The Crow, The Collapse, and the Cleaning Man

     I have quite a few friends in my German classes. We drink beer together and find German people to steal and cook Schnitzel for us and sometimes all dress up in German clothes to visit pubs on weekday nights. English literature, however, is an entirely different story. I have a few friends from English who I am very proud of, but our friendship was built upon other things, like Berlin, or drinking tea together at work, or...actually, no, just two.

     Anyway, at risk of digression, one of said English Lit friends turned to me today, and proclaimed, 'Hilary, you are the only person I know who manages to get herself in so many socially awkward situations quite so often'. I took this as a compliment, but it could have been her bidding me adieu in order to find cooler English Lit friends.

A poem, by my mum, October 2014

     The tale of the cleaning man comes after a particularly long weekend involving muffins, wine and very little movement. Safely in the swanky new toilets of our swanky new department building, I was inspecting my new-found stomach in the swanky new full-length mirrors. I admit, I might have even poked aforementioned flab. In comes cleaning man, to be greeted by a lot of skin and a lot of bra. We both laughed it off. 

     The crow was a little less entertained by my new gain of weight. The crow tried to carry me away. I was walking home from a 10 o'clock lecture, having a great time and envisioning tea and biscuits and the Made in Chelsea catchup on 4od. Then, there was a crow on my head. It was heavy and had grabby claws. I shrieked and shrieked and shrieked, and all the people in the meadows turned round to see me, the girl, flapping around, with a crow having the time of its life in my hair. 

     The collapse should be taken very seriously. I fell up the library stairs. Now, the library is not a place to stop and be embarrassed and look around at your audience, all the while laughing nervously at the accidental fall. No. The library is a place of no eye contact. The library is a place of silence, even if you might be dying. So up I hopped, sprinting up the rest of the stairs to safety. It soon transpired that I was not in the right shape for sprinting, as the world began to get darker and fuzzier, and the pain in my knee was far greater than that time I forgot to get off a t-bar ski lift and ended up ploughing into a snow-covered rock. I found a nearby table (a tall awkward one, like you get in costa or airports), and lay on it. It was there that two girls found me, shaking me and asking if I needed assistance. 'Because we're medical students', one said proudly. 'Well, medical sciences', said the other. (Even I could work out in my near-death state that this meant they were not actually doctors.) 'I'M FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE' I moaned, throwing myself further across the awkward too-tall table.They wheeled an office chair across from the other side of the floor, which I flopped into, and they left.

     All these stories are much better told in person with hand gestures and real life screams, but they are also told in a shorter form on my twitter.