The Adventures of Matt (in Leeds!)

Well, the main thing I wanted from being back “home” was a band practice, and it never materialised. Stephen, our drummer, is still suffering from RSI in his wrist. We were due to play a show the first week I was back but we never got to. I did go over and re-record some guitar for our new EP (I say ‘new’, we recorded the bulk of it last summer, it’s ridiculous). Apparently we’re just waiting on Thom to re-do some of his vocals and it’s good to go and I can annoy everyone I know by spamming them with our 6 new tracks.

Friday night I loaded all of my stuff that I’d brought (clothes, guitar, PC tower, plus christmas presents) into the car, and said goodbye to my Mum and sisters. My littlest sister had a friend over and didn’t even leave the house to say bye at the car like my mum and other sister, which hurt a little. Dad got us into Leeds in under an hour, not bad for a 70 mile drive. As soon as we got within the city limits I felt like I was back home. It sounds so clichéd, but I just felt like I was back where I belonged, and very glad to be so.

We got all my stuff back into the room, as well as some shopping my Dad had picked up for me. He made me laugh after he left (he didn’t stick around, since it was late by this point and he still had to drive back); he’d bought me 4 bottles of coke but no bread. I spent an enjoyable hour or two unpacking stuff and re-organising my room. My main Christmas presents, my amplifier and flatscreen monitor, made a big difference to my desk, which was formerly cable jungle with all the crap I had plugged in. It looks awesome now, I have a really good sound system going on, with my computer, turntable, and cd player/radio all hooked up the amplifier, which runs through my big 2 speakers. I was the only one in the flat, so I just enjoyed the peace and solitude.

I woke up the next morning (Saturday) at 9am, with nobody around to boast about this to. All us guys sleep late up here at weekends, and typically a Saturday wakeup hour for me is around 2 onwards. I’d been talking about getting up at 9 for weeks and the one time I did it, there was no-one there. I had great plans for the day; I would go and get my bus pass from the site office, then go into town and pick up some bread and shampoo and other little essentials, then maybe track down a speaker cable for my hifi. Instead, I got to the site office to find that the bus pass people weren’t there that day (as advertised), scuppering all my plans. Well, I could have walked the mile or two to the shops, but you know, I’m lazy.

The main reason for me being back early (I only started lectures today on the 23rd, despite being back since the 6th) was exams. I only had two, one for each module (Reading Prose, and Language, Text and Context). The Reading Prose one was challenging, I’m not sure I was as prepared for it as I could have been, but I’ll find out in 5 weeks I guess. Same goes for the LTC one. The first half was a 35 question multiple choice section, which was a little tricky but I think I did okay. I may have slipped into literary analysis for the second; a comparison of language use between a diary entry and a suicide note by the same author (Virginia Woolf, if you’re taking notes), but I’ll live. I only need 40% to pass, so I’m not worried.

got back the last essay I submitted before we broke up, on Discriminatory Language. I got a 60 (/90), my lowest mark yet, but still a 2.1, just. Besides that, I’ve been busy trying to fix my elective problems. With my course, we have to take 40 credits in other subjects in order to get the full 120 needed to pass. I chose when we registered to take Introduction To Programming and Beginning Writing. The Programming course lasted both semesters (normally electives only last one), and I presumed that the timetable would be the same for both. Since being emailed my new English timetable over Christmas, I saw that this wasn’t the case, and it now clashed with my writing elective. I’d heard there was a £50 admin fee for changing electives after registration, and I wasn’t pleased so I emailed my personal tutor, who reccomended I email first the Beginning Writing people, then seek a new elective if neccessary, which it was. I then emailed the School of Design for a course I originally wanted to take but was full, Digital Contemporary Art, described essentially as creative usage of photoshop for political/social messages. I figured that since this was something I’d already shown an interest in, it’d be worth taking. A week later, they still haven’t got back to me, and the semester started today, so I’m giving up. I just emailed them explaining that since I didn’t get a reply, I’m looking for alternatives. A late-night flick through the booklet of options alerted me to another creative writing module, run by the Open Studies school. I’m a bit dubious since this section of the university allows people from the community rather than just students, and someone else I know doing an elective with them is the only person below 40 on her course, but I’d rather do something I enjoy than something just to fill space, so I’ll probably email them.

