Scott and Chris had become a Freshers Week endurance act
The student tour continued.
After the previous show, Scott and Chris visited the University of Liverpool and worked with student radio.
The following morning they appeared at the University of Manchester for a session about getting into radio, presenting and how Radio 1 tried to make celebrity guests sound like ordinary people.
Scott was surprised by how many people attended.
Chris thought some students might simply have discovered a warm room after another night out.
Thursday morning had traditionally been one of the hardest moments of university sports weeks and freshers schedules.
The exhausted people wandering around Manchester appeared to support that theory.
Why do restaurants discontinue the only thing you order?
The first complaint concerned favourite foods which simply disappeared.
One listener was devastated that a pizza chain had stopped offering the Double Decadence crust.
Another missed the Meltdown.
Producer Mark had never recovered from a supermarket discontinuing a chicken tikka lasagne he loved.
Chris remembered occasions when fast-food chains removed a sauce or side which had become part of his regular order.
Scott thought the problem was disproportionately upsetting.
If somebody always ordered exactly the same thing, the item disappearing did not feel like a menu refresh.
It felt like the restaurant had personally cancelled their routine.
Chloe reached rock bottom with couscous and eggs
The conversation then moved to bad student food.
Chloe remembered being deep into her dissertation with almost nothing left in the house.
Her available ingredients were eggs and couscous.
She combined them.
The result was the couscous omelette.
Scott and Chris immediately understood why she described the period as rock bottom.
It was dry, strange and apparently preferable only to the alternative she had considered: mixing egg with Nutella.
Chris had tried pasta in the kettle
Chris could compete.
At university he had wanted faster pasta.
Normally he boiled water in the kettle, poured the water into a pan and then cooked the pasta.
He decided to remove the middle step.
The dry pasta went directly into the kettle.
The kettle began making a high-pitched noise and stopped working.
His next shortcut was even worse.
For fast cheese on toast, Chris turned a toaster onto its side so it could function like a grill.
The cheese melted.
A flame appeared.
The halls had to be evacuated.
Scott stressed that nobody listening should recreate the technique.
Chris then remembered buying enormous bags of cheap frozen mutton pellets to put over pasta.
His student cooking development had moved from dangerous appliances to food which sounded like animal feed.
Courtney needed Radio 1 to speak quietly
A current fresher called Courtney had been out night after night and asked the presenters to keep their voices down.
She was exhausted.
Her condition made the old stories feel less historical.
Across Britain, another group of students was currently discovering the same lessons.
Eventually, after enough nights out, a couscous omelette could begin to look like dinner.


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