So I’d arrived in Lancaster.  The railway station is in the city centre and the university, and so my guest room, is a mile or so south of the city.  In the day there are plenty of busses running between town and campus (In fact there are at night now, too.  There is a night bus service which runs hourly through the night between the city and campus.  This wasn’t there while I was a student which is a shame – there would have been a few times I would have liked to use it!), and normally I would catch one of these, but I had both my camera bag and my large clothes bag with me so I opted to find myself a taxi.

Taxis in Lancaster live by both the railway station and the bus station.  I needed some money so I decided to head to the bus station.  As I rolled my bag through town I passed a number of groups of students out for the night and it reminded me of when we used to go out as a group from University into town.  It was the only time I’ve really gone out regularly – we go out occasionally now, but it’s not quite the same – at University we would go out pretty much every Monday.  Monday was student night in Liquid.  The night would start with us all getting together in the kitchen of one of my friends.  The group, mostly the other people in his block, plus me, plus some others, would meet and order a taxi (or two, or three) to get into town.  We would start off in the bottom Weatherspoons (there are two in Lancaster, the top one and the bottom one).  There people would fill themselves up with cheap drinks and generally chat.  Once closing time came we moved on to Liquid. There people drank more, the girls danced, and I stood around the side just taking it all in.  At the end of the night we’d pile out of the club, back into a couple of taxis, back to the kitchen, hang about a bit until people went off to bed and I’d usually make my way back ‘home’ to my room (I was in a different college) at about 3am.  It was good fun.

Anyway, I got a taxi onto campus from the bus station.  The prices don’t seem to have changed and, compared to London, the £7.10 fare seemed very reasonable.  In fact I ended up paying £10 because I had that as a note, didn’t want to get any more change, and was really quite keen to get to my room.  So he took me to County college where I was staying, between us managing to get reasonably close to the porter’s lodge without actually knowing where it was (I walked past it first time, actually, and had to come back the same way hoping no one was watching me getting lost).  It was about 10pm and the porter wasn’t there.  There was a note saying he was out on patrol and that if it was urgent I should ring security who would radio for him.  I didn’t think it was really urgent so I hung about for a bit.  Sure enough he soon turned up.

It was at this point it struck me how much older I look than I realise.  I had kind of thought that I would still look like a student, after all it was only a few years ago.  “Guest room?” he asked.  Oh.  Is it that obvious?  Couldn’t I have been a poor student looking for him to tell him that the kitchen sink was blocked or that someone had stolen the fire extinguisher from the hall?  Apparently not.  I’m not 18 any more and you can tell.

So I get my room key and drag my bags to the room, number 1.  Having gone the long way around not knowing quite which passages have been closed off by the new buildings, and fought with the front door to the block thinking it was locked and that neither of the keys I had was working on it only to find I didn’t pull it hard enough to open it in the first place, I got into my room.  I’d stayed in this block before and it was reasonable but this time I was disappointed.  The first thing I noticed was the mould around the window.  It has obviously got damp and no one had cleaned it so it had just got worse.  There was also bubbling plaster next to the bed and the bathroom was pretty grotty: mouldy and with a broken fan (this might explain why dampness had built up from the shower with nothing to get rid of it).  But I wasn’t going to spend much time there, so what did it matter!  I left my stuff and went in search of something to eat.

Campus has a Spar and for pretty much the entire time I was there as a student it provided my food, so I headed back there.  It was also the only real shop on campus open at that time (there are a number of take-aways and things).  Campus Spar sells some great Lancashire cheese, so I bought a block of that, some bread rolls, butter and a pint of milk then headed for the radio station.  The plan was to see if I could find a computer which was logged on so that I could use the internet.  The station was empty except for the DJ on air and one of the computers was logged on as admin, so I settled down for the evening.  It’s amazing how quickly I ended up in the same habits as I used to, perhaps it’s just because there was nothing else to do, but I started ripping CDs from the record library onto the playout system.  Time ticked by, a few people came and went, I spoke to someone called Miss N who, apparently, is a postgrad, and eventually it was about 1am.  Time to go to bed.

From past experience I know that the cleaners usually hit the guestrooms about 10am so had set my alarm for the morning giving myself time to get up, have a shower and be out of the room by the time they came knocking.  I headed for the shower with the vague recollection that the water in college residences was nice and warm.  I turned the shower on and tested the water.  It was cold.  The shower was one of those with a complex water volume and temperature combined controls, so I fiddled with it to push it to the point I thought it would run as hot as possible.  It still ran cold.  So I left it for a bit – maybe it would get warmer having been left running for a while…  I was right, and around 10 minutes later I had a warm shower, grabbed some breakfast, and headed out to the station and ripped some more music.