My timetable this year is pretty early compared to last year’s. I guess my sleep pattern (Sleep at 4am, wake up 2pm) will be fixed though, which can only be a good thing. If you’re curious:
2005 timetable | 2006 timetable

I’ve been out a few times since I got back, and saw King Kong (good, too long though) and Jarhead (hello, plot?), which has led to the word ‘Kong’ becoming a synonym for “good”, “awesome”, “cool”, and pretty much every other word you can think of, amongst me and the guys. Ideally we want to be able to speak solely using the word Kong, and understanding one another perfectly. Kong.

We also watched all three Back To The Future movies, quite without meaning to. I put on #1 just to kill time as we were eating, then we decided we had to wach #2 because it ties in to #1. As #2 finished I was like “okay, it’s 11pm, I don’t feel like watching another one,” but five minutes later it was on. We then debated the ending and my flatmate James stayed up all night devising a theory to explain the paradoxical ending.

We went out to a poor nightclub (Gatecrasher. Why do these places always have lame names? ‘Revolution’ is just as bad, there is nothing revolutionary about getting girls in schoolgirl uniforms to stand on the bartop to attract customers, nor do I remember once seeing Ché Guevara there). Once in Gatecrasher I wanted to leave, and James and I eventually did for the infinitely cooler Reform, which was playing the Beatles, a sure sign that it’s a good venue.

The other thing has been the house hunting. It’s weird having to consider it all now even though we won’t be moving in till summer, but I guess that’s how these things go. I was initially down to be living with my flatmates Ben and James, plus our friend John, but since saying that the “Eng Crew”, as we’re known amongst ourselves (yeah, we all take English, imaginative I know) contemplated living together and the idea was much more appealing for various reasons.

Since then, we booked some house viewing appointments. The whole thing has been such an … experience. The very first place we saw was so, so bad. It didn’t bode well when the place looked awful just from outside. Inside it was a scuzzy little guys’ house, with a bright orange mould growth on the bath and a tiny, barred-window kitchen with a layer of grease on everything an inch thick. The (admittedly friendly) estate agent was talking about shampooing the carpets and re-grouting the tiles, but you can’t polish a turd, as they say in China.We made polite comments about discussing it and reviewing our options, and got the hell outta there.

The next place was better, although we were snapped up by a smarmy young guy who stopped us on the street asking if we were looking for houses. The place itself was nice although not all of it was double glazed.

The next day was more productive, we looked at 5 ot 6 places and found 3 that were good, although all of them were a little out of the way from Headingley, the main student area of town. One place was filled with two gangster wannabes we’d just seen in KFC and the place stunk of marijuana smoke when we walked in. One guy ran upstairs to “tidy his room”, and later asked if one of us was moving in there and then, since he hadn’t seen the other two flatmates for weeks (not the best thing to tell people when your estate agent is present). A bit worrying that the guy didn’t realise we were prospective tenants for July, not right now.

A few days after the initial viewings we met up to discuss the options and decided to view more before making any decisions, so watch this space. Still, looking round the places is fun, it’s really cool to imagine a real place of my own and I think we’ll have fun personalising it once it reaches that stage.

Finally, Scene Point Blank (my music site) finally posted our year end feature. It’s the list of our top 30 records of 2005, plus our individual staff lists, and ‘Year In Review’ feature, which is basically a rundown of our top 5 favourite singles, TV shows, beverages, movies, etc etc, of 2005. Putting it all together was a bitch, you imagine doing the following:

1. Getting all 16 or so staffers to write a list of their favourite 25 records of the year.
2. Assigning each record in each list a point score based on its ranking (ie, their #1 record gets 25 points, #2 gets 24, etc).
3. Working out the total points for each record (there were 242 total records listed by our staff this year).
4. Getting staff to vote on tied albums in the final 30.
5. Producing a nicely-formatted HTML version of the main list, with all the album names linked to our reviews of them, plus a paragraph’s review of each (again, persuading the staff to write these) plus the record label of the release.
6. Doing the same as above, minus the mini reviews, for each staffer’s individual list.
7. Making the graphics for both the Year In Review feature and the top 30 (plus album covers etc).

Yeah, quite a job. You can see the fruits of my labour here:

TOP 30 OF 2005 | 2005: A YEAR IN REVIEW.

On both sections, my personal list/feature is on the final page.

Thanks for reading, more soon.