Hanging around in the rapey woods at night was a great idea

There is a wooded area in between Sibly Hall and Whiteknights campus which as far as I'm aware, has no official name or anything. We colloquially refer to it as 'Rapey Woods'. Not because there has ever been a recorded instance of rape there, but because of the lack of light when night falls.

When it goes dark, due to the denseness of the forest, the lights from the street don't penetrate, and neither does the light from campus or the agriculture building. It quite literally just goes black- so black that you would genuinely get lost in the night and never find your way out if you haven't got a torch- even if you knew your way around.

Thats not the point of the story though. I am currently in the middle of a textiles/ photography project on my course. The basic outline was 'go to a charity shop, buy 2 or more items of clothing (interesting ones, but not necessarily because you would wear them) and then model them, take photos of them in rural and urban environments in 'ways that challenge peoples expectations''.

So its pretty vague, but we got the gist of it fairly quickly. Anyway. I went out and bought component parts for the lamest and most socially unacceptable suit I could find. The jacket isn't too bad, but it has a stupid pink and purple shiny lining.

The shirt is just awful, and has this horrible blue hexagon pattern on it. James said it would be 'just the ticket if you were going out to a party in the 70s'. Even the material feels over-starched and abrasive on the skin.

But as frank zappa would say, the 'crux of the biscuit' is the god awful tie that I bought. When I showed Jacob in my flat the clothes I had bought, he thought the jacket was not too bad, the shirt was pretty terrible, but when he saw the tie he was in disbelief at how bad it was. Never before have I seen somebody so taken aback by the lack of style of a piece of clothing.

He was literally walking around with it in his hands saying 'oh my god'. To be fair, the reason I bought it was because it reminded me of my old great great nans carpet in her house.

Anyway, Xio, Emily, Bryoni and myself went to the rapey woods in the daytime to take some pictures of our clothes in a way that 'challenges expectations'. Here is a nice shot I came up with.

We all agreed that it would be a good albeit cold idea to return here in the night armed with torches and cameras to take some cool night shots. And by god, cold it was. The lake was actually freezing over and we could see all our breath very clearly in the torchlight. It turned out the temperature reached a sizzling minus 5 that night.

We took night shots with cool lighting and stuff. Unfortunately for emily, the clothes she bought were pretty thin and not exactly winter wear... she was absolutely frozen. So for one of xio's shots, I 'gallantly' (nah, foolishly) donned a rather fetching purple dress so emily did not have to get cold all over again after she had warmed up. Big mistake, it was mad gay. At least Xio got some good shots for her project though... sigh. However, I do like feeling like a have the testicles to do something potentially embarrassing in the name of valour.

I think this is also a fairly powerful photo series. There is nothing like running for your life along a rickety bridge in rapey woods at night.

In other news, we coined a phrase that day as well. When Bryoni got stuck on a tree stump on her back and couldn't self right, we said she had 'turtled' herself. Also, we got spooked when we were trying to take photos in the dark by some guys who were walking their PITBULL in the woods. I turned around when I had a red torchlight and shone it in the direction of this rustling and I just saw some red eyes reflected back at me! We all basically lost control of our bowels at the time, but they just moved on.