Back when I was a student at Cambridge ...
... I had the unfortunate experience of getting involved with rowing. Now Cambridge exists as a bunch of fairly separate colleges, each with its own facilities and there is quite a rivalry between them. In the boat clubs, this becomes hatred verging on petty tribal warfare. This is not helped by a series of races twice a year where boats line up along the river and the objective is to ram the boat in front of you.

The stretch of river that the boat clubs use is a pretty desolate fenland affair, punctuated only by a couple of road bridges and a railway bridge. It became traditional for these bridges to be painted with college colours and slogans and during the afore-mentioned races, they would be changing colour most nights.

One of the wittier pieces of graffiti was when a college whose colour is red painted "RED ALERT" in 6 foot letters across the A14 road bridge, only for some other college to come along a couple of nights later to change it to "INBRED ALERT". That lasted about a year and half due to a police crackdown that happened soon after. I think the police were less worried about the graffiti than about the danger to students of using improvised abseiling gear to hang of the sides of bridges in the middle of the night while pissed.

A couple of years before my time, some geniuses from my college (whose colour was magenta) decided to attempt the ambitious project of writing "The winged magenta messenger of death". Unfortunately, this turned out to be too ambitious and the fuzz turned up just as they had completed "The winged magenta messessenger", so the only thing they managed to achieve was a night in the cells and making our college look illiterate.
(Mr T, Fri 8 Oct 2010, 9:50, 6 replies)

Ah, the bumps.
The grandmother of one of my school friends owned one of the big converted barns out on the fens, the garden went down to the river so we used to go there to watch them. My brother got one oar, his wife got two!
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Fri 8 Oct 2010, 12:13, closed)

they're called blades
actually actually
(jennymnemonic, Fri 8 Oct 2010, 12:34, closed)

Meh, whatever
actually actually actually
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Mon 11 Oct 2010, 12:08, closed)

Currently
It's green, Queens' painted it after Fairbairns last year. It was blue and yellow for a time, with FaT painting on ''Back where we belong'' when they regained the Mays headship.

Until some wag added ''At the'' in front of the slogan!
(Le Misanthrope last procrastinated on, Sat 9 Oct 2010, 0:12, closed)

which magenta college? Please say catz.
(shanterbabs, Sun 10 Oct 2010, 21:58, closed)

No, Downing

(Mr T, Mon 11 Oct 2010, 15:31, closed)