Let’s Drink To The Old Days

At a service station somewhere off the M6 you’re sat outside eating sandwiches with your parents. The view is across a car park with some muddy pathways and a small area of unattractive grassland in the distance. The faint hum of nearby traffic. You’re still essentially the same child you’ve always been, just a bit taller and with a few edges smoothed out. You’ve lost some innocence and you’ve gained some insecurities in exchange.

But a couple of hours later you’re unpacking all your belongings from the car and arranging them into a 12’ x 24’ room that’s going to be your home for the next nine months. Your parents depart and now you’re no longer a child. This is real life.

On the first – or probably second – night you’re in the room next to yours, hanging out with a guy from Singapore who’s got a fascinating story to tell about how he came to be studying engineering in the UK. There’s also Navan, the sweet natured Indian guy. There’s probably others. It would be great to go back there now and replay it all, to really immerse yourself in those shared stories and appreciate the journeys people had made to get to where they were. Journeys far less prosaic than a few hours up a motorway in the car with your parents.

But the nineteen year old you has this fixed idea in their head about student life. It’s freshers week and people are out drinking or dancing or both and more. Connections are being made and you don’t want to miss out. There’ll be a gap in the conversation at some point and you can politely head on elsewhere. But the gap never comes and you’re wedged in to this small room learning about other cultures that seem completely alien to you.

Of course in time you drift back to the main social river, you find your own people and you try to live what you’ve imagined student life to be. Music. Trips to the pub. Hanging out in the rec room playing darts or table tennis. Talking to some of the women who are resident in the main accommodation block next to where you live. And the guy from Singapore becomes a peripheral figure. And Navan is just someone you see in passing as they come and go from lectures.

It’s not long before the room backing on to yours is home to Ian, a stocky guy from Southampton who has his own car. The Singapore student left – you don’t know the full details as to why and you don’t now even remember their name. In the second term someone decides we should make a pledge to go drinking every night. Even if it’s only last minute, a dash to get one in before closing time. As though we’re attempting to break some record, make it into that famous Guiness book.

Beer is cheap in the student union, but for some reason we’re usually hanging out in some unattractive local pub ten minutes down the road from the main campus. The locals don’t like students. One night I’m drinking with Dave and Ian when some random middle aged man comes up to me and accuses me of having spent the evening staring at his wife. He wants me to go outside and fight him.  Luckily Ian is in my corner, he has a bit of the street fighter in him and is more than prepared to stand up to this stranger. Nothing really happens. A bit of shouting and then the guy’s wife is dragging him away and berating him for being drunk.

They were probably sat in my eyeline, so unconsciously I might have been staring at her, but I’d had no idea who she was until she appeared to drag her husband away. Most nights weren’t like that. At weekends we’d buy a copy of The War Cry from the Salvation Army guy and me and Dave would do the wordsearch. One time the three of us stayed up all night (I’m curious to know what we found to talk about for all those hours) and were first in the queue for breakfast on Saturday morning, much to the surprise of the few regulars, as generally most students slept in at weekends.

The computer department was across the playing fields and out to the far limit of the town. You could walk further along an unpaved road eastwards and eventually you’d be in one of the small rural villages that surrounded Stafford. On the main campus everything always felt bigger, more vibrant. Crowds of students milling around the bar. Guys selling posters of all the latest cool bands in a corridor outside the student union. Flyers for clubs and upcoming events. Copies of S’truth, which was the student union magazine.

Nothing truly eventful happened in that first year, beyond my dad ending up in hospital. Mad Mark Fletcher wasn’t really mad. He was vociferous on his day, a force of nature, but most of the time fun to hang out with. John the bastard was just a little self-absorbed (which is just a politer way of saying full of himself) … I don’t remember where the nickname originated, but no one called him that to his face and it was invented in jest (the addition of ‘son of John the bastard John’ came from an apocryphal story he'd told us about himself and his dad, the details of which are lost to me now).

At some point in term three a bunch of guys from our block decided to get a house share together for the next year. It happened over a weekend when I was back in Southend. I think Dave felt bad that this had all been carried out behind my back, but as I said elsewhere I don’t think it was deliberate. It was a numbers game and in different circumstances it might’ve been someone else who’d ended up being excluded.

Ironically the place they’d had their eye on fell through. A bigger property, located out in a nearby village, had space for five or six people and suddenly me and John were invited to be part of the gang – they needed to fill up the extra rooms. I suppose some part of me wanted to tell them to get lost, but a bigger part of me just wanted an easy life and not to have to make my own arrangements for accommodation. That property, out in Penkridge, also didn’t work out. Everyone was back to square one. And that was where the idea eventually came to buy a house – someone had parents who were prepared to invest in a property that they could rent out and then sell on at some future date.  The need for extra people evaporated and it was back to student services for me as I sought to find somewhere to live for my second year.

Stafford felt like a long way from home. Certainly the journey by train up from Essex took several hours. But one of my tutors turned out to have gone to the same school as me. And there was Liz, the final year arts student who became SJ’s girlfriend – her dad ran the local veterinary surgery where only a few months previously we’d taken our two adopted kittens to be treated for some minor ailment or other. It was a small world when you looked at it like that.

Year two was a wilderness. Nights at the pub were a thing of the past. I remember meeting Dave once, we were heading in opposite directions across those muddy fields that separated the computer block from the main campus. He’d secured a year in Cerne for his work placement. At that point I knew I was heading back to Essex for good, but I didn’t tell him that. In a way things had come full circle. I disappeared, much as the guy from Singapore had disappeared, and most people probably didn’t even realise it until several months after I’d left. And life for them would’ve pretty much carried on as it always had, regardless of whether I’d still been there or not.

So for once this story does have an ending, for me at least. I still have a tape of the first two Kraftwerk albums that I’d borrowed from Dave. I had always intended to return it, but it’s probably too late now.