Road To Nowhere

After my first year at uni fizzled out, I returned home to Southend for the summer. I did not obtain summer employment for myself. I think it was still possible to sign on during those months, but that may not be true.

Summer passed in a haze of inactivity. In August I went on the canals for a week, with my brother, one of my sisters and their partners. We set off from somewhere near Halifax and cruised the Yorkshire canals. The weather must’ve been mixed because at one point we got stranded near Selby because the canals had flooded and they were closed to all traffic until the water levels went back down.

In the interim we took a day trip to York. York is a fine city, perfect for a day’s visit. That still holds true to this day.

The canal trip was fun. We mostly chugged slowly up the canal flitting from one pub to another. There were the occasional locks to negotiate. I remember sitting watching some cricket on the portable B&W TV set that came with the boat we’d hired – Ian Botham was producing one of his landmark batting performances for England.

Of course canal boats are limited in space. In the course of a week, everybody is on top of everybody else. I recall a few frayed tempers. But mostly I think people had a good time. At least I did. (Although no one ever invited me on another canal holiday, so read into that what you will.)

I was good at not looking too far ahead. I knew my second year back in Stafford was going to be challenging, but I preferred not to think about it.

August ebbed into September. At some point I had to return to college. I no longer had the security of halls of residence. In year two you were on your own. I was literally on my own as all the people I’d lived with in my first year had procured a house for themselves. One of them had parents rich enough to buy a house, rent it out to the students and then  treat it as an investment that they could later sell on. Accommodation was in short supply in Stafford.

I ended up in a house share with two non-students, tucked away on the far side of town some distance from the main campus. The house had initially been rented by Caroline and her boyfriend. Caroline worked as a receptionist at a local opticians. The owner of the opticians also owned and rented out the house. At some point Caroline had split with her boyfriend. She couldn’t afford the rent for the whole house on her own, so new tenants had been found. One was a young accountant called Mike. I was the other.

The set up was awkward from the start. Caroline was used to having the house to herself. She’d laid down the rules for the new tenants. The main living room was available for anyone to use – you could even invite friends round – but it was important to book this in advance. Among the common amenities in the kitchen there was also a microwave and a washing machine. These belonged to Caroline. We were not to use them.

There was a phone. We could make calls, but we had to record each call and the length of the call in a log book so that the bill could be shared accurately. There was a rota for household chores: cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom, mowing the lawn etc.

It didn’t feel like a shared house. It felt like what it was – Caroline’s house in which other tenants were tolerated as long as they stuck to the rules and kept out of her way. I wasn’t fussed though. I didn’t have any friends to invite round.

Mike was nice enough. He’d already been living there for a few months. He invited me to the pub and gave me the lie of the land.  But we didn’t really have anything else in common. I think we managed a bit of chat about sport. I don’t think he was a big music fan. I don’t think I could express much interest in the world of accountancy. I’m not sure we went drinking more than the once.

I learnt to stick to my room and try to be as inconspicuous as possible. I would cook meals at odd times in the hope of not being in the way when others needed to eat. I had a portable TV to while away the hours. Or I would huddle under the covers of my bed and listen to music with headphones on. The house was cold. In winter there was ice on the insides of the window. Life was a struggle.

Year two of my course offered new challenges. I could no longer coast on what I’d already learnt at A-level. The course was designed to be four years and in the third year you were supposed to get an external placement where you would work and study. The man in charge of finding student placements did not seem to have a high opinion of me. In a one to one meeting he gauged my mental state and delivered a message that was broadly along the lines of me needing to buck my ideas up or I wouldn’t make it. (He wasn’t wrong, but I think these days they’d be offering struggling students counselling or support rather than this rather old school ‘shape up or ship out’ message.)

Outside of uni, I no longer had friends I could call on that were just a corridor away. I’d been spoilt in that first year. As an introvert it hadn’t taken much effort to find someone who was going to the pub or into town or off to a gig somewhere. Or there were friendly kick abouts on the nearby football pitches. In winter when it snowed heavily we built snowmen and other more elaborate structures. It didn’t take effort to be included.

But most of the people in my block had been engineering students. I didn’t see them at lectures, because I was elsewhere in the remoter computer science enclave. This even included its own common room, with places to sit and chill out, a bar and an array of pinball machines and the like to pass the time. So I was effectively cut off from the people I knew the best. And within their own self-contained world, that house share they’d acquired, they had no specific reason to seek out external people to hang out with.

My social life in year one had been nonstop. My social life in year two was flatlining.

The tipping point came somewhere towards the end of that first term back. I’d returned to Southend for a weekend. (I guess I had less incentive to stay in Stafford at the weekends now). On the Saturday I’d gone out for lunch with my mum to the local pub. What I’d eaten was some kind of vegetable quiche. (I was experimenting with being vegan at the time, but had chosen to be less restrictive when at home and was open to eating anything non meat or fish based). This was my downfall.

