The Adventures of Matt (in Leeds!)

The last week has been a blur. It’s not so much that I’ve been busy, with a timetable that looks like it does (see below), that’s difficult, but I just feel like I haven’t had a minute to myself to just sit down and recount everything that’s been going on.

Without going into huge detail for every day, the general theme is that we’re shaking off the introductorary feel to things and really jumping into the course.

Lectures have been straightforward. It’s hard to say that they’re gripping and I can’t wait for the next one, but I do find them interesting. The whole experience of being in a huge conference auditorium with 350 other English students is new and engaging. The variety of lecturers is also interesting. Just yesterday we had the first of several “Study Skills” lectures, that teach, well, study skills. The seafaringly-named John Whale took us for the first, a lecture on Essay Skills. Most of it was fairly obvious, at least, to me, and the main thing I got from the lecture was the instruction not to begin a sentence with the word “however” (although “this” is an excellent word to use).

I’ve also been experiencing seminars, slightly more intimidating forms of teaching since I can’t hide in a crowd of hundreds of people, and am expected to share my thoughts and criticisms of the things we’re looking at. The very first one I had was on the Literature side of the course, the Reading Prose module. I was very worried to start with, as I hadn’t finished the book we were supposed to read for preparation, due to me mixing up the seminar times and believing I had three more days to finish the book (which, incidentally, is The Turn Of The Screw, by Henry James). I managed to do some quick research and got a synopsis for the parts I hadn’t read, and did well in the seminar. Later that week I had my first Language, Text and Context seminar, which began awkwardly thanks to some odd questions by the tutor. It seemed at first to be, like the lectures, fairly similar to what I had done at AS Level, but it progressed (or hinted to..) into a deeper level, and looks like it’ll be very interesting.

Socially, things have calmed down a little, but I’ve still been out a fair bit, particularly in comparison to how often I did in Nottingham. Last Wednesday we visited Halo, a nightclub set in an old gothic church. It felt so blasphemous being in there as people scored drugs and watched podium dancers.. we’re all going to Hell. As well as that, we attempted the pub quiz in the Old Bar, one of the six bars within the Student Union. We found instantly that we couldn’t hear a single question due to the poor setup, so left a rude note on our answer paper and just went home. Everyone also went out to ‘Evolution’, a massive club. I was gonna go with them on the bus then meet up with flatmate Sarah, who was going into town with her friends from school who are also at Leeds. Once everyone else got off to go to creation, I felt my interest in going out decline and eventually just walked the 3 miles home and just chilled out on my own. I guess I just needed some time alone for a while, it’s rare that I get it lately.

Just this week we had the ‘Oxley Social’, for our accomodation. I went along, payed £4 to get into a bad pub/club packed with people, very sweaty, and playing bad music. I left after an hour and had to find my way back to the buses in the middle of the (as-yet-unexplored) city centre of Leeds. I ended up walking about a mile to the University, from where I could get a bus. Almost perfectly, a bus pulled up as I was a few hundred yards from the uni, and seemed to wait for me to reach it and get on. I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t, there weren’t many more buses at that time (12:30 am) and it was 4 miles to Oxley..

The girls in the flat opposite us have been in trouble, although it’s actually just the one girl. Holly has been throwing rubbish out of the window rather than putting it in the bin. It started off as a joke, with small items, but eventually progressed to things like wine bottles and boxes. The wardens saw/got a complaint, and subsequently threatened the whole flat with the loss of their deposits unless they sorted it out. Needless to say, the others weren’t thrilled with Holly.

To avoid more long paragraphs, here’s a nice friendly list of things I have learned so far from my University experience:

