13 weeks later...
Hi there.
IS IT A MIRAGE?
If I'm being honest, I'd actually given LiveJournal up for dead. Having moved on (almost entirely thanks to university) to Facebook, I had all but lost interest in updating here. But! The reason Facebook falls down (and is at the same time so magnificent) is that there's no actual point to it, is there? Good procrastination material when you have to write an essay, but it really has nothing on this place. I was chatting to Lou a few days ago and she reminded me of how much fun it is to ramble on over here.
University is clearly to blame. I mean, I know I was hardly Mr Verbose before then, but since going off to Durham I really have just dropped off the radar completely. Which is a shame, because university is absolutely awesome and hundreds of fab things have been happening over the past few months. To start off I will try to give a brief (hahaahahahahahah) summary of the sort of place Durham is and what I've been doing there.
chapter one: grove house forever
Durham University, not unlike Cambridge and Oxford, is split into various colleges, and mine is called the College of St. Hild and St. Bede. I never could resist a pretentious-sounding name. Anyway, a college, for you uneducated, unwashed masses, is where you live, eat and get lashed, and it's good that we've introduced this theme early because it'll be cropping up fairly often. College has nothing to do with your subject, but you compete in college sports etc etc etc. Most - well, some - of you at least are pretty intelligent, so you can figure it out.
Anyway. Hild Bede is the biggest college, both geographically and studentically (shut up. it's not as if I'm an English student), and is split into blocks and outhouses
+ haha, this is funny, I'm basically rehashing the speech that I used for all the tours I did on Open Day last week, except with less swearing +
A block = a big building with many corridors and lots of people. An outhouse = a big ol' house with maybe 15-20 people. I was lucky enough to end up in an outhouse - Grove House as it is better known - and I live with a terrific bunch of people there. Most notable of these Grove House persons is my roommate Neil, without whom things at uni wouldn’t be half as fun. See, most people coming to Durham dread the prospect of ending up with a roommate, but I looked forward to it - I even requested one on the formadoodle thing I filled in in the summer. It couldn’t have worked out better, really - Neil only lives up the road and is an all-round legend; a chilled-out alcoholic, not unlike myself.
But there’s an absolutely cracking cast of characters kicking around there - Matt, a sporting legend, Stella-buyer (certain people don’t get the beers in often enough) and all-round top bloke, Lee, a Welsh kid with a heart of gold and a cracking sense of humour, Ollie, the most chilled out guy I’ve ever met, and an absolute hero ... etc. etc. superlative after superlative. But the guys are all really nice - I’m living with 7 of them in a house next year.
The girls are equally great. I was going out with one of them, Carolyn, for almost the whole of the first term, but that all came to a pretty abrupt end over Christmas. Didn’t do an overly spectacular job of breaking up with her, but things have more or less sorted themselves out between us now, so it’s okay.
The social life at Durham is unbelievable. I could go through hundreds of people I’ve met who are really fantastic - not a great deal of point - and probably not even scratch the surface. It’s these people who have kept me away from the Internet and LJ and whatnot, whether going for a crafty pint, having a 4-player Mario Kart or having a cheeky innings of Corridor Cricket.
Oh hell yes. Best game ever.
So, yeah. Uni’s fun. The highlights have been nights like Formals, when everyone gets dressed up, has a lovely meal and then gets wasted. Problem is there have been too many good and funny nights, but I can offer my highlights:
- Stars in their Eyes. 9 of us entered, a really good group of people, and I opened the show as Damien Rice. Pretty scary, but great fun, especially in the bar afterwards.
-The day Neil came back at 9.30am from a night out in Newcastle - not the walk of shame, however. He’d fallen asleep on the train back from Newcastle to Durham and ended up in Leeds, where he had to wait for three hours for a train back.
-Tuesday of last week, whilst I was being an Open Day Rep. We had an absolutely cracking bunch of kids, the bar was heaving, and the shouting in Walkabout meant I couldn’t talk for about a week. Awesome :D
-One random Sunday Matt and I were sitting around at about 9 with nothing to do. ‘Shall we go get a burger?’ I suggested. ‘Go on then.’ On the way down to Pauline’s (awesome geordie lady who comes with her husband to just outside our bar every night selling burgers, bacon and eggs, etc.), one of us suggested getting a crafty pint. 11 pints later, chaos more or less ensued ;). It sticks in my memory, though, because it was fairly early on and probably the first time I had a ‘real’ conversation with Matt, if that makes sense. Fucking great night, that was.
