure Wine. I may be low.

I have received a little bit of criticism, however, for the rather drunken way I've been conducting myself through this experiment. A friend of mine asked what the point of cutting out spending was if I was going to continue with my extravagant Cambridge lifestyle (aka getting ridiculously drunk during three course meals to cope with stress and then going clubbing in a place that sells cocktails in oversized jugs with a straws). And it's a fair enough point. Another friend of mine suggested I just change the blog to document how great I was at getting free stuff on account of being just too damn awesome. He was being facetious but the joke contained enough truth to give me pause.

My response to the first friend was that although some of the point of the experiment was to move away from the culture of excess it was also about being getting creative with what I had. And I happened to have a lot of gin. I'm just as enthusiastic about the Think, Eat, Save campaign, for example, as I am about reminding Cambridge students not to be entitled wankers all of the time, myself included.

After the Trinity formal hall we ended up in a nightclub called The Place (except, like all nightclubs in Cambridge, no one calls it by its actual name and instead calls it Life). Now, I really didn't want to go to the nightclub. Firstly, it looked terribly dodgy (looks, in this case, were not deceiving). Secondly, you had to pay £2 for entry (it involved some complicated process consisting of going to Clare Hall for arm bands, rounding up my drunk lab friends on King's Parade as they shouted obscenities into the rather chilly night and finally making our way to the club). Thirdly, as I've just mentioned, my friends were very drunk. But through a series of guilt-inducing pleas rained upon me, I ended up in the nightclub. The hipster paid for my entry although it was at his insistence that I was standing there in an empty nightclub, choking on dry-ice as the hair cells in my ears were slowly murdered, so I didn't feel too bad about that.

I mentioned last time that I have very generous friends and that it makes the experiment a little difficult at times. At first, my friends were a little amused by my experiment and were more than willing to accommodate my new restriction. Then it started to get a bit inconvenient for them so then they started arguing with me about the philosophy behind the experiment. Determined (stubborn) as I am, this was a useless exercise, so then they just started paying for stuff and shoving it in my hands. So I was saving the money but I wasn't really reducing my consumption which was one of the aims of the exercise.

This time I decided that I wasn't going to let people buy me drinks in the nightclub. This lasted about 30 seconds. The hipster bought the first round, again, but under Leif's instructions. I was handed the world's biggest cocktail in the world's biggest jug. Luckily, I had not noticed that we had picked up two other women somewhere between Trinity and the club so the cocktail-in-a-jug was shared. It was mostly just cranberry juice anyway. Because women love diluted alcohol in big jugs and men like beer.

We included/scared-the-hell-out-of a new member of the lab in our little group that night. This lovely lad, all the way from Austria, represented the other group of people that I have come across when I tell them about my experiment: they find the experiment fascinating and then want to buy me something. So he bought me a G&T. And I let him because we were in a nightclub and I didn't want to contribute to his noise-induced hearing loss by screaming about reducing consumption and appreciating privilege. I just thanked him. Because sometimes people really are lovely and it's a bit exhausting trying to constantly change that loveliness into something you find more palatable that week.

My Saturday was spent recovering from my Friday. At least recovery is free.

Sunday was another Leif-sponsored adventure. He had bought a bread mixer on eBay and needed someone to drive him to Loughborough to pick it up. A road trip was suggested. The hipster's car only has two seats so we had to take my car on the condition that I didn't have to drive (I like napping and it's not safe to nap and drive) and that someone else would have to pay for fuel. With that agreed upon five of us from the lab drove to Loughborough, picked up the bread mixer and then realised that the weather was absolutely terrible. So, in the Loughborough Tesco carpark, as the gentlemen munched on their Tesco purchases and I ate my kale and chickpea salad that I had made that morning and brought along, we argued about what we would do.

Most of the conversations ended with me saying: 'Fine. But I can't do that because it costs money.' Needless to say, it started to get on some nerves. On a rainy day, in the middle of nowhere, being able to spend money for entertainment is a tad handy.

In the end we drove to a nearby National Trust property (I'm a National Trust member so entry and parking for me was free) and walked around Calke Abbey's park finding geocaches. On the way we saw a pretty church and stopped there for some quick geocaching (for those of you who don't know what geocaching is: it's 'a free real-world outdoor treasure hunt!'). And then we came home. An entire day out without spending a penny. As long as you are already a member of the National Trust, pack your lunch and can tag along on someone else's road trip.


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