From: jeremy@castle.ed.ac.uk (Jeremy Henderson)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Freshers
Date: 8 Oct 92 13:18:20 GMT
Organization: Edinburgh University

OK, I said that this subject didn't need expanding on, but it seems
I was wrong. I have just been dining at Joanne's Snack Bar, as is my
wont. For further information about this place of gustatory delight,
please refer to my posting yesterday. For more information about 
Snack Bars in general on the King's Buildings campus, refer to the 
works of Crawford _et al_ (et !al). For more information about brain-
dead losers, read on....

There are probably places where one can sit for a relaxing cup of coffee
and a tasty morsel of _patisserie_, and where newspapers are provide for
the patrons to peruse. I associate such places with tales of Viennese
cafe society. I have spent several days in Vienna and didn't see much apart
from a lot of traffic jams and some rather poorly displayed paintings by
Klimt and an interesting exhibition of Schiele's work. But I digress.
The main point is that the KB Snack Bars are patently *not* such places,
any more than they are places where one might expect to see displays of
work by Austrian painters, listen to performances of Mahler's _lieder_,
or in fact do anything much apart from ingest some putrifying sandwich.

Which brings me, in a rather roundabout way, to the topic of my peeve.
I am in the habit of purchasing a newspaper to read over lunch, as a 
way of diverting my attention from the unpleasant material about to enter
my oral orifice. From time to time I set the periodical aside and enter
a brief period of reverie during which I contemplate the finer points of
life, like what exactly Tony meant when he said that Anna was wearing a 
spray-on top on Monday's episode of Brookside. During such a period of
beatific contemplation, my mental perambulations were interrupted by a 
youthful person grasping my newspaper from the table and saying 
"Yefinshdwithae?", which I will translate from the Scottish as "I wonder
if I might make so bold as to inquire whether you have competed your
examination of this worthy publication?". In fact the question was somewhat
rhetorical, because before I had time to descend from my celestial plane
of intellectual activity, the scoundrel had grabbed my paper and was
buggering off with it. "Oi", I yelled, "what are you doing?". "Having a read
of the paper" responded the ruffian. I then was obliged to explain at length
that the paper, having been purchased from a nearby vendor of such daily
periodicals, was my personal property, and that I therefore did not take
kindly to having it swiped by some snot-nosed computer science student.
I flavored my explanation with a number of hypothetical circumstances, which
I hoped would elucidate the principle involved. The youth skulked off.

I am not, as I have noted, a Holmesesque libertarian (and I draw the attention
of Mr. A. J. Hippy to a distinction in meaning between words employing the
suffix -esque as opposed to -ian) but I do think that even a fresher
could have grasped the notion that things which are lying on a table are
not necessarily provided for communal use, and that if this principle were
extended to, say, wallets, chaos would rapidly ensue. If you see what I mean.

IncidentalBrooksidePeeve: That jumped-up little gob-shite Peter Harrison looks
as though he might be on the verge of getting his greasy little end away
with Anna, who I had previously believed to be keeping herself pure for me.

ExtraPeeve: Getting confused between my life and a soap opera.

AnInside!Peeve: Anna has not got married to my flat-mate.

-- 
===Jeremy Henderson===jeremy@castle.ed.ac.uk=          Vommen
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