Anyway. I can feel your interest in this topic waning, but in conclusion it’s great fun. My course is actually very good too, but maybe I’ll go into that another day. If you have any questions, as I doubt any of you do, fire away.
chapter two: home and the like
I have actually been pretty good about visiting home since starting uni. I’ve made three trips back to Birmingham thus far;
1 - first trip back was the weekend of Andy’s 20th birthday, which was key. Actually, coming back to Brum felt much more normal than going back to Durham, and it was a cracking weekend. Andy, Andy and I went out for pizza Saturday night then went back to Preston’s for some light drinking and Disney. Ended up getting completely fucked on Whisky Vodka Lemonade (hint: do NOT mix whisky and vodka) and having all kinds of problems, but it was worth it.
2 - second time around, a few weeks after that, I came back to see my cousin Grace from Ireland. We have a family of Irish second cousins called the Brosnans who I’ve not visited in about ten years, so it was really nice to see her.
Christmas came at this point, and I went back to LION full time. It’s actually really great to be able to walk in and out of the place whenever I want, they’re very good to me. Christmas also saw one of the most entertaining trips of recent times - I went down to see Matt in Cambridge, and after a chilled-out evening in the pub we drove the next day down to Southampton to see our friend Kate, whose house is RIDICULOUS. It’s huge, and she has beautiful grounds, and a tennis court, swimming pool etc. - nice to see how the other half lives - and we had a great time at her Christmas party.
Christmas Day itself was nice (love how I’m discussing Christmas in April), thanks to Niamh being such a ridiculously hilarious and beautiful person. She’s in good spirits at the moment because her baby brother (she insists) is on the way in May - Ray’s pretty heavily pregnant at the moment.
3 - my third return to Birmingham was a bit more sobering, because my grandpa (mum’s side) passed away on February 15th. It was expected and peaceful, but still obviously really sad because he was such a wonderful man and had an impact on so many people’s lives. I found out earlier this week that he and a grandfather of one of the girls at my college in Durham fought in the same artillery regiment during World War II, which was a pretty crazy discovery. Gramps was hilarious, we all miss him. The funeral service was nice, though, and at the wake my brothers and I got drunk in his memory ;). Funny thing is that I didn’t cry at all during the service until the hymns - there’s something about the music that sets me off, I don’t know. You have to remember that, weirdly enough, this was the first member of my family to die, and my first funeral. The sad thing is I doubt they’ll all be quite so... not exactly happy, but, it felt like the natural order of things, so to speak.
Grandma’s still so active, that’s the funny thing, at nearly 88. I had a really good conversation with her earlier about stuff - you just, I dunno. I think I take my grandparents for granted sometimes - considering a lot of people either never knew or don’t get on with theirs - I was lucky enough to know and get on really well with all four. Hm. <3
chapter three: other stuff
+ In cheerier news, I’m returning to the United States in a couple of weeks. I’m flying out to Georgia on Good Friday and staying in Athens for just over a week with my friend Tarik, which promises to be absolutely fantastic. It’s really the steak I’m looking forward to.
+ A couple of weeks back I ran for a position on my College’s SRC Exec (people who are in charge, sort of thing), the position of College and Environment Officer - which involves sorting out things like Open Days and college’s recycling/energy conservation etc. Lost, unfortunately, because I went up against two friends of mine who are both popular and really suited to the position, Jess and Marc. Funny thing is that the position was split up until this year: Jess wanted to do Environment and Marc wanted to do College, so it’s kind of a shame. Marc won - he’s this guy from Australia, a total hero, and he’ll do a cracking job on the Exec. Jess and I will continue to drown our sorrows ;)
+ Simon, general hero of life, actually drove SEVEN hours last week to come and pick me up from University. That’s friendship, homes - I bought him a Pizza Express to show my gratitude.
+ Niamh turns three on April 13th. Hard to believe, in some ways, and yet it’s so hard to remember life before she came along. Looking forward to it :)
+ Do you guys know that I am coming to you here from a really shiny Apple iBook G4? I don’t recall ever mentioning that I’m now an Apple Convert. The day before Uni started I spent about a grand on my laptop and a suit and a few other bits and bobs. I love it, though, it’s so reliable and pretty. Apple wins.
+ Did anyone watch Arsenal beat Juventus tonight? They were terrific.
(hoho, you can tell I’m running out of ideas if I’ve reached the present day)
+ literally, I’m having the absolute time of my life over at university, but I really hope I make more of an effort to keep up with LJ this time around (ha). It didn’t help that I was without the internet for about a month at the start of the first term, but still.
Anyway, guys, I think I’ll sign off for the time being. It’d be good to see y’all comment, though - I forget how you probably think I’ve all died by now - so yeah, drop a few words in. I hope things are going well, whatever you’re getting up to :)
-andy xx
IS IT A MIRAGE?
