Newbold Street: The Arrival

I don't mean to brag, but I have a lot of friends. Unfortunately, I'm a near-adult human with trivialities, frivolities, a mess of principals and an organisation of whims, as are we all; thus, each friendship is heinously complex, relying on the personalities, commitments, geographical location, disposition and a plethora of other properties, including but not limited to gender, of all concerned parties. These complications are what make everyday so interesting; how bored would you be if every person really were a faceless brick-in-the-wall?

Despite the variety in detail, every friendship is principally the same: two people who mutually enjoy one another's company and care for one another, mutually. This lengthy prologue, then, is simply a declaration that many a person cares about me and me about each of them, which, again, is not a mere bragging exercise. It'd be a complicated and time-consuming endeavour to contact everybody I'd call a pal in turn; most would be busy at the time of calling, were I to make the necessary century of phone calls; my love of lengthy texts is likely not shared, nor is SMS really the medium for such an endeavour; letters are a little more direct, appropriate and a little less intrusive, but sending a forest in parts to mostly unknown addresses is just plain silly; email matches letters for the lack of intrusion and the availability of words with which to express myself, but its informality and the frequent disregard with which people receive emails strikes me that it would not be such a great medium for informing all caring buddies that I'm alive and well. In fact, some aforementioned complications are in such severity that direct contact is not strictly the best approach. What, then, should be the medium for my communication?

As you're no doubt aware, this is the chosen medium. It's personal, far-reaching, non-intrusive; its apparent formality depends upon my register. It's perfect. With this prologue thankfully complete, I'll begin my message.

 

Saturday gone, I arrived in the quaint and royal Royal Leamington Spa. What makes it royal? I don't know. There's a tourist information office a two-minute walk away, so I may ask them. Alternatively, I could ask Wikipedia, but Jimmy Wales' Guide to the Galaxy is not as friendly, human or even as sentient as a tourist information office person. It has been raining pretty much since I got here. I left my wallet on the train. I've moved my stuff into my room, including my bicycle Amanda and my unnamed record player, which is currently blasting Dark Side's beautiful finale Eclipse. Quel chanson! Lily the Japanese peace lily is over by the window. A whiteboard, a second monitor, a lamp, a bed, a bookshelf brimming with ingenious narrative: they're all here and keeping me happy. I even have a set of scales which sends an electrical signal through my body and uses this to calculate my percentage body fat and percentage body water. I'm all gadgeted-up.

We don't yet have internet. To answer your question, I'm using the mobile internet from my phone – named Prometheus – and its "WiFi Hotspot" capabilities. Like I said, I'm all gadgeted-up. Virgin Media are sending their dogsbodies round on Thursday, so hopefully Prometheus can rest then, and cease having his liver perpetually eaten by the vulture of my laptop. The boiler boils hot water, but neglects the radiators. I have a fierce collection of one whole jacket/jumper thingy, so I'm warm and snug. Actually, I'm currently sat in my boxers; even for a Geordie, I wear little in the winter. So, the heating is failing to bother me while its inexistence is saving me money on that first dreaded bill. We have water, a brand new bathroom, a gorgeous kitchen and a nice big yard. We've got everything a growing boy needs, so hopefully I'll be six foot tall when I return to Whitley Bay at Christmas.

This is perhaps the most structured thing I've ever written. I once wrote a paragraph which told the story about a witch who placed a curse on a sports hall, then decided I'd hit a dead end, put the entire paragraph in quotation marks and appended "Or so the legend goes." I then continued a fruitful description of invigilators and of my desire to use the toilet, frequently making references to that story to make it look deliberate. That was my English GCSE and I got an A for that paper. I would sincerely love to know exactly what the examiner thought; I especially wonder whether the non-gender-specific he thought my shark-jumping witch was deliberate. Anyway, that cacophony of imaginative drivel was accidentally structured, in the end; much like this. I've covered my stuff, the house's stuff, and now it's time to discuss the people who live here.

They're all smelly and I hate them. Ha, just kidding! There's Josh, Mike, Hugh, James and Roland. To put it another way, there's Roland, James, Hugh, Mike and Josh. Hopefully none is too offended by the order. In any case, they're all lovely people, and besides them, we seem to have already become the social centre of Warwick University, which is fantastic because it took best part of three terms to get more than one person to hike to the far-off land of Lakeside in which we – Josh, Hugh and I – resided last year.

It would hardly be a blogpost of mine if I didn't throw in some cynicism, and so I have to voice my frightful opinion that University will be shit this year. I can do mathematics fine. I hit 77 last year, so I'm fairly certain I can maintain a First for the length of my degree. However, the University is a massive trek, and though I had a lot of fun on campus last year, there's only lectures to be had on University land this year. The saving grace is, of course, living off-campus. Last year, the University was all-encompassing. We were stuck in a bubble, cut off from society. How the blazes anyone is supposed to think about a future in a society with which they have no connection is beyond me. I think I just explained recidivism in a sentence.

