So this shared experience that gives way to an incredibly strong friendship is unique to every university hall and group of people within it. Now my university hall wasn't really a hall at all. It was a little housing estate made up of budget (almost flat-pack) 6-bed houses. My bond with my housemates was stronger than most because instead of spreading myself liberally over about 200 people, there were four other girls I spent most of my time with - principally two.
Maybe it's chance who gets allocated what house, maybe there's a bit of 'let's try and match these people' - I don't know, but whether by accident or the university's design, I got placed with a girl who happened to have the same birthday as me.
This meant we always made a big deal of our birthdays. In our second year (because we all decided to stay together in our wee house) we'd have a big event in September for one clutch of birthdays and in March for our brithdays. We'd see it as a challenge to come up with creative and interesting presents so much so that for our 20th birthday, after my housemate signed up to a kind of army-training programme, I decided that she could save on gym membership if she had her own store of keep-fit items. That and our other housemate could practice for Total Wipeout with them.
So one Saturday morning I took delivery of a trampette and added them to my collection of a gym ball, a twisty thing, a hula hoop and probably something else that 'seemed like a good idea at the time'. Anyway, the day came and we presented our housemate with her gifts and took the trampette outside for a test run.
Once we had set it up we realised that it had a picture of a formidably muscly woman named Marcey stamped across the middle and so we set about bouncing so that we too could look slightly peculiar and overly muscly like the picture suggested.
Therefore, I can now show you the next picture in the series:
On Marcey
My 20th birthday, March 2009
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