If I'm being honest, I'd actually given LiveJournal up for dead. Having moved on (almost entirely thanks to university) to Facebook, I had all but lost interest in updating here. But! The reason Facebook falls down (and is at the same time so magnificent) is that there's no actual point to it, is there? Good procrastination material when you have to write an essay, but it really has nothing on this place. I was chatting to Lou a few days ago and she reminded me of how much fun it is to ramble on over here.
University is clearly to blame. I mean, I know I was hardly Mr Verbose before then, but since going off to Durham I really have just dropped off the radar completely. Which is a shame, because university is absolutely awesome and hundreds of fab things have been happening over the past few months. To start off I will try to give a brief (hahaahahahahahah) summary of the sort of place Durham is and what I've been doing there.
chapter one: grove house forever
Durham University, not unlike Cambridge and Oxford, is split into various colleges, and mine is called the College of St. Hild and St. Bede. I never could resist a pretentious-sounding name. Anyway, a college, for you uneducated, unwashed masses, is where you live, eat and get lashed, and it's good that we've introduced this theme early because it'll be cropping up fairly often. College has nothing to do with your subject, but you compete in college sports etc etc etc. Most - well, some - of you at least are pretty intelligent, so you can figure it out.
Anyway. Hild Bede is the biggest college, both geographically and studentically (shut up. it's not as if I'm an English student), and is split into blocks and outhouses
+ haha, this is funny, I'm basically rehashing the speech that I used for all the tours I did on Open Day last week, except with less swearing +
A block = a big building with many corridors and lots of people. An outhouse = a big ol' house with maybe 15-20 people. I was lucky enough to end up in an outhouse - Grove House as it is better known - and I live with a terrific bunch of people there. Most notable of these Grove House persons is my roommate Neil, without whom things at uni wouldn’t be half as fun. See, most people coming to Durham dread the prospect of ending up with a roommate, but I looked forward to it - I even requested one on the formadoodle thing I filled in in the summer. It couldn’t have worked out better, really - Neil only lives up the road and is an all-round legend; a chilled-out alcoholic, not unlike myself.
But there’s an absolutely cracking cast of characters kicking around there - Matt, a sporting legend, Stella-buyer (certain people don’t get the beers in often enough) and all-round top bloke, Lee, a Welsh kid with a heart of gold and a cracking sense of humour, Ollie, the most chilled out guy I’ve ever met, and an absolute hero ... etc. etc. superlative after superlative. But the guys are all really nice - I’m living with 7 of them in a house next year.
The girls are equally great. I was going out with one of them, Carolyn, for almost the whole of the first term, but that all came to a pretty abrupt end over Christmas. Didn’t do an overly spectacular job of breaking up with her, but things have more or less sorted themselves out between us now, so it’s okay.
The social life at Durham is unbelievable. I could go through hundreds of people I’ve met who are really fantastic - not a great deal of point - and probably not even scratch the surface. It’s these people who have kept me away from the Internet and LJ and whatnot, whether going for a crafty pint, having a 4-player Mario Kart or having a cheeky innings of Corridor Cricket.
Oh hell yes. Best game ever.
So, yeah. Uni’s fun. The highlights have been nights like Formals, when everyone gets dressed up, has a lovely meal and then gets wasted. Problem is there have been too many good and funny nights, but I can offer my highlights:
- Stars in their Eyes. 9 of us entered, a really good group of people, and I opened the show as Damien Rice. Pretty scary, but great fun, especially in the bar afterwards.
-The day Neil came back at 9.30am from a night out in Newcastle - not the walk of shame, however. He’d fallen asleep on the train back from Newcastle to Durham and ended up in Leeds, where he had to wait for three hours for a train back.
-Tuesday of last week, whilst I was being an Open Day Rep. We had an absolutely cracking bunch of kids, the bar was heaving, and the shouting in Walkabout meant I couldn’t talk for about a week. Awesome :D
-One random Sunday Matt and I were sitting around at about 9 with nothing to do. ‘Shall we go get a burger?’ I suggested. ‘Go on then.’ On the way down to Pauline’s (awesome geordie lady who comes with her husband to just outside our bar every night selling burgers, bacon and eggs, etc.), one of us suggested getting a crafty pint. 11 pints later, chaos more or less ensued ;). It sticks in my memory, though, because it was fairly early on and probably the first time I had a ‘real’ conversation with Matt, if that makes sense. Fucking great night, that was.
