Stripping Stories

Girls in a maze I don’t know if universities still have Rag Weeks like they used to in my day, and indeed for my American readers I don’t know if you have such things over there at all, or perhaps they go by a different name, but back in the 70’s they were a big thing.  For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, this was a week in which students at the Uni did crazy things to raise money for charity.  I was 18 years old and in my first year as a student of botany, horticulture and landscape gardening.  A strange subject you may think for a modern girl, but things were changing back then and the ‘new’ universities were introducing degrees in all sorts of new things.  I had always been keen on botany and it seemed like a good course. We had only been there a few months in our first year when Jack, a boy from the year above, came in to our lecture theatre with an announcement.  Rag Week was coming up he said, and it was tradition that the firs...

Chocolat by Joris Sprout On a hot summer day in 1892, one of those days when the canicule strikes Paris like the blast of the depths of Hades, Gabriel des Esseintes made his way slowly along the Boulevard St Germain, his jewel encrusted tortoise at his heels, seeking, as was his wont, those pleasures, which to him were like the nectar of the Gods, but which were to others of such a nature that had his purpose been known, he might have found himself entrusted to the care the guardians of the law which in that day patrolled the streets of the great city in their never ending quest to quell the causes of social disorder among the heaving masses. Seating himself in Les Deux Magots by the parvis of the ancient church he looked across at the Café de Flore where two jeunes filles en fleurs sipped coffee in the shade of the great hornbeams which cast their sombre shades over the convives who gathered at that early morning to watch, in the way of all French people, the world as it pass...