• Anyone could just (and probably does) walk in off the streets into a lecture
• There is always somebody in lectures who, upon hearing the words “Language, text and context” or “Reading Prose”, looks around in shock and scuttles out quickly.
• Similarly, there is always someone who stumbles in twenty minutes late and tries to act nonchalant and as though nobody is looking at them.
• Many people exist to make your life a wall-to-wall coalition of advertisements by standing in queues in the path of any popular destination, forcing fliers into your hand as you pass
• Drunk (or indeed sober) men can not and should not dance.
• The first three rows of desks in lecture halls (at least, in the Roger Stevens halls) do not bear interesting graffiti and desk art to read because they are below the level of the lecturer and thus can be seen when attempting to kill boredom with a pen.
• Said graffiti is much more interesting in the places where English students have sat (where else would you expect poetry?).
• At the front of every slow-moving queue of students trying to leave the lecture theatre, there will always be an irritatingly unaware person, usually a girl, chattering away to somebody without realising she is holding the progress of 150 people eager to be somewhere else.
• Asda are notorious for only stocking (fresh) bread that is due to reach sell-by date within one day of purchase.
• Pillows that feel wonderfully soft are, in fact, the worst kind, since they make sleeping a too comfortable experience.
• Shampoo is surprisingly expensive.
• Impulse buys are generally negative experiences, but discounted food must always be bought, whether it is needed or not. CHEAP GOODS!
• Science (in its broadest terms) Students are particularly antisocial and unfriendly when compared to Arts students.
• In the case of Computer Science, all the stereotypes do apply.
• At any given day, it is possible to find approximately 3.4 wizened old men with eccentric beards wandering the campus.
• In seminars, there is always a person (again, usually a girl) who laughs at a mild joke made by the tutor for far too long, and far louder than the joke deserves.
• When doing laundry, people bond for a short time, generally if only to complain about the length of time the machines take, and how much they cost.
• Learning your way around campus is an experience marked by discovering newly-created (or so it seems) passages that lead to nowhere and appear to come from a different country.
• Freshers’ tourettes is an embarassing condition affecting most first years, causing them to quickly spout “what’s your name?”, “what course are you doing?” and the tried-and-tested “where are you from?” in rapid fire, quick succession, often without listening to the answers, or taking them in at all.
• A 16″ pizza becomes a day’s worth of food.

More as it happens..

Thursday comes and money does not arrive in my account. I luckily remember the £140 Asda card my mum imparted me with before she left, and Ben and I take his car and find our way there, with thanks to a random old man who points us in the correct direction. Bizarrely, the place is situated in the middle of a residential area. The first thing I do is check that I can pay with the card now (it says ‘Christmas Gift Card’ on it..), to ensure I don’t fill a trolley I can’t actually pay for.

Shopping is surprisingly fun, we try to outdo each other with the bargains we can find, until I come across a huge lamb joint probably the size of my head, for a princely £1.70 (since it was due to go out of date very soon). I snap it up, reasoning that at that price, I couldn’t not buy it. We stock up on vegetables of all things, and I buy a caesar salad knowing my mother would be proud/amazed.

Both Ben’s and my own shopping comes to just under £20, not bad for what we bought. We pack it all in and feel like complete badasses for doing our own shopping and bringing it back to the flat. We pack it away eagerly, and I make tortilla wraps for lunch. The excitement never ends in M Block.

The excitement really begins when Ben and I get bored and conspire various methods to annoy the flat below us. I suggest tying a spoon to a string and tapping on their window. Ben loves this and we improvise; we end up with the following:

The spiral contraptions are the amazing eggcups that were included in my kitchen set. Previously these had been used as something of a Flat 21 initiation test; they had to be placed on the Wilko’s spatula and flipped over and caught again. After tying them securely to the chain of bags Ben made, we dangled them out of the window and tapped for a few minutes on the below flat’s windows. We get bored and just leave the bag tied up and dangling over their kitchen window.

A half hour later we come back to the kitchen to find that the flat below us had filled the eggcups.. with eggs! We eagerly haul them back up, and hit upon the idea of hard boiling the eggs and painting them. We boil them for about 5 minutes and then draw faces on them with highlighter pens:

We carefully put the newly christened eggs (Fred, the elaborately decorated one) into the eggcups and lower them back down carefully. This time, the window opens, and Lee, the guy pictured below, carefully pulls in the basket.

NO! DISASTER STRIKES!! Clumsy Lee sends Fred plummeting to a messy death on the grass below. He pulls in the other egg quickly to cries of “MURDERER!” from Ben. Another hand comes out and pulls the entire eggcup contraption inside the kitchen, snapping the plastic bag chain. Alanna then arrives, and gets her tomatoes from the fridge and begins raining them down on the flat below. They shut the window, and we feel guilty.

Alanna then fills a container with water and pours it on their closed window to wash away the seeds. This half works, so she grabs the mop and begins mopping their window clean. She then drops the mop by accident and carries on with the floor brush. We get no more response, so we leave for the time being.

