Leaving Home

It seems hard to believe it’ll be 13 years in October since I found myself starting the first year of my degree. 18-years-old, a naive, nervous kid from Cumbria transported down near That London. At the time, my mother thought I was running away from her, like they all do at such moments. Why hadn't I gone to Preston or Newcastle, only a two hour drive from home?

The reason was exactly that. The freshly-adult D.C. Harrison hadn't liked the shy, bumbling teenager he had thus so far been. I blamed my parents insomuch as they had brought me up in some crap hell-hole of a one-horse town where I was labelled a "puff" for daring to read outside lessons and would routinely take a kicking during enforced rugby matches that seemed less a competition and more an exercise in seeing who out of the other 29 could bounce on my head the most.

Thus, I decided that by going to university hours away from anybody who even vaguely knew me I could reinvent myself as some kind of cool cat to whom all the pretty girls would flock to, attracted by my Northern brogue. As it turned out, it was more a problem than anything, as I had to repeat myself about three times, as most of my fellow students hadn't heard a Northern accent outside the Gallagher brothers.

On the plus side, it was good to be away from the heavy working class machismo that I'd been brought up in. For the first time, I was hanging out with people from every combination of race, religion and sexuality. It was nice to be in an environment where a chap could, if so wished, flirt with another fellow and not expect to then suddenly find themselves in hospital as a result.

Sometime in Fresher’s Week, the Student Union had an event that was based around a Stock Exchange concept. The large screen (usually used to show football games) featured a list of drinks with prices, which fluctuated – I assume – dependent on what was selling. Being a tall chap, we were able to stand right by the bar and still be able to see what was going cheap over everyone else’s heads.

In hindsight, it seems a pretty stupid idea, doing as it does encouraging everyone to mix drinks like mad and induce mass hoying of ring. It certainly happened to my neighbours, though I someone managed to keep enough common sense to stick to the piss-weak lager they were serving on tap. Within weeks, a friendly skinhead on my course called Big Dave (and haven’t we all known a Big Dave at some point?) introduced me to Newcastle Brown Ale, which we worked out of all the bottled ales gave the best value for money and therefore became my tipple of choice throughout the rest of our studies. Strangely, I've not touched it since graduation, not even on my trip to LA in 2005 where it was bizarrely advertised on billboards all over Hollywood as being a drink for attractive young hipsters, rather than for factory workers from places like Wolverhampton and Hull to guzzle before the usual Saturday night scrap at closing time.

In hindsight of that year, it was maybe enough to survive. There were stories abound of burn-outs: indeed, I once helped a completely zonked-out vague acquaintance to bed after a frankly colossal all-day bender involving most drugs known to man washed down with a small lake of alcohol. A few days later I found out he’d been checked into the psychiatric wing of the local hospital. Happy ending: he subsequently took on a monk-like lifestyle and graduated with a first. Several lads I knew on my course dropped out before the first year was out, red-eyed and lost.

I nearly ended up there myself: I confess to playing up some kind of cliché as hard-drinking Northerner, helped by the fact that most of my fellow students (bar the Irish) couldn't hold their booze. Come Easter, however, a single bottle of beer at the start of the evening was enough to send me to my bed for a restless night of throwing up to the point of dry-retching. The false bubble of indestructibility was burst and I spent the next few months pretty much teetotal.

Lying in bed after that night, I came to the realisation that when it all comes down, you can't hide who you are from that nagging voice in the back of your head. I'm the least cool, hip person in the world and am tough as a Daisy. Subsequently, I limped through my degree with diminishing interest, preferring to spend my days playing Pro Evolution Soccer on Playstation and watching about four episodes of the Simpsons a day.

Three years concluded with me limping back up North with a heavy sense of “is that it?”, set to enter a two year spell in the Phantom Zone of unemployment that ended when a friend rescued me, setting in motion a series of events that saw me gratefully dragged up to the lifeboat HMS Manchester.

Years on, on a return visit to home, and after a fair few drinks, I made some kind of apology to my parents for being such a pain back then, especially for having the feelings described in the second paragraph here. My dad told me not to be so bloody daft.