Midsummer

So last weekend a terrorism-obsessed Zebedi (obviously this isn't his real name, but having found it amusing to change the names of my friends in my last post I thought I'd try it in this one too) came to visit for the weekend. Why Zebedi finds terrorism so fascinating I can't fathom, but it has led him to study for a master's degree in the subject and next year will be embarking on a Phd in the same in our very own venerable institution. Somehow he manages to bring the subject of any conversation round to the subject of terrorism, which you would think might kill the atmosphere somewhat, and very often you would be right.

Last night I joined him and others at the postgraduate bonfire on the beach, where he was smoking shisha with Syrian friends from the International Relations department, many of whom were studying subjects as depressing as he. I had brought along a friend who studies physics and told him about how the first I had been introduced to one of Zebedi's colleagues, humpty-dumpty (yep, I can easily amuse myself with this name-changing lark) I had thought he had told me that he was studying tourism. To be precise I seem to recall that I heard him tell me that he was studying how people became radicalised into tourism in Syria. You can imagine that I wondered firstly about what it meant to be radicalised into tourism, and secondly what would possess tourists to visit Syria these days. When I related this story to Zebedi he told me that there was such a thing as "jihadi tourism", by which people went to went, had a holiday and went home again. I marvelled at his gift of word association.

It was at this point that the police arrived and asked what our group was smoking. The owner of the shisha pipes (I presume they have another name, but hey, I'm not going to look it up) told them - I presume truthfully - that it was flavoured tobacco, and invited the police to try for themselves. They of course declined. The spoilsports. This rather reminded me of the time when, at around the age of seventeen I was returning home from midnight ten-pin bowling. For some reason at the weekends, with friends I had taken the habit of going bowling in Basildon from midnight. Quite why we chose this hour I forget. I presume for no other reason that it was cheap. Our car was stopped by the police around the local shopping centre after 2am. I think they may have been looking for drugs. Quite why they thought that we might have drugs with us I am not sure, because they couldn't possibly have spotted us calling at the petrol station to buy nothing other than biscuits. Anyway, the policeman asks us all to get out of the car, checks in the bowling balls, and then sees what looks like a gun in the side of the car door on the drivers side. My friend hastily tells him that is is cigarette lighter (it was). "How does it work?" the policeman asks him, to which the reply obviously was "you pull the trigger". I forget which of them demonstrated that it was indeed a cigarette lighter. Sometimes friends can have pretty idiotic cigarette lighters.