College years part one

I seem to have been sitting in front of my screen for too long today. I have been catching up on important emails - not many i must add, but it's a way of saying what is on my mind.

I have already let a cup of tea go cold and drunk a lukewarm coffee and already it's about lunchtime. The sun is shining again so I guess we are getting a little late summer after all.


Next week sees the return to school, and so I guess there are a lot of students feeling trepidations at the thought of getting up in the mornings again, and even more parents who will be glad to get them out of the house again.

Going to a new place, whether it be a school or a college, can be a very daunting experience for some; I expected it to be but it was not. I felt utterly free, for the first time in my life. Liberated from the tyrrany of my father, I determined to change myself and become more me than what he had tried, unsuccessfully to mould me into.

I had no restraints, physical(see back!) or otherwise, and I didn't know how to use that freedom. The fun came in trying to find out. Actually i did have one pretty important constraint, and that was money. I hadn't much in the way of savings and my student grant was pretty minimal, so I had to get by as well as i could. Fortunately in those days, accommodation, bills and food were all provided, so all i had to find was money for a hectic social life that was to develop over the next three years.

This will make some people laugh, but in those days a pound would buy 8 pints of beer, or about 100 cigarettes, it would pay for two curries, or keep one in busfares for a month. My budget ran to two pounds fifty a week, plus whatever else I could earn or beg from my mother. Anyway i did get by, I never bought clothes or other luxuries, and tended to live in jeans and probably nylon shirts. (They didn't need ironing!)

That year i made some wonderful friends, one of which I still see from time to time, though not often enough. He and I are very different in all sorts of ways, yet we get on very well and he has been one of my greatest supports through troubled times. I know that he is reading this and want him to know how much i appreciate him. He is one of four people to whom this blog is entrusted. If you are one of the other three, then you are in good company.

Growing up was the chief aim of college years, and to do so slowly and with as much pleasure as possible. Girls were in abundance, (one of the attractions of Portsmouth was the huge ratio of 7 women to one man!) and although we had to compete with the polytechnic guys, there were plenty to go around and go around I did. The first year I suppose I was testing the water as it were. I had assumed that my girlfriend back home would have moved on and did not expect her to wait for me to come home. Something else i got wrong, and for which I am very sorry now. I know now that i was not ready for a relationship that had any meaning at all. I wonder if I ever was? Anyway I confess to a long string of casual relationships, none of which meant much at all, and I didn't let them get in the way of important things like, hockey, basketball, athhletics and Caving. I joined everything that interested me. I even joined the Historical society because they ran free trips to all sorts of places. My life was very full and those were probably some of the happiest days of my life.