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Your boyfriend's wild university years: What he claims vs reality

HAS your boyfriend pathetically tried to impress you with tales about his crazy years at uni? Here’s how his claims match up with what actually happened.

Claim: ‘The best thing about going to uni was the freedom – I could stay out all night, bring girls back and have wild parties in my room which always got massively out of hand.’

Reality: Was hideously homesick and cried for his mum every night through Freshers’ Week when everyone else was out partying. Went home nearly every weekend with his washing.

Claim: ‘I was out on the lash every single night: lager, cider, gin, tequila slammers – loads of those. It’s a wonder I had a liver left by the time I graduated!’

Reality: Regularly passed out after four pints, generally after first throwing up all over someone. Housemates bundled him into a taxi back to the digs initially, then got pissed off with having to constantly babysit him and took to leaving him comatose in a club toilet cubicle.

Claim: ‘Drugs? I tried everything – weed, coke, speed, poppers. I was like some rock star in the 60s snorting coke off groupies’ tits.’

Reality: Smoked a spliff in his first year, turned green and remained silent all evening in a black pit of paranoia. Spent the rest of the week equally paranoid the police would somehow find out and send him to prison. Never touched anything else.

Claim: ‘I honestly can’t even remember how many girls I shagged. Let’s just say I made professional footballers look like the bloody Pope.’

Reality: Got off with the Goth girl everyone avoided because she was really weird. Spent the next three months in a strange relationship where he frequently pretended not to know her. That was it.

Claim: ‘I barely did any work at all, I was too busy partying. God only knows how I came out of it with my 2:1 in Psychology.’

Reality: Constantly up studying until 3am while all his housemates were out clubbing. Still a mystery how he got a 2:1 because, even though psychology is a piss-easy degree, he’s actually pretty thick and peaked educationally when he squeezed in with a C and two Ds at A-level.

The six most annoying conversations to overhear

ARE you stuck on a train, in a queue or a crowded cafe being subjected to the most tiresome conversational topics known to man? They might be one of these.

Film plots

Even the plot to Reservoir Dogs sounds like a snoozefest when recounted badly enough. Extra annoyance points if they keep doubling back to correct facts about a film that don’t really matter: ‘No wait, was it a helicopter? Or was it a plane…?’ The icing on the cake is if they thoroughly discuss spoilers for a film you were definitely planning to see. 

Children

When will people understand that things their children do and say are of zero interest to anyone besides the parents (and even then, it’s not a given)? Topics of particular, ear-bleeding dullness include: what/when/where/how many times the child pissed/shat/ate/woke up, and anything to do with homework or phlegm.

Dreams

Dreams – the nocturnal farts of somebody else’s subconscious. At least real-life stories have the compulsion of actually having occurred. Listening to some par-for-the-course dream about being stuck in their ex’s flat with Huw Edwards trying inflate balloons is too much to bear. 

Recipes 

Not a mouth-watering list of ingredients – that could be interesting – but laboured descriptions of tedium like making sourdough: different amounts of starter they’ve tried adding, various proving times, etc. Or they might be making something very simple exactly as you’d expect, eg. a pizza base topped with ham, mushroom and mozzarella.

Happiness

An idiot opining on the meaning of life makes you want to end it all by ramming a wooden coffee-stirrer down an ear canal and into your brain. Especially when they spout platitudes as if they’d thought of them themselves: ‘I often think that everything happens for a reason…’ Presumably then you’re listening to this trite shit because you did something bad in a past life, like torturing people in the Spanish Inquisition. Which, coincidentally, you’d quite like to do now.

Traffic

You’d think people could lay off boring traffic talk when they’re not in a car. It’s particularly cruel when you’re on a speeding train and you get stuck with a stranger’s blow-by-blow account of her nightmare drive to work. If you wanted the full experience you’d sit in the f**king car with her. Before hurling yourself into the road.

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