Some point around lunch time Vick arrived, as did Roper.  After sitting around chatting, and perhaps a little messing about, we set off in search of some lunch and a little present for the person who had organised the event in the evening.  Vick works for a radio station and she had her work car with her, so we all bundled into it and set off to Sainsbury’s in town to see if we could find something like flowers and a card.  On arrival Roper and I were dispatched to look for a card while Vick chose the flowers.  Once we had found the correct aisle we began to look for cards.  Now, there were a few which were thank you cards and a few which were just generic blank cards.  We picked a few up, looked at them, and put them back – you know, the way you do when picking a card – but decided against each of them for one reason or another.  This must have gone on for at least 5 minutes until, seemingly out of nowhere, Vick appeared.  In she swept, picking a card off the shelf without much thought at all, and headed for the checkout.  Roper and I were a little taken aback.  How can you pick a card like that without giving it any thought?  We followed here making comments about how we didn’t even realise that pink card was even a card, and other manly things.

Not much of excitement happened for the rest of the afternoon.  We sat in the station for a while, talked to some current members.  I have my card to the current sysadmin in case he had any questions about the playout system (he did, he emailed me although I’ve yet to reply), Vick told the guy currently working on a station re-brand that she could get him voice work from people at her work.  At about quarter past 6 we headed off to get changed for the meal.  Roper and I were both in the same guest accommodation block, and given Vick didn’t have anywhere to get changed I offered her my bathroom.  So we all headed back and got ourselves dolled up.

I set off on Friday afternoon, around 4 in fact, with all my bags – my main bag containing clothes and my laptop, and my camera bag with two cameras and accessories.  The plan was to miss out London as best as possible, travelling via Clapham Junction and Watford Junction.  It’s a route I’ve taken before and I knew it would be busy, but the aim was to avoid the tube.  The first section of the trip went fine, and although I had to stand on the train from Clapham to Watford, I was reasonably happy.  The train from Watford to Lancaster, on the other hand, was slightly less enjoyable.

First of all the train was busy.  That was ok, and I didn’t really mind sitting on the floor in the vestibule area.  The key thing was that I could see my bags – there was thousands of pounds worth of kit in them which I can’t afford to replace and that kit is my livelihood.  So I sat with it.  A few other people were in the same area as I was, initially two girls and another guy although one of the girls left and must have found a seat somewhere (they declassified two of the first class carriages because the train was busy and I guess she sat in one of those).  Shortly the guy got off and the other girl moved to a seat in the next carriage which left me by myself.  During the trip up to this point various people had been walking up and down going to the shop and things, including a couple of young lads who had clearly been drinking and were a little aggressive.  After a while one of them came and stood opposite me and made a phone call to, what seemed like, his girlfriend.  During it he told her about this lady who he had been sitting near who had got him a bit wound up – his friend had been playing music on his mobile phone and she’d asked him to turn it down.  This had obviously made them a bit worked up and I guess they hadn’t been too polite to her.  Shortly afterwards she had apparently told them to move a bag which was touching her foot.  This, apparently, was the last straw.

The lad who was on the phone was explaining this to his girlfriend in pretty colourful language and at one point he turned around to be and said “sorry for my language, sir, this woman’s just been winding us up”.  I’m not offended by it, so I told him it was ok, and he carried on his conversation.  Once off the phone he started talking to me.  He was obviously drunk but seemed reasonable.  He explained that they were squaddies doing their phase one training and it was one of the rare weekends they get off.  He said they weren’t allowed to drink during phase one and when they get time off they just go mad.  This seemed fair enough to me.  He also had a whinge about people from London.  When I told him I was from Aldershot he asked me a few things about how he would get the train to visit his girlfriend, doing her phase two training in Aldershot, and I happily explained.

Shortly he was joined by his friend who was saying things about how he had to leave the seats they were in or they he would have hit the lady.  But that “I ain’t no wife-beater”.  He also complained about another one of their group who had apparently been telling him he should apologise for the way he spoke to her.  He then turned to me and said “if he comes back, do you mind if I spark him out?”, and punched the train wall.  Hard.  To which I replied, “I think it might cause a bit of trouble”.  His friend agreed saying something about not ruining their careers.  Soon enough the third one joined them.  He was clearly much more drunk than the other two.  He started to tell the second guy how he should apologise for being disrespectful to her, and how they had trained together and where in the same squad.  This started an argument.  Luckily it died down reasonably quickly when they realised two of them were getting out at the next stop.  The most drunk one was supposed to be getting off one stop later.

