Hey, baby, get your gums round my plums! Now, when you think of undergraduates, studying hard for their degree and with a thirst for knowledge and enlightenment, you may forget that sometimes they actually have the mental age of a 13 year old and that they sometimes sneak into someone else’s lectures and pass childish notes to each other, giggling secretively. Anyway, I was happy as the lecturer stared hard at Gazza for laughing at a very inappropriate moment.
At the end of the lecture the lecturer asked myself and another student to come and say ‘Hello’, explaining that she still didn’t know everyone in the group. Luckily for me the other student went up to see her straight away, and under the cover of that meeting, Gazza and I made a swift exit before she realised we’d gone.
Later on that day it was time for me to go and head back to Pompey, and having said my farewells I returned to my car, only to find a parking ticket stuck to the front windscreen! I was shocked, as even in the hazy stupor I'd been in when I’d arrived a day or so before, I’d checked that I was OK to park there. When I looked at it, the ticket was for parking facing the wrong way round at night, with the front of my car facing the oncoming traffic! I am the only person I have ever known to have been done for such a heinous offence, and I wasn’t happy, not happy at all - but there you go. In those days we even had police on the streets!
The darkest hour ...
I returned to Portsmouth, even more depressed than when I left, having seen the accommodation, friends and facilities enjoyed by Gazza in Leeds, compared to my miserable existence in Portsmouth, and for the first time ever, I was prepared to admit defeat, quit the course and return home to Oxford.
But then, just when I was at rock bottom, I bumped into someone I knew from school in Oxford, who was also studying at Portsmouth. Alan (AKA Womble - a nickname he gained after wearing a bobble hat that made him look a bit like a Womble!) was in the year above me and was studying Accountancy. Although he was a year older than me, I knew him from school mainly through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme that we’d both joined, and I knew that he also shared my passion for motorcycles.
Neither of us knew the other had come to Portsmouth Poly and we were both very happy to discover each-other’s existence, and immediately went for a few drinks together. By chance, it turned out that he was being forced to leave his digs at Christmas (in Southsea it was common for students to be turfed out of their accommodation, usually at Easter, as landlords could charge much higher prices to tourists in the Summer months) and he was also looking for somewhere to live! Not only that but he had already found a large room in an old Victorian house – and just needed a roommate! Perfect! We would move in together after the Christmas hols. A friend! Suddenly things were looking up. Remember the old adage: the darkest hour is right before the dawn!
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