University!!

Well, quite an interesting few days to be honest, considering it's back to school after Christmas!! Back in uni, and to be fair, this semester is already feeling much less fun and lack luster. I've only had literature to attend this week as it is graduation for the third years, and the whole place has shut down the rest of the week. Just to let you all know I'm doing a foundation degree at the University of Derby here in the UK, and really having a great time!!
    
If you're thinking of going back to Uni or going for the first time as a mature student, do it! Honestly, I was blown away with the quality of the people I've met there and have really enjoyed how everyone just gets on with it. There is a real sense of all being in it together, and no judging people because they're a little older at all! I absolutely love all of my new Uni friends.

This is a photo I got the other day on my way home from Uni, sat on a bus on the A38 dual carriageway in rush hour. Nature has a way of doing beautiful things where you least expect them. Who said England isn't beautiful?

Last night I went to the Mushroom Hall pub in Albert Village again, as Paul (the landlord) was kind enough to be a co-signatory for my passport application, and in return I said I would play pool for him in a friendly match between three pubs. Well, I got very drunk to say the least, but we won this leg 6-2, and will got to the return leg in a couple of weeks. Thank you Rosie for the lift home, really a lovely thing!!

But why do I need a passport? Well, this summer I'll be doing a little traveling around Europe, and of course you need a passport for that. I'm doing a volunteer placement in Poland for two weeks with a company called 'Angloville' and you can look at their website here. I will be staying in an amazing place talking to people all day long! A four star hotel and all my meals in exchange for conversation. Sounds good to me!! Then I will be traveling over land for two weeks before landing in Spain to do the same thing but with a different company. I plan to take in a few places I went on my travels before, and see how they have changed or stayed the same.

Signing off now, but going to give you this piece of writing of mine I did for a Uni project, as a thank you for reading this Blog. It is about the village I live in, so Google it!

            Newhall is a village lost in a timeless place, neither past nor present, but somewhere in a non-descript void, stoic in its unmoving stasis. Don't expect uniform terraces that destroy the mind and soul here, you wont find them. Every corner yields a new type of building, every streetlight illuminates a new style of house. But, equally, these are no tree lined avenues where children whoosh and whoop in piles of autumn leaves. Dark red brick from an era long since lost dominates, rising from uneven, over repaired pavements up through drizzle-moistened air to a uniform slate sky.

            William Allitt school rests in the hub of the village, bizarrely bringing children by bus from outlying smaller villages into its cool embrace. Lunchtimes bring them down the short hill to the shopping arcade, piling into 'The Big Fish' or 'The Cob Shop', often smoking openly, believing themselves to be the picture of maturity, laughing, shouting, and swearing beautifully.

            Locals will proudly tell you that it is 'the biggest village in England', but no evidence seems to support this. It is big never the less, easily being big enough to be called a small town. Pubs litter the streets; ugly down trodden spit and sawdust dives that older men seem to Lord over. These pubs have names as unimaginative as their décor, 'The Lamb Inn', The Crown', and worse still, 'The Freehold Tavern', 'The Constitutional Club' and, amazingly uninspiring and set back off the road 'The Newhall Labour Club'. Patriarchal hard-men reside in the pubs, and resolve their differences the old fashioned way, before a walk-home kebab from the seemingly always open 'The Big Fish', but most definitely after 8 pints of Pedigree. Hard families ascertain their local ranking here, and there is more significance to the comings and goings of a Newhall back street boozer than an outsider will realise.

            People here embody working class England. Mothers are young, poorly made up, frustrated and tough, and will happily black your eye for you, should you deserve it. Fathers are young too, hard working for family businesses that specialise in gardening, window cleaning or building. Others commute to nearby Burton for the brewing industry there, just like their fathers did before them, then spending lost evenings with their own fathers in the pubs, jostling for small superiorities and waiting to become the new 'hard man' just like their forebears.

            A particular pride for residents is their very own 'Waste Management and Recycling Centre'. It is known as 'Newhall Tip', and is the one and only reason a person would enter the village without living there. Look westward on a warm summer evening and you will see the underground methane from the landfill being burned off, creating an unexpectedly attractive six-foot high blue flame. It's a glorious sight for sure, but if the wind comes in from the west, the village acquires the smell of rotting refuse which never fails to entertain me.

            Ask a local what they think of their strange home, and they'll announce smiling "It's a shit hole!", and laugh. Don’t come in from the outside and agree however, unless you actually want your other eye blacking and a brief two-word diatribe on where you belong.

            Yet, despite all its eccentricities and failures, beauty shines through. In the car park of the abysmal Sainsbury's local, a single tree stands watch. Each springtime it buries everything for a quarter square mile around it in the thickest blossom you ever saw, and for a short while, children literally shower themselves in tiny pink dreams.

            So take a walk up Higgins Road, leaving the park behind, past the community centre and 'The Freehold Tavern'. Leave Wood Lane behind and cross the road away from The Local, and look at the white house there. It isn’t much, but it's where you'll find me, and all that I am.

            It's where you'll find my heart.

Until next time everybody, I love you all!