As the train slowed down they moved towards the other set of doors in the vestibule out of my view, and people started making their way from main area of the carriage to the doors I was sitting next to.  Just as I stood up to let people off the train one of the squaddies, the third to join me previously, came flying across the train covered in blood.  He was swiftly followed by another, the second to join me, kicking, punching and generally beating him pretty hard.  The thought ran through my head that I should do something about it, but I didn’t suppose I’d be able to help the situation with two large, trained, drunk lads.  There was a middle-aged man and another young lady waiting to get off with me, he tried to reason with them, she screamed for them to stop.  They weren’t having any of it.  After a while, just as the train doors opened, two guys from elsewhere in the train got involved.  One threw one of them off the train while the other, who it looked very much like had been trained himself (a bouncer, I thought), restrained one of them.  The one inside the train calmed down very quickly (I suppose he didn’t have much choice while being pressed against the wall by this other passenger) while the one on the outside stayed quite aggressive.  The train driver closed the doors until the police arrived to keep them apart.

Once the police arrived things got back to normal pretty quickly.  We’d lost about 15 minutes on the journey time and they made an announcement about an “onboard incident” (so now you know what it means), but shortly got on our way again.  I was quite happy to sit back down with my bags where I was before, but the train manager was worried about the blood on the walls.  Sure they needed to clear it off, and people who were passing through were pulling alarmed faces when he told them to keep clear of the walls, but I had been there when the fight broke out and had been sprayed with blood from the people themselves, so I wasn’t too bothered.  Either way, he didn’t want me there.  So I asked what I could do with my bags – there wasn’t space on the rack and I didn’t want to leave them behind.  He said I could just put them in the corridor, so I did.  And I stood next to them.  A few people came past, I very kindly opened the door for them, I was a bit in the way.  Shortly the train manager came to me again and said “you’re really in the way, can you please sit down, there are plenty of seats”.  I explained about my bags again.  I also said I was happy to take them with me, but I’d have to put them on the seat, and given they had already announced this journey that people must removed bags from seats, I wasn’t really sure I was allowed to do that.  “I’ll make an exception given the circumstances”.

Given all this, that I’d just witnessed the fight and everything, I thought I was remarkably un-shaken.  Having said that I think I might have been a little short tempered with the train manager.  I can see his point, but I can also see mine.  I suppose it will have been a reasonably stressful event for him too, and we were both probably a little tense, but I really wasn’t impressed by the way he spoke to me.  I’d have been quite happy sitting in a blood stained vestibule for the next 45 minutes.  By this stage I just wanted to be left alone.  I dread to think what the other passengers thought of me.

Anyway, a reasonable ‘weekend’ all in all.  Despite the early morning and late night on Thursday (in fact I ‘slept’ in the radio station on Thursday night because of where KJ’s house is and the lack of buses to it).  The counter-sabb event went quite well, the station hailed it as a success, though I’m not quite as triumphant feeling about it.  Yeah it was a good OB pulled together at the last minute, but it just didn’t feel right.  There wasn’t as much pressure, there wasn’t a need to do things to a schedule dictated by other people, and there weren’t things to sort out as the night rolled on.  Maybe it’s the people who made it back in my day.  Not that the people there now aren’t great, but I don’t know them as well. I haven’t spent years with them in the close confines of the office, I don’t know the in-jokes, and they don’t know me.  As grumpy as A is, we got on well.  Nights like Elections were stressful (for him more than me), but we pulled together and it worked.  And he must have enjoyed it too — he’s now a BBC broadcast engineer.  So why did I do elections this year?  I don’t know.  I made the site, but I wasn’t going to go down I kind of had my arm twisted into it by KJ.  This all said, I do love doing it.  I spent 4 hours in the station today updating the computerized playout system.  Why do I enjoy that?  I can’t tell you.  It’s moving files around on a computer, adding titles, sometimes adding intro length.  It’s not ‘fun’, but I enjoy it.  I guess there are things people do but can’t explain why they enjoy them.  The next challenge is to find someone who will pay me to do it, other people I know have managed, how hard can it be?

