The Adventures of Matt (in Leeds!)

Archive for December, 2005

Final post for the year

Saturday, December 10th, 2005

It’s really weird here now and even harder to explain it to someone who isn’t living in a similar situation (which is: a block of 4 flats, each with 5 residents).

Essentially, term ended on Friday so most people in M block (my home) have gone now, besides 4 of us. I’m the only person left in my particular flat, making walking the corridors and kitchen a slightly eerie task. It’s weird to find the place silent and deserted, normally there’s people around at (literally) all hours and it’s rare that the only sounds I can hear are the ones I’m making myself.

There’s been drama and disasters going on in the past week or two. Holly, one of the girls in the flat opposite mine, is leaving Leeds, mostly due to her not being happy with her course. She stopped going to lectures weeks ago, but stayed on here until the end of the year. As the week progressed she got more and more emotional, culminating in a tearful (and drunk) Thursday night. More on that later..

Also leaving is Sarah, a girl I’ve come to be friends with who also lives in Holly’s flat. Essentially, she never really gelled with the other girls in her flat, and all her friends live in a different residence very close to Leeds University itself, so she’s moving there. It’s weird right now to look out of my window to their kitchen and see it empty, but it’s going to be even weirder next year when there’s two people missing.

In terms of academic stuff, it’s been going well. I handed in two essays since my last entry, and I’ve had one back, scoring a 66. For reference, I scored a 61 on the first one. I was happy with it, an improvement is obviously a good thing and a 66 is not far from being a First (69 is a borderline), which is encouraging. I found the comments useful, although apparently I’m reading the wrong people; I referenced Marx when my tutor commented he would have loved to have seen me talk about Freud. Still, I found it helpful. The other essay was for English Language, and was on discriminatory language. It was really interesting and made me look at the concept of sexism in a new light. I’m not sure how I did on it yet, but I was pretty pleased with the end result. Finally, I had to hand in my computer programming coursework for marking. This was the second one; on the first one I got 14/17. This one I got 17/17, full marks! I was very pleased, especially since I beat a lot of people who are actually Computer Science students, while I’m merely a lowly English student.. ha! Sadly, the coursework marks don’t go towards the end grade so neither of them mean all that much.. bah.

Last week I was due to make a presentation in a seminar on Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory (summary: Literature has replaced Religion as the upper class’s way of controlling and influencing us working class stiffs. Good essay!). I awoke blearily at 10:32am, with the latest bus I could catch leaving at 10:26. Damn. I normally get up at 9 for this seminar. Swearing and stumbling into an icy cold shower, I dressed in seconds, grabbed my presentation notes and ran for the bike shed, jumping on and pedalling through the frosty morning to uni, 4 miles away. Made it in at 10:58, alternately sweating and shivering, and went inside. Not once was I called on to give said presentation, and when I approached my tutor at the end he admitted he’d forgotten his preperation notes and forgot I was supposed to do it. We agreed I’d do it next week and I left. Needless to say, this week’s seminar, I once again prepared my notes and showed up on time, but he didn’t ask so it didn’t get given. I’m not sure if I feel relieved or annoyed, but either way, I have a 6 minute presentation on Eagleton’s Literary Theory to give, if anyone’s interested.

In this final week we (the entire block, mostly) went out for a christmas meal together. It wasn’t as successful as it could have been. In what is appearing to be a disturbing pattern, I almost missed it due to getting a shower at 7, when the taxis arrived, having been told by Ben that they were coming at 7:30. Luckily, the fourth taxi didn’t show up so me and some other people who didn’t fit in the first three got another and made it there on time. When they seated all 14 of us, they split us off into two tables so we didn’t really feel ‘whole’ during the meal. The food was passable but small portions (for the price), so we ended up going back out once it was finished, and heading to a small club called The Reformat, which was really cool. It had a very similar atmosphere to Nottingham’s Rescue Rooms, but much less indie/cool/scene. It had some amazing music playing and we just had a good time, and afterwards we grabbed some bad takeaway food, in time-honoured tradition.

The next night, it was time for the fabled Otley Run. For non-Leeds residents, this is a 16-pub crawl down Leeds’ Otley Road. There’s a nice roundup on interstudent.co.uk, although we’ve never heard of #10. The Otley Run is tradition for most Leeds student, and along with this, it’s customary to do it dressed up somehow. Of course, it being Christmas, we got with the season and did it in awful cheap Santa suits.

It’s weird, since this is normally the kind of thing I’d hate, but it was really good fun, even though I wasn’t drinking. Once I joined everyone else (I’d came late from a lecture, everyone started around 4:30) and got the damned suit on, we just got into the spirit of things and had fun. After a while, you tend to forget you’re wearing a stupid costume, so the stares from people become interpreted as complimentary, until you remember they’re probably wondering how uncomfortable that itchy-looking fake beard is.

We finished up around 2 am in the Dry Dock, a boat that’s been converted into a pub. Most of the drama kicked off here, with various people crying and shouting at one another, and Katie losing her purse with all her cards and money in (it turned up the next day, unsurprisingly). Of course, once back at the flat, we ordered pizzas and sat around for hours enjoying them. Next morning I was up at 8:30, after going to sleep at 5, for my final Language seminar, which was not worth getting out of bed for, in all honesty.

And now, some photos, mostly of the Otley run, but a few of some of my friends on the English course, when we went for a drink after our last lecture.

My flatmates Ben and Alanna in our corridor.