Hours later, we’re all in the kitchen and realise that the below flat had stolen two of our eggcups! There’s no other choice but to infiltrate their flat by means of a cunning plan, which I (with some help from the others), produce:

The plan gets stupid and in the end, culminates in this, which fails to wash off for several days:

In the end, Alanna takes the plan downstairs and shows someone in the flat, who hands over a mop bucket which apparently contains our eggcups. I was a little annoyed at this, since the water was horrible grey and murky mop water, so we sieve the eggcups out and throw their bucket out of the window. We retire to bed plotting revenge.

I get up, shower, and find that the bathroom floor gets particularly wet when the (walk-in) shower is used. I also find that my new blue towels deposit blue fluffy chunks on every surface they touch, including my body, but quickly rectify the problem. I go into the kitchen and cook my first “meal”; a bacon sandwich. Nervously, I drop the still-boiling pan after use into the sink of water, giving off an angry hiss of steam that I am terrified will set off the smoke alarms. We had been informed on Saturday’s meeting that the smoke alarms automatically set off corresponding alarms in the other flats, and if, after 2 minutes, a cancellation is not made, the fire service are called. Luckily, chaos does not ensue, and I clear away the smoke with a teatowel.

The others gradually wake up and come into the kitchen. As we sit and chat, we hear our fifth and final housemate has moved in, a girl called Alanna. We all come out and say hi to her, then go and get ready to leave. We’d planned to meet up with the girls from the other flat, and begin a long walk into Headlngley, the student town a mile or two from Leeds itself. It takes us around 40 minutes. We head into Wilkinsons and stock up on essentials (soap, in most people’s case, which was not supplied with the rooms). Some people take passport photos for the various university departments, and we explore a little more before walking back.

When we get back, Alanna’s parents have left, and she joins us in the kitchen as we repeat the previous night’s introductorary talks. She quickly takes to everyone, seeming particularly confident and friendly, and suggests we make some decorations for the rather drab kitchen. Ben jokingly mentions the bin bags he bought in Wilkos, and she jumps on the idea, and before long, Ben, Kathryn, Alanna and I (James had gone to his room) embark on a cut-and-glue mission of artwork; creating miniature portraits of one another and a dazzling “BLOCK M! TOO GOOD FOR A SLOGAN!” display from myself. James enters midway through and contributes some tinfoil stars and moons. We stick all of the aforementioned, plus some novelty stickers, to a spread-out black bin bag, and stick the resulting creation to the wall. Ten minutes later, the girls come over, and we dazzle them with our artistic efforts, while introducing Alanna.

There’s talk of heading to the Student Union that night, which opens up its doors for Fresher’s week, so later we’re downstairs and heading to the onsite bar at Oxley. Before we leave, Kathryn burns her hand on the oven, and we all worry for her. She seems okay and comes with us to the bar, but declines to head into town to go to the Union. We leave the site bar and get on our first bus, a packed 96 which takes us down to the memorable Parkinson building. We get off, a group of the 15 or so of us from the “kitchen party” the night before.

We walk over to the Union but queues are long, so someone nominates a bar called ‘Tiger Tiger’ for our evening. We walk into Leeds city centre a little and find thebar, while being bombared with flyers for club nights trying to take advantage of the influx of students. We reach the bar and see an equally long queue, but join it anyway.

Once inside, I pay £4 to step forward two paces and find myself at the back of a wall of people making for the bar with the speed of a glacier. People push and block every direction, and I feel like a little child. We push forwards and get downstairs, and I find that Ben and Alanna have disappeared. While James and I have things in common, he takes to leaving the room and standing alone at times, so he is not always easy to sit and chat with, unlike the others. I stand and keep looking back to the stairs, hoping to see them. Eventually they appear, Alanna with her skinhead boyfriend in tow who, against all outward appearances, seems like an alright guy. We sit at some tables and everyone smokes and drinks. Just as I’m about to get up and move due to the smoke in my face, someone proclaims that the last bus is at midnight on Sundays. We realise that it is 11:40, so everyone assembles and leaves. When we reach the bus stop, it transpires (we think) that the last bus was in fact at 11:15. Whether or not this was the case, we never find out, but we instead get taxis. James, Ben and myself get in one, along with a girl named Sally from the downstairs flat. The others instruct us to haggle, but the linguistically-challenged taxi driver confuses into accepting the £8.70 charge without complaint. We arrive back at the flats and head back to the girls’ kitchen for a while, before people get tired and we leave for bed.