An Irishman abroad

"Stoodent Life" - Part 1 - Making the Choice

Remarkably enough, the first couple of years at university were relatively quiet. I had just started seeing a girl back home. I was 19 years of age and she was 22 and has the dubious honour of going down in history as my first serious girlfriend. History would go on to show that we were to end up spending nearly seven years together in relative happiness.
At the time we met, she was working as a receptionist for a small company in Belfast; which meant that she had her own income and her own car. Needless to say, I was in love.
Having only started going out together at the start of July, it was a bit of a wrench for me to leave for university that September, even though The University of Ulster at Coleraine itself was only located about an hour’s train journey up the road from where she lived, and as a result I spent far too much of my time travelling up and down from Coleraine university on the train.

She lived in a beautiful little village located along the Six Mile Water River, about 5 miles west of my hometown of Ballyclare. You could be forgiven for assuming that this river is called this simply because it runs for 6 miles, but you would be wrong.

The river was actually originally called The River Ollar, but according to history, its name was changed because long ago, once upon a time, a weakened army, almost dead on their feet searching for water, had to walk six miles before they came across the river Ollar.

Not very interesting, but true - although how they struggled to find water in a country that seems to permanently exist under rain clouds is totally beyond me.

This river starts off in Mount Slemish, the location where according to legend, St. Patrick himself, banished the snakes from Ireland. To this day, I’ve never seen a snake in Ireland, so I guess it must be true.

From Mount Slemish, the river wends its way down through the Six Mile Water Valley to Lough Neagh – the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles (and not one that we felt the need to populate with some ‘mythical beastie’).

On its route it goes through several towns, including the small market town of Ballyclare, before heading to Antrim, via Dunadry.

So what possessed me to go all the way up to Coleraine University in the first place? I (don’t) hear you ask. There were after all other universities, two in Belfast and one even closer in Jordanstown, about 8 miles away from Ballyclare.

Well, basically, when applying for university, my thought process went a little bit like this (perhaps without the rather schizophrenic tendencies)

- OK Jonny – here is your big moment in life - time to move away from home and go out there and take on the world!
- Mmmmmm, now let me see… Where should I go?
- First of all what do I want to be when I grow up?
- Errr, dunno
- OK then, what do I like to study?
- Err, girls bums and breasts
- Ok, I’m not sure they do a course on that anywhere
- What do I want to do with my life?
- I would love to be a writer!
- OK – now we’re getting somewhere. But just in case I can’t get into a writing course, which can be a bit difficult, I need a plan ‘B’. What else do I want from my life?
- I want to be filthy rich and see the world!
- OK (how original) Do I know anyone that has done that?
- Yes – Bill Gates
- OK – and how did he make his money?
- He made windows!
- But windows have been around since 100AD, when the Romans began to use glass for architectural purposes, with the discovery of clear glass (through the introduction of manganese oxide) in Alexandria. Cast glass windows, albeit with poor optical qualities, thus began to appear in the most important buildings in Rome and the most luxurious villas of Herculaneum and Pompeii - how did Bill Gates make money from windows?
- No not that type of window – the computer operating system, Microsoft Windows, ya frigging eejit!
- Ah, computers, yes – I’m with you now. Do I know anyone personally who works with computers?
- Yes – my father.
- And is he rich?
- Er, well, I’m not sure that he’s rich, but he does buy me the odd drink and pay my way into see the football every now and then.
- OK, and does he travel the world?
- Well, he does go over to Milton Keynes on a regular basis and he once worked in Milan for a week!
- Mmmm, quite. Do I have any experience of computers?
- Yes – I had a Spectrum 48K, and then a Spectrum+ and then a Spectrum 128K and then an Amiga 600, and then an Amiga 1200, and then…
- Yes – OK then, I’m getting the picture here. Computers it is! (for plan ‘B’ at least)

Next up for discussion was the topic of location. Where did I want to spend the next four years of my life studying?

First of all, this would be based on which universities offered courses that I wanted to study, which basically was a straight choice between writing and computers. Now pretty much any university anywhere will offer a course in computing, but writing was a little bit more difficult.

During my extensive search for somewhere that provided a course in writing, I stumbled across a course at a place called Crewe School of Writing.

At that time, I had no idea where Crewe was. I knew the football team and I knew they had a strong link with Liverpool FC, long before the days of feeder clubs, so I looked it up in a map of England. There it was – about 50 miles south east of Liverpool. Ahh, Liverpool – the city that I had never been to, but would love to.
Famous for its music, it’s comedy and of course it’s football.
It is the home of the mighty Liverpool FC (which is a helluva coincidence, considering the name of the city).
How cool it would be to live in Crewe and travel up at the weekend to see the Mighty Reds.

