h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wingpig, there is one great way to get pleasure our of being in the company of sloanes (or yahs as you call them). It's a game I made up called Sloane Bingo. You get 5 points for spotting a baseball cap, turned up collars, cricket jumper or red jeans. 10 points for a piecrust collar or string of pearls. 15 points for a flash sports car, 20 points if you get in conversation with them and they mention skiing, their acquiaintance with minor royalty or any of the top public schools. 25 points if they actually are minor royalty (and so on). This makes time pass far more pleasurably, especially in the bars, restaurants and clubs around Fulham Broadway.

Up here we have the annual Yah Hunt. Details are published in the student paper concerning the prime hunting grounds offering differing levels of difficulty. It didn't happen this year as ther are no proper people left - every voice I can hear at the moment sounds as if it went to Eton and every face looks as if it went skiiing with mummy and daddy over the easter holiday. My ex-flatmate was the son of a lord and had "The Hon. Blah blah blah" on his bank statements. Christ knows how I ended up in a flat with such a person. I still try to organise yah-baiting forays into the local bars (not pubs), where shabby clothing and genial manners are pointedly used in the face of the fashion and booming arrogance faced therein.

Well, you did choose one of the most sloaney universities in the land! My place was the same, although I did find it quite amusing. I had a couple of boyfriends at Edinburgh Uni once. They were most definitely not yahs though.

i didn't think Edinburgh would be too bad. Cantab, Oxon, Dunelm is the way it usually goes. I see my theoretical degree and hear some t**t of a department head rabbiting on about the good name of the university and realise I'm in the wrong place. If only they said in the prospectus. Three years ago it wasn't too bad but after two years out my year has replaced half the scottish people with extra yahs. Shold have gone to Glasgow. More gigs, less wankers and more vocational stuff. I don't want to spend the rest of my days growing small things in petri dishes.

Playing sloane bingo at Exeter Uni would be a pointless exercise. You'd be in triple figures before you knew it. Baseball caps and turned up collars by the bucketful.
One girl I know would be the greatest score ever (as it were). In one conversation with her, I can score 75 points or more in 5 minutes.
There are only so many times I can take being told what a jolly nice chap Prince Charles is...

There's an article somewhere in the uni website up here that I did a while back for the yah hunt listing the types of yah. Can't remember them without seeing it but the False Yah came into it somewhere - someone that goes hideously overdrawn just to keep up with the beautiful people they so envy. My flatmate's just been bailed out of some court action taken against him by his bank after he spent his entire loan not on paying off the overdraft but on £1600 worth of Fender and Trace Elliot. I thought I was in a normal flat finally. Oh well. What about Rugby shirts for Sloane Bingo? It sometimes only denotes a medical student. Although anyone wearing one is a bit weird.

I went to Exeter too. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson's sister Santa sat behind me in my Italian class. You're right, sloane bingo would have been a bit pointless down there.

Where do you drink in Exeter these days? What are the clubs like? Where do you live? I used to live in a condemned house in Old Tiverton Road. It was great.

Sorry Wingpig, that was dircted at CJ - I seem to have replied in the wrong place.

My friend Sarra once drew up a list of different types of sloane, from True Blue Sloane to Wannabe Sloane (your "false Yah") and New Money Sloane, and then Aristocracy and Minor Royalty.

Don't worry about it.

I'll try and dig out the stuff to put in the user page. Terms of reference to Yahs from around the country would be welcome. Apparently they're "Rahs" at Dunelm. I wonder if Oxford and Cambridge have a word for them? They probably only have words for the inconvenient poor people with regional accents that they occaisonally meet . I'll ask my cousin, as the fat git went there. He used to be Welsh but now sounds as if he's lived in Banbury all his life.

Oh my god!! So I'm not alone in my hatred of these b*****ds!

I spent 3 long years at the University of Durham suffering these idiots, named (as mentioned above) Rahs. Baseball caps, rugby shirts, big chins and irritating Home Counties accents were abound. These tossers tend to be the ones involved in sports (rugby & rowing), college student business (i.e. social climbing.. I think it's genetic), and they all end up working for Arthur bloody Andersen or Price Sodding Waterhouse F**king Coopers. Most of them have it emblazoned on the back of their sports club jackets anyway.

In other words, if you want to have a normal student existance (i.e. drink, music, sex, maybe some soft drugs), go to Leeds, Sheffield or somewhere normal. If, however, you're an upper-middle-class baseball-capped rugby-shirted public-school-going ski-ing-holiday idiot, go to Durham.

Grrrrr!!!!!! God, I'd forgotten how much I hated these dickheads.

You weren't doing Religion and Philosophy at St. Aidan's, were you? I know someone that did whilst a colleague of ours went to Warwick (as they failed to get into LSE) and now work as an IT consultant for PWC, earning vast stacks of cash and getting freebie cars, laptops and so forth. He was a Marillion fan that might call himself Grendel if he found that furitq was taken.

They annoy me most when you have to sit in the middle of a big group of them in a computer room. Key-thumping time.

Although I'm perfectly happy swearing it's frowned upon slightly by the PTB of this site in case there are sweet little kiddies reading whose mothers might complain. Invent new expletives (like Semprini) rather than saying f*ck and bu**er as saying 'gosh', 'darn' and 'dash it all to heck' makes people sound like they're trying to give the impression that they're too cultured to use proper profanity.

Well, I did go to St. Aidan's funnily enough, but I did Linguistics. I too am an IT bod, but horrendously underpaid. Big Marillion fan though.

Is it possible to be underpaid and in IT?
Most of my mates have just graduated with degrees in CS and AI and are mostly already earning £18K upwards within six months of graduation. All the job papers seem full of that sort of stuff.
Dick or Hogarth?

Oh yes, it's possible to be underpaid when you're in IT and not an IT graduate, believe me.. getting there though.

Dick/Hogarth: Lyrics - Dick, singing - Hogarth,