Alex Zane on Student Life: "Gosh! This is going to be terrible. All my stories are going to be about masturbation!"

Some people are too cool for school. Two-time drop out Alex Zane tells us how to befriend Welsh weirdos, give back-chat to lecturers and generally laugh in the face of higher education.


ON UNI HALLS:"Honesty exists on a multitude of levels"

Jethro, Alex’s welsh friend from Max Rayne Hall at UCL back in 1998 created a big bang. “He used to throw things out the window that shouldn’t be thrown out of windows. We had a lovely garden gnome in the kitchen that was thrown out the window. Someone had a beautiful pot plant that they’d been growing for years – Jethro threw that.” His needs to launch gardening accessories out the sixth floor window stemmed from his deep-rooted rage issues following a traumatic freshers experience that would confuse even Freud: “We were all playing a game where you tell stories in which we felt we created a very safe zone in which honesty was the policy . Sadly many of us were aware that dealing in the currency of honesty only leads to trouble so you always deal in a certain kind of lower honesty- a degree of honesty but not honesty in its purest form and Jethro, however, was new to the idea of honesty existing on a multitude of levels and consequently told us a story about how he personally chose to masturbate on his side while laying out a toilet roll in front of him to catch material exiting his body, the matter if you will, and we called it the Jethro Sidewank.” Don’t worry. We can assure you that Jethro hasn’t been smuggled into a Welsh mental hospital; Alex Zane still facebooks him.


ON MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES: "The nice man in Camden was in fact a drug dealer who made the girls cry."

Jethro wasn’t the only one to be lulled into a false sense of security and then regret a freshers transgression. “The thing is we were all so green and you think you’ve got life experience as a fresher. I walked in with this kind of cocky arrogance: ‘seen it all, done it all nothing shocks me, I’m a world weary traveller!’” Alex recalls in true freshers spirit chatting to a random stranger in a “well dancy” club in Camden, taking him back home to flat full of friends only to discover that the nice man in Camden was in fact a drug dealer who made the girls cry.


ON SEX: "must be done in groups..."

Alex is quick to remind us that if you are going to do something bad, it is best to do it in a group. “Thanks to the unfortunate horseshoe shape of Max Rayne (a UCL uni hall), fifteen of us watched a girl’s Italian boyfriend… masturbate into the sink in [her] room through a window. He kept bringing himself to the climax and then stopping for about 30 seconds and doing the whole things again. I was intrigued! Granted, if I had been alone granted with condensation forming on the glass with every breath I took that would have been weird but there was a group of people so there was that kind of acceptable comaradery.”


ON MAKING FRIENDS: "We have nothing but the fact we live together in common."

We’ve all had our Jethro’s and Italian wankers, so just how do you cope with being thrust into a corridor with such weirdoes? Alex advises “It’s important to make friends with the people in your halls or at least be on talking terms because no matter how weird they are you are stuck with them for at least 7 months… You can always go ‘we have nothing but the fact we live together in common. Aren’t these tiles nice in the kitchen? Ooo the windows are slightly cleaner today.’” But remember, this is the guy who befriended a drug dealer and went home with him…


ON CLEANLINESS:"I put a mop through the kitchen wall and then moved a poster over it so noone ever knew.”

We point out that it doesn’t take a fresher version of Magnus Magnerson to smash the paper-thin walls of UCL Halls. A defensive Alex agrees, “That’s what I said to the dean of students as I was being chucked out."


ON EXTRA-CURRICULAR LIFE:"Alright lets do something a little bit proactive"

He spent most of his time starting comedy nights, student radio shows and starring in the only instalment of a UCL Film & TV soc. series imaginatively called ‘The College.’ “Freshers week for me was half getting blind drunk and sleeping with the wrong people and half actually going ‘alright lets do something a little bit proactive’ as a step towards what you might want to do in life…like going on to do Xfm.Potentially!”


ON URBANIA: plug,plug,plug...

But there is more to London than career prospects in the media and my can Alex wax-lyrical about that. “Freshers week in London is ten times the freshers week anywhere else….London is always good. Go check out some comedy. And then there is always First Friday of course- the best indie disco in London at Islington Academy courtesy of Xfm.”


So there you have it: the Freshers Gospel according to Alex Zane. The first commandment: join more societies than there is time in the day. The second: remember drug dealers are not your friends. The third: be honest but not Sidewank honest. for.

Elishka Flint and MK