We're off-campus this year. It's fantastic. I live in a home, not an office-block. That's exactly the point. It's a bloody wonderful house, but it's so much more than that. This is home.

Exile

I have never been so upset to be leaving a place than I am to be leaving the northeast later today. Sure, I'm dreading the exams neither for which I've prepared nor about which I've convinced myself to care, but they are not nearly colossal enough to strike immobilising fear upon my mind; only one such experience springs to mind, and it is far detached from the world of academia.

It also doesn't help that Sunday happens to be my sister's birthday. She at least pretends not to care, but it does slightly annoy me that the schedule has woven itself so tightly around the pivot of being a nuisance. That rather sets the theme for all my grumbles at being called back to university and my duties as another brick in the wall. I don't believe I wasted a moment over these holidays and yet I regret not being able to do so much more.

Nonetheless, I spend this weekend in Cambridge, and, save a few exams, I can bathe in the luscious waters of no work, regimes or responsibilities for ten weeks thereafter. It's not all doom and gloom. I used to enjoy Maths, especially exams; perhaps there is yet scope to rekindle that enjoyment. It would be the one thing to fully restore my faith in this degree if I could at least remember why it was I thought I'd enjoy it.

Like I say, Cambridge this weekend with, to choose the most apt superlative, the most entertaining of my flatmates, followed by two days hard graft, an exam, then a Pre-Avengers marathon amongst friends. It's not quite being by the seaside, but nothing ever was.

Act II

Last term was incredible. I don't know anyone here who is not of that opinion. I've already written more than enough in the past ten weeks about the brilliance of meeting new people and that it is a pleasure unequalled by any other. I spoke at the close of last term with many a friend of the difficulty returning home at Christmas presented; departing new friends and heading back to a place which was no longer home.

This term, heading back to Whitley Bay seems near inconsequential. I am much looking forward to seeing friends of old, a great deal more so than I was at Christmas. Nonetheless, it is neither saddening nor a relief to be leaving campus for five weeks. Why is that so? Well, I've given it a great deal of thought. Here comes that thought.

Act Two

That's just it. Only once before did I ever truly dive into a new setting, and that would have been at the very start of school, which failed to make any mark on my memory at all. Neither have I ever encountered so many fresh faces in such a short period as I did at the start of university. In much respect, those ten weeks was the establishing piece of this year, of my university experience, and possibly of my life as a whole. Thus, Term 1 was in all respects Act I. Conversely, this term, as I mentioned to Josh Glenn on numerous occasions, has felt very much like Act II. Very little has developed; nothing much has changed. We have, for a second time, reached the interval, and this time the anticipation for further narrative is much diminished.

The word "diminished" leads me nicely onto a second, partially detached, point.

Diminishing Returns

Viewing this term not as a second part, but as a second story, it is then a sequel and not a second act. Thus, as ever, it suffers inevitably from diminishing returns. It could never measure up to the original, or, at the very least, it would fail to stand alone. Term 2 relies on Term 1 for all of its themes and motifs, but Term 1 being a conceptualised, perfectly closed work of art — as shown by its ability to captivate the audience and render them wanting more — Term 2 would never manage to match the effect of the former.

Leaving analogues to performance art in all its forms aside, we venture for my final deliberation into the wacky world of philosophy.

Me

Douglas Adams closes the first of his undeniably fantastic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books with the following gem:

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

I like to think of three phases in the development of personal relationships as the You, Me, and Them stages. In the You phase, the main aim is to build rapport with the new person with whom one is building a relationship. The Me phase involves discovering how this new relationship affects oneself, or rather, finding one's own identity. The third and final stage is the most complex, and this Them stage appertains to the theorising of how any third party might view the first two parties and any interaction between them.

In very basic animals, knowledge of one's surroundings is acquired, and some basic prey may understand the existence of a predator without necessarily having any concept of self. The next level of creatures up I'd imagine includes cats, who can both reason that the bird in its vision is a living thing and that it is itself a creature capable of choices. Thus, the cat can reach the Me stage, which the ant cannot.

The human has a very strange ability yet. He is not only capable of reasoning that the creature in his vision is a conscious one, nor that he himself is thinking, but further: he can think as though he were that creature. The Them phase, then, is covered by any creature with the ability to empathise. This strange affinity for putting oneself in the shoes of another is something quite sophisticated indeed. What the hell does this have to do with trimesters? I'm glad you asked.

