Colombus combined Blood & Fire redemptionist evangelism with an insatiable hunger for electrical goods & miscellaneous consumer ephemera. His room was a cross between a Scripture Union bookshop & a sub-branch of Comet. For one term at Walton Street, he was next door to me. I endured the racket of, in turn, his efforts to master the Yamaha electronic keyboard & his hectoring attempts to “convert” fellow students to the paths of righteousness. Once, he took it upon himself to tell Halima Mohammed that it was her job to cook sausages for him, her being female & all. My life, what a commotion that caused. As it would. I thought she was going to wrap the frying pan round his bony cranium. And all this while I was trying to do my reading.
You'd think he'd have got the message in the first year, when he got torn off a strip by some female comrade who he'd tried to persuade to do his laundry. But this bloke was nothing if not stubborn.
The pamphlets stored in his room were distributed by an outfit called “The Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge”; lovely people full of pure Christian mercy. The general tone of these tracts was: “The LORD will TEAR out your Entrails with a Windlass, SEW Your eyelids shut with Rusty Barbed Wire & CAST You into The Lake of Eternal Fire, because HE Is A LOVING GOD”. What is it about evangelists & Capital Letters, eh? When you think about it, the transatlantic tub-thumpers Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart et al even talk like that. It’s as if their voices are stuck on “Caps Lock”.
Colombus had the loudest voice of anyone I’ve ever met, and that includes the Navy's drill instructors. Once, he was sitting behind me during a car journey and bellowing into my ear when normal conversational tones would have been quite sufficient. “Can you speak up a bit, Colombus?”, said I in jest, “I can’t hear you”. Bad move: I’d forgotten that Colombus didn’t do irony and he just doubled his output, causing ear damage which I’m sure affects me to this day.
As you can imagine, then, our corridor was not exactly like the headquarters of the Noise Abatement Society. To compound the problem: across from me was Alf “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” Roder, who was learning German & had audio tapes to assist in revision. His hearing aid was frequently on the blink, so the volume on his tape player was jacked to maximum. Being in the hallway was like having a front-row seat at the Nuremburg rallies.
Living in that environment was so incompatible with study that I had to seek auditory asylum in Kitson block. At that distance, the din was just a dull roar.
Forgive me: I digress. Colombus was an extremely fast & capable table tennis player, and could easily beat pretty much anyone in the college (with the exception, perhaps, of Big Bill the chip-scoffing, chain-smoking athlete). Once, he was playing against me. I should add that my standard of play was abysmal. So, Colombus didn’t concern himself with paying attention to the game. He was carrying on a conversation with someone, only occasionally glancing at the table: he didn’t even bother trying. What happened then was a case of “The Tortoise & the Hare”. The plodding tortoise caught up with the inattentive hare & beat him by one point.
He went incandescent with rage: I thought that he would implode in a flash of concentrated fury. “You cannot have won! You cannot beat me!” he raged. “Play again!” he said. I took my leave at this point, observing that I had studying to do & couldn’t spare any more time thrashing him at games. I consider myself fortunate that God restrained him from burying his bat in the back of my head.
He has, I understand, gone on to make an ecclesiastical career for himself as a bishop of some sort. Will we see him at Burford? If so, perhaps we may persuade him to throw off the shackles of teetotal abstinence & have a pint for old-times’ sake! It is at such events that the righteous should ask themselves; "what would Jesus drink?".
The Gog
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