I got food poisoning. Bad food poisoning. I woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain down the right side of my body. It felt like someone was pressing a hot iron to my ribs. It was agony. I was soon throwing up to add to the misery. A doctor was eventually summoned. (This dates everything, back to a time when doctors still made house calls.)

I was supposed to return to Stafford on Sunday. I had an important first meeting  on Monday relating to a group presentation that me and three other students were due to be making later in the year. As it was, I didn’t get out of bed for several days. I couldn’t eat anything solid until the Wednesday. For days I felt weak and unable to do much of anything. It was a week later before I finally had the energy to make the long trek by train back up north.

By this point I felt a complete disconnect with my course. There were presentations I didn’t want to do. There was coding that I didn’t understand. The application process for my ‘sandwich’ year was still outstanding. Winter was coming. The house I lived in felt more like a prison than a home. I heaped up the covers, existed off tins of tomato soup and escaped deeper into the world of books and music.

*

I still retain a few distinct memories from this time. One relates to the common room with its array of pinball machines and other distractions. It feels like I spent a lot of time there. I guess it was warm and it got me out the house. If I wasn’t going to lectures, I was still in some way attending college. I’d sit and read books or the latest edition of the NME or the like.

I remember watching a bunch of first year students playing the pinball machine. They’d been playing for some time and had managed to rack up a lot of free games. I guess they were more skilful pinball players than me. At some point time had run out for them and they had to go to a lecture. With great calculation, one of them turned the machine off via a switch located discretely on the underside of the device. Another of the group grabbed a piece of A4 paper and added a handwritten note in block capitals that read: Out of Order.

Satisfied with their work, off they went to attend classes. They probably had no idea I’d been watching. I was doing a pretty good job of blending into the surroundings by this point. As soon as they had safely left the building, I got up and removed the notice and switched the machine back on. Half an hour of free pinball added a bit of variety to my day. I suppose I should’ve felt bad for my actions, but in the grand scheme of things I found it more amusing than anything else. I’d left the building long before any of those students returned.

The other memory comes from after the Christmas break. By this time I knew I wasn’t going to finish my course. I’d stopped going to the campus altogether by now. I’d arrived on the first day back to collect my grant cheque, but that was about it. Holed up in the bedroom of 4 Henry Street, ice on the inside of the windows, I was scheming a new direction for my life. I’d placed an advert in Melody Maker stating that I was looking for new bands for a tape compilation I was putting together. Alongside this ad, I’d also written to a couple of bands and labels that I knew asking if they were interested in contributing material. Computing for me was already receding into the distance.

On the particular day I remember, it had been snowing. Snow in winter in the north Midlands was far from unusual. The climate of the mid 80s was different from that of today. Snow was a run of the mill occurrence. I was doing laundry that day. I couldn’t use the washing machine in the house because that belonged to Caroline. So I was trudging through the snow to the nearest laundrette. Inevitably that walk took me past the large cooling tower attached to the local hospital which had been the cause of a serious outbreak of legionnaire’s disease just a few months earlier. I walked past that grim marker most days of my tenure in Henry Street.

In the laundrette I was reading the latest novel from SF writer Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. It was early morning, midweek and the place was empty. The book (like much of Delany’s later works) was a challenging read, but definitely more interesting than my current surroundings. I was lost. The snow, dirty and half melted, was depressing. As was the laundrette. It felt like an ending. A breaking point.

I had one final appointment with my personal tutor. I had to formally confirm my decision to leave the course. Fortunately she was a kindly, older woman and not the man who’d earlier advised me to shape up or ship out. That would’ve been too much to take. She tried to persuade me to change my mind. She said several students had been asking what had happened to me since I’d stopped attending lectures. She told me how one of my fellow students was looking for a friend to go to the cinema with. (There had been a recent attack on a female student and now understandably women were reticent to go out at night on their own). The student – her name was Sheree and she’d been in my tutorial group in first year – was from Sheffield and in different circumstances I would’ve been very happy to go watch films with her.

I was also somewhat surprised, as in that previous year she’d always been hanging out with a bunch of about four or five other guys. I somehow couldn’t picture her as needing a plus one for anything. But then maybe you could’ve said the same for me. It was a well placed and well intentioned attempt to integrate me back into student life, but I was sadly too far gone by then.

I’m not sure how long passed between that meeting and my return to Essex. Days. A couple of weeks at most. I’d had several replies to the letters I’d sent and the advert I’d placed in the Melody Maker. I was excited at the prospect of the compilation I was already putting together in my head. It was the first step on a new path. My northern adventure was over. It had not been a success, but it had been an experience. And it stands now as a minor detour on the route map of my life.

I’ve never revisited Stafford. It’s probably changed beyond all recognition now anyway. I’m not sure there would ever have been anything there for me to see. There are plenty of landmarks – from my first year in particular – and several more interesting stories to tell. But we shall return to those, perhaps on another day.