In Term 1, the emphasis was very much on getting to know one's surroundings, and, more precisely, the knew people in one's life. Thus, upon leaving said people who had very much been the focus of any thought, whether conscious or subconscious, the observer suffers a sudden sense of emptiness, of desolation. "Why am I leaving my whole world behind?" is possibly the thought that occurs in some shape or form of anyone vacating a brand new home for the first time.

In Term 2, I have noticed in myself and others a tendency to question one's own identity. After ten weeks of this tendency, suddenly the world is no longer about everyone else, but more about the new person whom one has become. As such, leaving this place behind no longer equates to deserting one's world. My world is where I am. Next term, according to my "You, Me, Them" theory, we may well pass into a phase of questions such as "What do they think of us?" Nonetheless, at this point in time, I'm much more concerned with knowing who I am than wondering who everyone around me is, or what they think of everyone else around me. A five week break may well change all of that, but for the moment I have no quarrel with taking a five week break.

Optimism

I know. I didn't think I was capable of it.

More than anything else, I'm looking forward to not living in this glorified Travelodge. I may have lost count, but I believe it's around 160 days until we can move into our house in Leamington. Here comes an exploration of all the things which will be much better in my new home.

First up, as it's on my mind, laundry. Currently, I have to walk about 50m to the building opposite if I want to wash my clothes. As such, I don't do that nearly often enough. Next year, the washing machine is 5m from my bedroom. Furthermore, my bedroom itself is a lot bigger, will have a sofa in it, a router, a server, some spare monitors, one hell of a printer, possibly a piano and much more wardrobe space and thus much more clothes. The only thing this bedroom has over my future one is its ensuite bathroom.

By some sort of anomalous geographical tragedy, The West Midlands are in the middle of nowhere, despite being in the middle of England. Meriden, Britain's furthest village from the sea, is closer to this University than anything which counts as civilisation. I feel sympathy for Coventry; whereas London is more than experienced in rising from the ashes, Coventry was completely forsaken after the Luftwaffe decided to tear it apart. Perhaps it was thriving and trendy in the '30s. So we have future house's next advantage: location.

Leamington Spa is a lovely little town. Rather deserted, unlike any similar settlement in Tyneside which all clump together to form a kind of sprawling metropolis, Warwickshire's towns are some distance from each other. Further, Leamington Spa has a McDonald's; Whitley Bay does not. Stupid protesting residents.

As a town, it really is quite something, and given that within a five-minute radius there is more than I can properly discuss, I'm going to forsake prose and venture into the hideous world of bullet points:

• Domino's Pizza
• McDonald's
• Every clothes shop imaginable.
• Pizza Hut
• Pizza Express
• Apollo Cinema — which is the nicest cinema I've ever known
• Yet more places that do pizza
• CEX
• Tesco Express
• Swimming Pool
• More quaint parks than anyone would ever need — picnics!
• A copious amount of pubs
• A more copious amount of clubs
• A TRAIN STATION! — I've never lived so close to a train station.
• Curry houses by the dozen

Really, as of August, the only time I have to leave Leamington is when I have lectures. Darned lectures: they take all the fun out of University.

And before I forget, the top five "best things" about my house next year are my housemates.

Between the idea and the reality

I'm at University now. I thought I'd mention that for those you who don't know me, or who haven't been paying attention. Now that everyone's on the same page, I'll begin.

The seriously sharp amongst will have noticed The Hollow Men has crept its way into my title. I love that poem. Eliot is brilliant in general - without him there'd be no Cats, and that would be a travesty.

The Hollow Men is a truly beautiful piece, all about the nature of disappointment. More specifically, it deals with the inevitability of disappointment. When it's not being ironic, the phrase "that's the way I want to go," ordinarily applies to drifting off peacefully in one's sleep. Irvine Welsh thinks otherwise. Choosing life is akin to choosing "rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home." In the end, though, it's likely that the vast majority of us will die in a hospital ward, low on relatives and without any recollection of events from our last twenty years of life. Medicine is likely to advance far enough to eliminate all but a handful of diseases, car safety will improve exponentially and violent crime is forever on its way out, so the odds of living long past the onset of senility is practically an inevitability for anyone who really wants that. So, it follows thus, we will all end, "not with a bang, but a whimper."

How disappointing is that? Realistically, the death of Thorin Oakenshield is what most people would desire. To have that final victory, that ultimate battle, to win it all, then just leave one's corporeality. It's not quite a bang, but it's far from a whimper. The alternative is to perish in battle, but that is disappointing, too. Granted, it's a bang, but dying halfway through the story, with no epilogue, it's almost, but not quite, as unsatisfying as dying years later, the last remnant of your own forgotten tale.

