Fragment of Autobiography

The house I lived in when I was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, was built without a foundation and on wet winter days like today entry would require a complicated series of leaps across the large puddle that collected in the doorway, sometimes with the aid of a sandwich board someone had helpfully placed there. One of my student acquaintances was only too happy to negotiate this obstacle in search of a safe place to skin up, a habit I began to find increasingly annoying after another acquaintance was ejected from rooms for possession of a trivial amount of weed. To compound my displeasure, this person borrowed a pair of my boots and refused to give them back. Allow me at this point to sidetrack into a tale of John (non-Hollywood-actor) Wain, who when living in Reading University found it an inconvenience to walk down the corridor to the bathroom and fell into the disgusting habit of pissing in bottles. Hosting a party one evening, he poured someone a glass of wine, pondered it quizzically, and said ‘That looks like piss’, tasted it and confirmed, ‘It is piss!’ As you will already have guessed, this tale tops that one in one crucial regard. Reader, I too was a disgusting young man and have been known on (an obviously one-off, never to be repeated) occasion to take a leak in a handy empty bottle. Anyway, this person, who never did return my boots, attended a party in my room, attempted to slug a drink from a bottle, which contained a healthy pouring of feculence, otherwise piss, a fact I didn’t break to him then but which, twenty years after he took my goddamn boots, I hereby make public, and take that, you boot-filching blackguard, you drank my piss!