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

Whilst wholeheartedly annoyed that my favourite moan (other than just quite how unfriendly the staff in the dratted University Library are) is already part of the guide, I am astonished that the entry makes no reference to an even more insiduous breed of vagrants who loiter here in the summer months.

Foreign language students, particularly once precariously perched upon a peddle cycle, must be the most horrific torture visited upon town and gown alike. Wobbling on a hire cycle that they have somehow retuned within a week through their ignorance of bicycle maintenance to shreik and shudder to the very great alarm of all and sundry, they cycle three abreast so that the roads are rendered even more dangerous than the efforts of the council have alredy made them. At least the tourists have the decency to remain in the very centre of town, language students get billeted near graduate accomodation and hold up the queue in the co-op buying one onion and one aubergine and one red pepper and two potatoes. And speaking in Spanish the entire time to their Spanish friends. Surely there's no need for them at all?

Yes, you're right, I overlooked the language students. Though the ones I encounter seem to prefer the pavement to the road. Since I came back to work in Cambridge after a 10 month break I've lost count of the number of times I've nearly been mown down by them. Oblonomaculatus (now on H2G2 as Oblongomacultus for reasons too complicated to describe here.)

And we are beginning to head yet again towards the crowds of stupid tourist season Living pretty central in Cambridge it really* is a pain... Plus of course, some of them crowd into the pubs, and shout loudly at each other, disturbing my drinking Made me laugh a few years ago, when an tourist was on this road, and took a picture of the buildings, of which my house is one, and I heard them comment 'its so old' I didn't like to point out that these were built in teh 1960's, and that if he walked the other way a bit he'd find some stuff a few hundred years older