If I can return to my original point after that pseudo-digression, The Hollow Men deals with the dissatisfaction that every man feels when his idea becomes reality. On a side note, wherever I use a gender specific noun, just read it as the other gender or your favourite non-gender specific equivalent if you're the kind of person to take offence. Back to the point, now that nobody is taking offence from stylistic choices, I can't remember ever imagining something perfectly. I'm often quite close, but the accuracy of the my approximation correlates to the relevance of my past experience. I can imagine a future train journey very well if I know the train, the line, the time of day, who the passengers will be, whether or not I've already read the book with which I'd occupy myself and so on. In the case of University, I had absolutely no idea.

In terms of academic content, I had a better idea than most. Wikipedia, the Open University and the odd visit, for one reason or another, to Newcastle University all gave me an insight into the vast difference between school and this place. The disparity between teaching at schools and learning at University was more of a shock to some than to myself, given that circumstances necessitated my self-teaching onwards from at least five years ago. Even before that, I knew above and beyond the scope of the curriculum by virtue of curiosity, an ability to read, and access to far too many encyclopaedias, atlases, poor excuses for newspapers and very few channels that weren't BBC. Enough autocentricism for now, academia is less than half of the University experience. For some, it counts for closer to zero.

The next most obvious consequence of conscripting oneself to the West Midlands for four years is that, if they're fortunate, your family doesn't live there. This came as no surprise. I was every bit as callous about the lack of brothers and sisters and, for that matter, a mother as I expected to be. Anyone who actually knows me will know just how much I love being one of the five, but I can do that from afar. Perhaps I would have found it more difficult if I were the first to flee the nest, but, as it happens, I am the middle child and the second to put down hooks outside the Northeast. Again, my mother makes it easier. I love that woman, though I never tell her, but living with her isn't half difficult. She does do my laundry, though, and thus I regularly make infrequent trips to the launderette here. It's 100 metres away, and in the opposite direction to everything else in the 'verse, given that the only entrance to this glorified Travelodge is at the opposite end of its grassy courtyard to the launderette. As such, I've been of my own accord less than three times, and that condition satisfied by a margin of at least two. I never expected to do much laundry, so as of yet, I'm yet to mention a condition of this bubble onto which the shadow falls between the motion and the act.

If you've not read The Hollow Men, you probably missed three obscure metaphors by now. Go read it, come back. Done that? Good. Yes, I know, it was in Apocalypse Now. So was I Can't Get No Satisfaction, but they don't mention that every time it plays on Radio 2.

The real shadow, the headpiece filled with straw, the discrepancy between essence and the descent, is the people. Unlike trains or launderettes, people are intrinsically different. A train goes choo, and a washing machine whirrs, but a person can make those noises and so many more. "Thanks, Captain Obvious," some of you say. "Nice way of putting it," say others. "Stop with the quotes," go yet another set. That's exactly the point. You load up a washing machine, bit of soap powder, hit the button and it washes your clothes. So I'm told. As far as people are concerned, there is no right way through clothes at them. For washing machines, there's no wrong way. That's what it does. I can generalise about washing machines; they don't take offence. People revel in their differences, and I can't even make comments about all of a single group without someone piping up in protest. I'm not complaining either. Quite frankly, people make life worth living. Not even trains do that, and I bloody love trains.

I've met a whole load of people in my life. A whole load - still with the washing machine lexicon, I see. Sorry about that. Nonetheless, just as I based my expectation of mathematics on what I'd seen earlier, I based my entire expectation of who I'd meet, greet, eat, beat, sheet, neat, hang on, the list stopped working. I based my expectation of what people would be likely upon some biased concatenation of every personality I'd ever encountered. That's a lot of personalities. Ordinarily, taking that much information, adjusting it for inflation, dividing by the square of the speed of light and then taking logs would usually yield at least some approximations worth their weight. In this case, no amount of calculating gave me anything like a glimpse at the nature of the people here.

It's almost as though nobody I ever met had anything besides anatomy and culture in common with everybody I've met since. It's terrifying and enlightening, seeing so many new combinations of little idiosyncrasies, culminating in a plethora of personalities, none of which are anything like any conception of my mind. From an existentialist point of view, there's no greater argument against being simply a brain in a jar. My subconscious is incredible: my conscious is an abacus next to its DeepThought, but it would take a machine infinitely more complex to simulate just a handful of us luminous beings. Not this crude matter at all.

Nonetheless, the horror of surprise created by twenty-two-thousand unfamiliar characters pales into insignificance under the right light. That light, to me, is the future. It counts for nothing, making every last one of these beautiful amalgamations appear in an instant, since time - the destroyer of minds, men and mountains - will vanish them all in due course. Not with a bang, but a whimper.