Friday wasn’t much of note but Saturday, to my surprise, was quite entertaining.  KJ and his new girlfriend (more about her later…) are in the university choir, and they had a concert on Saturday night.  This was kind of jumped on me (though I’m sure KJ would swear blind that he told me all about it in advance), but wasn’t half as bad as I feared.  It was very short.  I’d not been in the chaplaincy of the University in all my time there, and it’s a nice little place for concerts.  The concert was in the free chapel.  First half started with a choral version of ‘Downtown’, the Pop song first made famous by Petula Clark in 1964.  It then moved on to a piece called ‘Never Weather Beaten Sail’, unfortunately it wasn’t memorable enough for me to be able to say much more about it.  Onwards to ‘Mangwani M’pulele’ and a piece taken from Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Gondoliers’.  Admittedly I don’t know much about Gilbert and Sullivan’s musicals – I’m much more fond of modern musicals – but I’ve heard far more memorable pieces of theirs.  Heading onward via ‘All in the April Evening’ a ‘tender and reverent setting of a wonderful 19th century poem by Katharine Tynan’, we come to what you might call the highlight of the evening, a medley of songs from Les Miserables.  I know how hard Les Mis is to sing.  My brother was involved with a professional concert version of the musical not so many years ago.  However, even with this in mind, I was a little disappointed.  Really the main criticism I had of the whole evening’s singing was how flat it was (orchestrally, not musically).  The choir are low on men, but even given that I thought the conductor didn’t balance what she had very well at all.  I found out later she’d told the tenors to sing a little more quietly.  Les Mis has some wonderful harmony but you couldn’t pick it out.  I don’t think it helped that they started out with ‘At the End of the Day’, a song which sounds great with a strong ensemble, but can easily sound poorly mixed.  This version unfortunately did just that.  The choir clearly has some very good singers.  Once girl’s voice cut through the rest of the choir throughout most of the concert, and there were some great solos during the Les Mis medley.  The (rather large) girl who sang the female lead in ‘On My Own’ had a very nice, if a little under powerful, voice.  It’s a shame that she spent the rest of the concert with her head buried in her music hardly moving her mouth.  The first half ran to about 30 minutes.  We then had a 20 minute interval.  Upon reconvening in the free chapel we were sung at for roughly another 15 minutes.  I’m not going to go into much detail about the second half; for one thing there’s not much to say, for another I don’t want to be too negative.  On the up side, it was only short.

Following the concert I was invited to the choir’s social.  This took place in Bowland SCR.  I wasn’t much looking forward to this either.  Given that I didn’t know anyone in the choir other than KJ and his girlfriend, I was a little concerned it would end up being another event at which I just sat in the corner not talking to anyone.  I was right for a while.  I sat with a group to begin with, but people started to drift away as they mingled with other people they knew.  In fact they seemed to gravitate to another group.  Now, the choir have an (apparently) legendary punch.  I was told I had to try it.  I don’t normally drink (not through any objection, but because I don’t like it very much), but I tried some.  It wasn’t very nice, so I got a ‘glass’ of orange and lemonade after.  I’m not sure how it happened, but following that I ended up with another glass of the punch.  The punch is quite strong and I’m a lightweight.  You can see where this is going.  I’ve found in the past that when I’ve had a bit to drink I become a lot more sociable, I talk to people who I don’t know, this isn’t usual.  There was a giant jenga game by the other group, and I was invited to play.  I turned the offer down: “I’ll watch and pick up some tactics”.  Soon enough, with the help of a little punch, I was giving advice (good advice, none of my block ideas made people lose!), firstly to one guy who I was standing next to, and in the second or third game to both him and a nice girl called Jess (the choir’s accompanymentalist).  She took my advice and didn’t lose.  He decided to choose his own block at one point and did lose.

