The anti-Buddhist Miles Monroe night

When I arrived at college to study Film & Drama in 1990 at Reading, I was a teetotal, drug-free, non-smoking, quasi-Buddhist Woody Allen fan, among other things. I’d drunk Special Brew and smoked fags for a short while when I was sixteen, but they never really appealed. I quickly got into hardcore (among other things), and while I found the full-on straight edge scene a bit fundamentalist, I liked the mixture of violently energetic music and ethical living, often tinged with Eastern religious philosophies.

The first term at Reading was mostly excruciating. The girl in Cambridge I tried to keep a relationship up with, I knew she was cold; I didn’t really know I was too, so I broke from her into a frantic emptiness and lack of direction. I didn’t click with anyone on the small, isolated, intensive course I was on. The campus was a dump. Of course everyone else in my position—or just everyone else, it seemed—was in the bar getting sozzled on cheap cider. I sat in my room a lot, and went a bit mad.

I’m not sure why the end-of-term Christmas disco inspired me to go for it with a good costume—maybe a last-ditch attempt at fitting in. Of course the theme was "The Movies". One lecturer did a pretty good Rev. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter). A Scottish guy had a great idea, and came in a suit with an oxygen mask hanging out his pocket: Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. I went for Woody Allen’s Miles Monroe from Sleeper, the hapless cryogenic time-traveller, disguised as a domestic robot.

That night, I said goodbye to the outdated (for me) traces of straight edge and Buddhism. I smoked and drank a bit. I didn’t get completely off my face (that was ‘91-’93). I just dropped the restrictions, made some friends, and enjoyed myself.

I got big laughs at the end when the lights came on and the clearing up started, simply by grabbing a broom and helping sweep the floor. It really was a cracking costume.