23 tonight, is there any chance you could help us out?" "Ah, see we used to do that," said the woman behind the desk. Ooh, we thought, this looks good. "But we don't do it anymore." What? How do you 'stop' doing something like this? What makes you decide to 'stop' being generous and charitable? Some sort of twisted New Years Resolution? "So I'm afraid you'll have to pay if you want to go to Dover." It wasn't too bad, it was only £12 each so we didn't eat into our beer-festivaltakings too much. But still, it would have been far nicer of them to let us go on the (practically empty) coach for free. It was a long and tedious journey, during which the most interesting occurrence was not visiting the University of Kent. When we reached Dover it was already dark. We only had 3 hours left of Jailbreak and decided that if we could simply get out of the country it would be decently satisfactory. However, hitching onto a ferry was made decidedly more difficult by the complete absence of cars. The place was deserted. So again we resigned to having to pay to get on (only £9 each, though) in order to secure ourselves a visit to France for the evening. We arrived there at 8:05pm, got off the ferry, showed our passports, took a photo of ourselves looking unenthusiastic under a map of Calais, got a French newspaper from an equally French security guard, checked back in again, got on the same ferry at 8:20 and headed back to Dover. Pfft. Tourists. That challenge wasn’t over, though. We may have got to Calais in the time limit, but there was still the teensy little problem of getting back to Cambridge. We didn’t want to spend any money, so we decided to try and hitch our way back, even though it was now 9pm and that decision would inevitably lead to our spending the night by the roadside somewhere, waiting feebly for lifts that would almost certainly never come. But hey, we were living on a budget here. We started asking round on the ferry to see if anyone was heading our way, and if they were willing to give two bedraggled Cambridge students a lift at all. The first people we asked said they were going to Biggleswade, and that yes they would give us a lift. Excellent. We had struck Bedfordshire. We arrived at the 24-hour service station at about half past midnight. We were
…George W. Bush is the only president to not have had anything of his printed when he was sworn into office…Winston Churchill claimed to have seen Lincoln’s ghost…