It’s been fun, if a little busy, and I seem to have got myself roped into making the Sabb Elections site for the radio station.  I stayed at Sarah, Laura and Clare’s house on Wednesday and Thursday and then with Miss T on Friday and Saturday nights.  That wasn’t quite what I expected.  You see I’ve not been able to contact Miss T at all recently — she’s been busy with everything a university 3rd year involves and she’s had depression problems.  She was always a little bit changeable in her moods but it never struck me that there might actually be something wrong.  I don’t know what happened to cause her to end up getting something done about it, but she did and possibly it’s helping.  She’s also got a new boyfriend – Mr S.  He’s the LULUMS president, a sound techie and generally very laid back.  I like him more than Rich, but I think I might have had an irrational dislike of him, he never did much to upset me I just didn’t like him much.  Mr S seems to be looking after her well which I’m glad about, especially at the moment.  Having said that, I don’t know how I feel about her having a boyfriend at all.  It’s strange — I love my Miss T to bits but I would never go out with her.  Still I just want her to myself.  I remember the night she first spent with her previous boyfriend while I was still in Lancaster — she came to see me the morning after and we went to Sainsbury’s.  She was so happy and to see her happy made me happy and it was great, still there was this underlying feeling that I didn’t want her to be with him.  I think over time I put that down to not liking him very much but I’m not sure that’s what it was — I do like Mr S, but I feel kind of the same way about this.  On Friday he rang her asking if he should come round that night to stay.  Miss T asked me if I would mind, and half of me wanted to say “Yes, I want you all to myself!  He can’t be there!”, but he obviously makes her happy and I couldn’t take that away from her could I?  I slept on the floor for two nights.  When William visited he got the bed.  That’s unfair.  “He came especially to see me” was the argument, which I guess washes a bit, I don’t know.  I don’t really care.  She’s happy, he’s acceptable: I’m happy.  I told her she had to come and see me over Easter and if she doesn’t I’m just going to turn up on her Mum’s doorstep and see her.

And now I have to go back to my flat and see the state it’s been left in.  The decorators didn’t contact me again so I guess everything must have worked out OK.  As far as I know they still have the key, unless he dropped it into the letter box, so I’ll have to arrange to get that back and everything.  I’m hoping having left it until today to go back the paint fumes won’t be as bad as they were on Tuesday night.  I think if they are then I’m going to have to wander over to the office and stay there tonight – I’ll take my sleeping bag, it’ll be fine.  After that I guess it might be possible to camp on Miss D’s floor for a day or so, just long enough to open the windows and let the smell out.  The heating’s also off.  The pessimist in me (that’s most of me, to be fair) says tonight will be cold and fume-ridden.  Great.  Can’t wait.

I got an email from my brother’s best man today about his stag do.  They want to have it on (I think) the 9th June when his wedding is on the 14th July.  This is in York, that’s North Yorkshire  This could prove to be a bit of a problem what with living at the other end of the country, you know Hampshire down there south of London.  Bah.  I’ll have to see, I guess it might be possible if I go up on the Saturday in the day, go out that night and back on the Sunday but I wouldn’t fancy it much.  Am I a rubbish brother to even consider not going?

Yes, it’s 8.44am and I’m on the train, just past Rugby, on my way to Lancaster.  The plan was always to get the 6.04 train from Aldershot into London and I did wonder if the early morning was worth it just to get in to Lancaster a bit earlier, but I think I made the right choice — I could hardly breathe in my flat with all the paint fumes around so wasn’t exactly sleeping well anyway.

Talking of paint, the decorators should be busily working by now, and I’ve had no phone calls from them so I guess they got into the flat alright.  That or they are giving today a miss.  I did ensure there was a suitable stone jammed in the main door as I left the building this morning, but I wasn’t sure it would last the course from half five through until eight.

We’ve just gone past a school with all the kids getting ready to start their day.  I was thinking about this yesterday: given my timing and sleeping habbits now, I really don’t know how I managed to make it up for school every day.  We used to all meet up at Ben’s house and do something (watch TV for a bit, play on the N64 or Playstation, etc) before wandering up the hill at about 8.30.  I suppose school days were only six and a half hours long with an hour for lunch, not the 8 hours I’m supposed to work every day now (though usually end up working more), and I did get into the habbit of napping when I got home from my paper round for an hour or so, and I do remeber almost falling asleep in English from time to time.  Maybe that’s how I managed it, maybe it’s not such a mystery.

I’m trying to get into the habbit of sleeping when I get in from work – I really like it, it makes me feel refreshed and then I can stay up that bit later when I have things to work on.  I guess my schedule is a little strange now, but I think I might struggle with going back to working and living ‘normal’ hours.

With all this talk of sleep I’m feeling even more tired.  Maybe I should try to get some sleep while I’m just sitting here, I don’t think I’m going to get much else done and there’s another hour and a half before we get to Lancaster (not to mention the 15 or so hours before I’ll end up getting any more real sleep).  If I get another hour now that’ll take me up to around 7 hours in the last 48 hours.  That’s 41 hours of being awake and what do I have to show for it?  A theatre programme and this blog entry.  Well done me for being so productive.

You know, now I’m hungry.  I guess it is just about breakfast time.