And the pub dog bit me.
This is a morality tale about biting off more than you can chew.

A very long time ago, before Sid and Jolene seduced each other in the shower, and when Cif was Jif, I was packed off to university to study for a degree in music which mysteriously (to my parents) took five years instead of the four they expected. But it began with the traditional "Freshers' Concert" where all the shiny new first years were expected to play their party-pieces. Though I had been a church organist for a few years before going up to university, choral conducting experience was not mine. But when the tutor asked the first-years, "who has been a conductor?" and no-one responded, my hand timidly went up.

I was poo. They threw motets and madrigals at me with time-signature changes throughout (mostly to accommodate hemiolas q.v.), and even some Gesualdo, and I carved like a man trying to sculpt wet candy floss. And so the concert came and went.

Afterwards, the traditional visit to The Ram, a cider house, took place. The Ram served cider, and cider only, and was way out in the countryside, reachable only by rail and a long sobering walk. But the final-year students felt it their adult duty to introduce the freshers to real drinking, so I sat down in the garden in a chilly autumn evening, with my regulation pint of Bulmer's medium-dry.

Three more pint glasses were plonked onto the table in front of me, by final year students. The reckoning was approaching.

"In honour of you conducting the freshers' choir, we offer you these gifts for your immediate consumption!" The more boorish students, including first-years, were by now chanting, "In One! In One!" and a church organist isn't unused to drinking with his thirsty bellringers, so I obliged.

These glasses did not contain medium-dry cider. They carried a half-pint of "Bulmer's No. 7" (long since discontinued) topped-up with a half of Special Reserve and probably some spirits too. These, they called "hand grenades" (and are still remembered on a Romany discussion forum run by the BBC!)

I did not know this. I pleasured myself and my fellow students, but then the hand grenades started to come to the end of their fuses. After giving a speech from which photographs were posted, one by one, upon the music department noticeboard by a man who now runs the very best audio gear maintenance business in the country, I fell over. The shite conductor of the Freshers' Choir was now about to pass shite himself, it felt. My last memory is of vomiting so fulsomely that the brook running through the garden of this pub was changing colour, and I wanted to laugh at the funny gurgling noises. Then the pub dog bit me.

I remember nothing now. Apparently, one of the students (who now runs the very best classical recording business in the country) brought a white Escort van, and ran me back to campus. A bunch of students dragged me upstairs feet first, and I was relieved of my clothing before they caught my bed for long enough to put me in it.

At 2.30pm the next day, I awoke to a knock on the door. The conductor had paid his price, and my first visitor was a final-year student who is now chairman of a Very Important Industry Association, arriving to see if I was ok. He'd already apologised to my tutor in advance, apparently! I was taken to the bathroom where my clothes lay in water whose colour resembled the brook in the pub garden.

A diner does not have to farm cattle for beef to know a good steak from a bad one. And a singer does not need to be a conductor to know when a lunatic first-year student is overstretching himself!

Length? About 64 bars plus The Ram.
(Sky Channel 760, Fri 9 Jul 2010, 12:58, 2 replies)

*click*
For liking cider, since i puked on the stuff as a wee nipper I didn't try it for years and just got back into it this summer....Great stuff!
(bROKEN aRROW PUA HVI Master, Fri 9 Jul 2010, 13:03, closed)

The Ram
Great pub, long gone now. Used to regularly drink there in college days. Truly dangerous ciders. Worst hangovers of my life!
( alwayslostinsmoke fulfilling dreams since, Fri 9 Jul 2010, 15:28, closed)