Southampton; First Impressions, September 1994

Southampton, September 1994, and I was twenty two years old. After my stuff was unpacked from the van, my parents left and for the first time I was left alone in a city where I knew no-one.
I was also alone in my new house too. I didn't know who would be moving in -or when. I had no idea what my next two years studying illustration would be like.
The uncertainty of the future did not seem at all overwhelming at the time.

The house I lived in was a narrow terraced house with three bedrooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, and at the back a long living room leading into a kitchen. On the other side of the kitchen was the toilet and the bathroom. From my room, upstairs at the back of the house - a long and cold space that I was afraid would never see the sun - it was a long journey at night to the dark toilet.

I wonder what I thought that first evening as dark fell, smoking endless cigarettes, unpacking and listening to music. I wonder what I thought the next morning as I made my way into the college itself for some kind of induction. I don't remember. There is a blank in my memory, a space where the only thing I have approaching memory is vague images of late summer sunshine. I remember during the first break sat leaning on a bollard outside the college smoking a cigarette. Somebody from my class stood to my left, and another to my right, eating an apple. They were Steve and Jim, later to become friends but we never said anything to each other at the time.

The first week is a blur. I remember getting lost in one of the parks at lunchtime, being impressed with HMV where over the course of a week bought albums by Impaled Nazarene, Opthalamia, Havohej, Children on Stun and Black Sabbath. I remember running into James after some kind of welcome speech in the Guildhall in the town centre. I knew James, vaguely, through people I had gone to Langley College with the year before. I was glad I had run into him. He had been lucky enough to get into halls of residence and that afternoon we went back to his room, listened to The Cure and talked about starting a band, as I suppose almost every first year does in Freshers Week.
That night I waited for him, as agreed, outside his halls of residence to join him and some of his classmates down the pub. I seemed to be waiting there an eternity, listening to Moonspell's first mini-album 'Under the Moonspell' on my walkman headphones. Black night and windy. Still warm though. I remember the yellow squares of the windows in the halls of residence building, situated near the main college itself.
I don't remember the pub that night, but I remember the names of some of the people there; William, Kristen, Violet... maybe some others. I met them the next morning too as they walked about the town centre taking photographs for a project for their film course.

St Marys bothered me. This was the name of the area in which I lived. When I was first looking at houses, over the summer, I was bothered then too. Though the streets were empty, there was something a little unnerving about them too... At the time, this feeling of unease manifested itself as thinking 'the streets were too wide'. Most of the residents of St Marys were from other countries. There was a temple down the road from me, I can't remember for which faith though, and the roads... A labyrinthine clutch of roads, a maze of identical terraced buildings, low ragged houses interspersed with small corner shops selling the mundane and the exotic; fruits and meats I couldn't name, newspapers in which I couldn't recognise the alphabet let alone the language.
My initial feelings about St Marys were to be proved right, it wasn't to be the most of salubrious areas in which to live.

I dreaded that first weekend there as after finishing college at Thursday lunchtime, I wasn't to be back in until Monday, which meant four days on my own in a town where I knew no-one. I didn't have the number for James' halls of residence, and knew no-one else, but much like things we dread, I remember nothing about that weekend now.

I remember a poem I wrote though. Had the windows open in my room and the air was warm, and through the windows, the sound of voices and children playing. It reminded me of Southside in Kinloss, where I lived for a while when I was a kid; Cries outside the window feel just like 78, sixteen years have gone and the hour is late... (Hmm. Less said about that the better. I still have the poem somewhere. I have no idea why I remember those lines) Strange to think that back then, I was remembering a feeling from sixteen years before, and here I am now, eighteen years on from then. Remembering remembering.
Never happier than messing about with time and memory.
Even when I was 22 it seems.

That was my first week or so at Southampton anyway.
Nothing very exciting happened.