I can't remember what the weather was like, though remember it being grey and warm (much like now). I caught the yellow 458 bus from Uxbridge Station to Langley. I remember vague fragments of the journey. There was a girl on the bus who was really loud and annoying. I remember one of the other passengers saying that 'she was like this every morning!' Soon enough I was at my destination, Langley College, where I was to spend the next year (well nine months really) doing a foundation course in art and design.
I was 21, and the three years since I had left school had not exactly been successful. I had taken my art A-level in a year at Uxbridge College (and failed), then went to a college in Harrow to do my first foundation course, but left a couple of months before I finished it. I had spent the year previous to starting Langley College being unemployed and working part-time at W.H.Smiths.
I remember asking someone where the room I needed to be was. So delighted was I that somebody knew the answer. So delighted was I that somebody knew the answer that I didn't listen to the directions at all. I found the room I needed, somewhere up on the first or second floor. It was a long room where and my fellow students all sat around a long rectangle of tables.
I remember one girl saying that she was only 16, and it transpired that she was in the wrong room, and should have been elsewhere - probably on some two year BTEC course elsewhere. I remember the people around me. I remember Owen saying that his favourite band was Voivod. I remember going down the park at lunchtime and buying cans of beer. I remember Claude, whom I had sat next to, expressing some kind of concern about this, as if we were on the slippery slope to some kind of street drinking delinquency.
I can't say for sure what else happened on that day (Was it the first day that everybody showed their summer projects, which I hadn't done because I had never received the brief? Was it the first day that we all drew still-life (still-lives?) from objects bought from home?). I have vague memories of waiting for the bus home, being slightly uncomfortable for some reason - was it raining? Was the post uncomfortable? I remember watching the shops across the road which I would come to know so well over the next three quarters if a year ("10 Silk Cut please!").
I have no memories of the journey home, nor of that evening.
After I had finished Langley College, I went to Southampton to study illustration for two years. Because of the people I met at Southampton, I ended up (after doing an English degree at Worcester for three years afterwards) moving to Brighton where I am now. In it's own way, my year at Langley College, had a very profound effect on my future, and there are certainly still things from an artistic point of view, that I still remember and use now (Negative space! Intensity of mark making!).
I'd love to go back two decades and do the whole thing again.