Anyway. I can feel your interest in this topic waning, but in conclusion it’s great fun. My course is actually very good too, but maybe I’ll go into that another day. If you have any questions, as I doubt any of you do, fire away.
chapter two: home and the like
I have actually been pretty good about visiting home since starting uni. I’ve made three trips back to Birmingham thus far;
1 - first trip back was the weekend of Andy’s 20th birthday, which was key. Actually, coming back to Brum felt much more normal than going back to Durham, and it was a cracking weekend. Andy, Andy and I went out for pizza Saturday night then went back to Preston’s for some light drinking and Disney. Ended up getting completely fucked on Whisky Vodka Lemonade (hint: do NOT mix whisky and vodka) and having all kinds of problems, but it was worth it.
2 - second time around, a few weeks after that, I came back to see my cousin Grace from Ireland. We have a family of Irish second cousins called the Brosnans who I’ve not visited in about ten years, so it was really nice to see her.
Christmas came at this point, and I went back to LION full time. It’s actually really great to be able to walk in and out of the place whenever I want, they’re very good to me. Christmas also saw one of the most entertaining trips of recent times - I went down to see Matt in Cambridge, and after a chilled-out evening in the pub we drove the next day down to Southampton to see our friend Kate, whose house is RIDICULOUS. It’s huge, and she has beautiful grounds, and a tennis court, swimming pool etc. - nice to see how the other half lives - and we had a great time at her Christmas party.
Christmas Day itself was nice (love how I’m discussing Christmas in April), thanks to Niamh being such a ridiculously hilarious and beautiful person. She’s in good spirits at the moment because her baby brother (she insists) is on the way in May - Ray’s pretty heavily pregnant at the moment.
3 - my third return to Birmingham was a bit more sobering, because my grandpa (mum’s side) passed away on February 15th. It was expected and peaceful, but still obviously really sad because he was such a wonderful man and had an impact on so many people’s lives. I found out earlier this week that he and a grandfather of one of the girls at my college in Durham fought in the same artillery regiment during World War II, which was a pretty crazy discovery. Gramps was hilarious, we all miss him. The funeral service was nice, though, and at the wake my brothers and I got drunk in his memory ;). Funny thing is that I didn’t cry at all during the service until the hymns - there’s something about the music that sets me off, I don’t know. You have to remember that, weirdly enough, this was the first member of my family to die, and my first funeral. The sad thing is I doubt they’ll all be quite so... not exactly happy, but, it felt like the natural order of things, so to speak.
Grandma’s still so active, that’s the funny thing, at nearly 88. I had a really good conversation with her earlier about stuff - you just, I dunno. I think I take my grandparents for granted sometimes - considering a lot of people either never knew or don’t get on with theirs - I was lucky enough to know and get on really well with all four. Hm. <3
chapter three: other stuff
+ In cheerier news, I’m returning to the United States in a couple of weeks. I’m flying out to Georgia on Good Friday and staying in Athens for just over a week with my friend Tarik, which promises to be absolutely fantastic. It’s really the steak I’m looking forward to.
+ A couple of weeks back I ran for a position on my College’s SRC Exec (people who are in charge, sort of thing), the position of College and Environment Officer - which involves sorting out things like Open Days and college’s recycling/energy conservation etc. Lost, unfortunately, because I went up against two friends of mine who are both popular and really suited to the position, Jess and Marc. Funny thing is that the position was split up until this year: Jess wanted to do Environment and Marc wanted to do College, so it’s kind of a shame. Marc won - he’s this guy from Australia, a total hero, and he’ll do a cracking job on the Exec. Jess and I will continue to drown our sorrows ;)
+ Simon, general hero of life, actually drove SEVEN hours last week to come and pick me up from University. That’s friendship, homes - I bought him a Pizza Express to show my gratitude.
+ Niamh turns three on April 13th. Hard to believe, in some ways, and yet it’s so hard to remember life before she came along. Looking forward to it :)
+ Do you guys know that I am coming to you here from a really shiny Apple iBook G4? I don’t recall ever mentioning that I’m now an Apple Convert. The day before Uni started I spent about a grand on my laptop and a suit and a few other bits and bobs. I love it, though, it’s so reliable and pretty. Apple wins.
+ Did anyone watch Arsenal beat Juventus tonight? They were terrific.
(hoho, you can tell I’m running out of ideas if I’ve reached the present day)
+ literally, I’m having the absolute time of my life over at university, but I really hope I make more of an effort to keep up with LJ this time around (ha). It didn’t help that I was without the internet for about a month at the start of the first term, but still.
Anyway, guys, I think I’ll sign off for the time being. It’d be good to see y’all comment, though - I forget how you probably think I’ve all died by now - so yeah, drop a few words in. I hope things are going well, whatever you’re getting up to :)
-andy xx