Brew Rooms: A Portal to the Bowels of Hell?

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Spoonbill
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Brew Rooms: A Portal to the Bowels of Hell?

Post by Spoonbill »

So just why did we all get excited about having the freedom to make burnt toast, pour scalding milk over each other and cremate Vesta Chow Mein on a Sunday evening (fighting tooth and nail over 3 lousy gas rings)? We must've been off our heads.

The dining hall food was way better on a Sunday evening than any old rubbish we boys used to incinerate in the Brew Room, yet most of us persisted with the food-burning till Grecians before throwing in the towel and returning to Sunday Tea.

And I'll never forget that awful fishy stink of damp, rotting cleaning-cloths lurking by the sink taps.

They shouldn't never of placed the temptation in our way.

(Anyone remember stealthily stealing bread from the bread bins of other houses? People could get unpleasantly territorial about it. Thumping was not unknown.)
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Great Plum
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Post by Great Plum »

Brew rooms - oh how I remember the delights of the Maine A brew room!
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FrogBoxed
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Post by FrogBoxed »

Boringly, the girls' houses just had "kitchens" which were generally cleaner than the boys' brew rooms, though they still had their fair share of stinking dishcloths, off milk, toast crumbs, and cooked pasta peeling off the ceilings/walls.
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Great Plum
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Post by Great Plum »

Did you have any tebags on the ceiling?
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Richard Ruck
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Post by Richard Ruck »

Great Plum wrote:Did you have any tebags on the ceiling?
We used to have teabags on the ceiling. Nearly the same thing, I suppose!

Spoony's right, though! These places were horrific in every respect.

There always seemed to be half a mug of milk quietly going off in a corner somewhere as well.
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Great Plum
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Post by Great Plum »

Ok, I meant teabags! :roll: :lol:
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Post by FrogBoxed »

Teabag stains: yes. Teabags: no. Our stalwart cleaner, Mary, would remove them with a long wooden pole. We did have a wonderful mural of a jungle complete with various animals and insects—anyone know if that's still there?
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Post by graham »

It was always butter on the ceiling in Thorn A. Butter on the floor was also useful for a bored UF who had been instructed to deliver toast to demanding Grecians.
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Post by Laura M »

Barnes A kitchen was by far the worst girls house kitchen, I remember having wars with my housemisstress about how unfair it was to just have it as a weekly duty when clearly it was a punnishment to clean!!

And yes as far as I still know the Col.B murial is still there!!
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Post by Bingo the Poop-Eating Dog »

graham wrote:It was always butter on the ceiling in Thorn A. Butter on the floor was also useful for a bored UF who had been instructed to deliver toast to demanding Grecians.
Yeah....The pleasures of slipping on a buttered floor whilst carrying a pan of boiling milk and cracking one's skull. Absolutely unmissable.

And then there were the lockers swarming with silverfish.....and the house fridge which was totally b*ggered, so you ended up spreading rancid margarine on your toast and then spending Double Ron Lorimer feeling like vomiting (not that we didn't feel like vomiting anyway during Double Ron Lorimer).

And then there was trying to cook food in saucepans with dodgy handles (endless opportunities for self-mutilation and maiming). Mind you, this was well before Health & Safety legislation was invented by some dreary killjoy....

(I was in a department store last year and saw 'retro' toasters for sale which were the dead spit of those knackered old yellow-and-silver monstrosities we used to stick our knives, fingers, tongues etc. into. I'd rather hoped they'd been airbrushed out of history like the tawse - but no.)
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Post by cj »

Bingo the Poop-Eating Dog wrote:And then there were the lockers swarming with silverfish.....and the house fridge which was totally b*ggered, so you ended up spreading rancid margarine on your toast ... And then there was trying to cook food in saucepans with dodgy handles (endless opportunities for self-mutilation and maiming). Mind you, this was well before Health & Safety legislation was invented by some dreary killjoy....
Good preparation for living in student digs!! Health and Safety is for wimps. Silverfish were the only friends some people had. And I've never seen them anywhere else apart from the lockers at school. Were they bred especially for us to make friends with?
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Post by DavebytheSea »

ooh! I've got some here - and bugs that eat the carpet.
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Post by Laura M »

Silverfish pah! It was all about the rodent infestation we experienced, you know you've hit new levels of unhygenic when the mice move in!
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Post by loringa »

graham wrote:It was always butter on the ceiling in Thorn A. Butter on the floor was also useful for a bored UF who had been instructed to deliver toast to demanding Grecians.
Why on earth would a UF, bored or otherwise, wish to make toast for a Grecian. Surely there's not been a return to fagging?
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Post by Richard Ruck »

loringa wrote: Why on earth would a UF, bored or otherwise, wish to make toast for a Grecian. Surely there's not been a return to fagging?
A very good point.

According to one of my reliable sources, this sort of behaviour did indeed make a comeback, but went by the name of 'bockering'.

I can imagine that after the abolition of the Junior / Senior houses it would have been much easier for idle Grecians to 'persuade' some overawed 11 or 12 year old kid to brave the brew room on their behalf, but it does seem a bit odd that someone on the UF would go along with it.

Even when senior houses existed, and the UF types were on the bottom rung of the ladder in those houses, I don't recall this sort of thing going on.

The '70s must have been reasonably civilised after all, I suppose!
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