And then it dawned on me.

Why not just apply for courses in Liverpool? That way, I could hop on a bus or even walk to the Colliseum of Anfield for the games at the weekend!!

It says a lot for my character when football turned out to be the one major driving force in deciding the path that my future life would be taking. But why stop there? Miss Stewart, our careers advisor had always encouraged us not to put all our eggs in one basket - to prepare ourselves for rejection, by applying for several courses.

In the UK, university application involves going through the UCCA (University Central Council on Admissions) process. In this application form, you fill in various details about yourself, and then you specify, in order of preference, the university that you would like to go to.
Next, UCCA gets in touch with your school to discuss with your careers teacher how well or how badly you are likely to do in your exams. Based on this discussion, your chosen universities decided whether or not that they would like to offer you a place for the following academic year.

That was why we had to specify a list of 5 alternatives – just in case we didn’t get into our first choice course. The only other team which I care about (other than Ballyclare Comrades) was of course the Glorious Glasgow Rangers, so it only seemed natural to apply for a couple of courses at the University of Glasgow as well.

Ach, the simple logic of it all – it all made perfect sense. For the first time in my life, I had a purpose – a direction.

So excitedly, I filled in the application form. First choice was the writing course in Crewe, followed by two computer courses in Liverpool and two computer courses in Glasgow.
I was ecstatic that such a potentially life altering decision had been more or less made for me. I smiled to myself as I popped the letter in the post, pleased with myself; I thought what’s the worst that can happen? Live in Glasgow for a few years? I even convinced myself that it might even be more fun up in Glasgow. At least Rangers had a fifty-fifty chance of winning every trophy in Scotland!

How wrong I was.
(Not about Rangers, although over the course of the decade that followed, it was almost a 100 percent chance of winning a trophy).

Now I’m not going to use this opportunity to bad mouth or write libelous statements about an ex-school teacher, but whatever Miss Stewart had said to the various institutions of education that made up my wish list, it can’t have been too flattering of me.


It was with huge disappointment that I opened rejection letter after rejection letter.

As it turned out, I didn’t do very well in my exams – certainly not well enough to get onto any of the courses that I wanted. Miss Stewart had been right all along. I was a failure!
Why should I think that I would ever have been good enough to go to a writing institution, or to John Moore’s University of Liverpool or the University of Glasgow? I wasn’t fit to go to Scally’s School of Scoring Smack in Toxteth, or Billy Buckfast’s institute of Boozing in Govan, let alone the temples of education that I had had the audacity of applying for.

Faced with a another decision about what to do with my life, I made the only one that I could – I went to Belfast for a year and studied re-sits of my exams.

Thankfully I did OK – but when it came to applying for university, my outlook on life had changed somewhat, and I decided that I wanted to stay in Northern Ireland.
So I applied for a few courses at Coleraine Uni.
Coleraine was far enough to warrant living away from home. It had less of a political agenda than Queens University Belfast and Jordanstown was just too close to home. I simply wouldn’t have had any reason to live away from home.

Also, situated where it was, Coleraine University was located in a great part of the world (as was described in the prologue).

Once I had decided on Coleraine and actually got accepted and passed my exams, and therefore meeting their entrance requirements, my next problem was to find somewhere to live.
Unfortunately, I had chosen a university that none of my friends were going to (or maybe I just didn’t have any friends).

Because of its coastal location there are lots of bed and breakfasts, so I came up with a plan where I would stay in one of these for the first term, until I had become friendly with a few students and then we could go about renting some place for the rest of the school year.

As it turned out, an aunt and uncle of mine have a B+B in Portrush and I asked if it would be possible to stay there. There was just one problem. They were a good, clean-living Christian couple and as a result only normally took on female, non-smoking students. Oh and one other thing – Overnight visitors were strictly forbidden. (As if I should be so lucky!).

This was of course a bit of a problem for all concerned, but it was already quite close to the start of University and I was getting quite desperate. A compromise was reached were I stayed in the only bedroom on the ground floor, which was next to my aunt and uncle’s living quarters. Not really the rock and roll lifestyle that I had been hoping for, but at least it would only be a temporary measure.

But as time went on and even though I had made a few friends at university, I never got around to moving in with them, but ended up travelling up and down pretty much on a daily basis on the train.
So that was how it had come to pass that I spent a lot of my first year of university, my first year of true freedom, my first year of living away from home without having to answer to my parents on a daily basis, travelling up and down on the bloody train from Coleraine to Antrim.
Coupled with the fact that I was living in the bed and breakfast from hell (or I suppose heaven as the owners thought), I really didn’t spend too many evenings ‘out and about’ sampling the glamour of Student life.

How that was soon to change…