I currently have no internet, so this is going to be the first blog I have ever written before I’ve actually been able to put it up. The plus side to this that if I make any silly spelling errors the lovely word checker will tell me, the bad sides are obviously that I can not put it up immediately and the horrible little spell checker that doesn’t accept words like blog.

Anyway I am currently in Durham as the title would suggest well not quite Durham but a nearby town called Stockton where my girlfriend’s university is situated. I’m not sure how glad she will be that I am telling the whole world this but I went up with her this week to keep her company while she is doing her re-sits. Yes, it may seem a bit of a bad idea as she is meant to be heavily revising but I can imagine if I was up here by myself I would get very lonely and thus most likely fall into some kind of depression. It is not that Stockton is a bad town; on the contrary, some parts of it are quite exciting. Just there is not all that much in close proximity of the room we are in.

So onto the actual activities that I shall be talking about. The lady needing to revise meant that I needed to make myself scarce and being the helpful lad I am I thought I would do some shopping for us for the week. Obviously this did not go entirely to plan or it wouldn’t be worth writing about. Kali told me the directions to the local Morrisons supermarket but I hazily forgot them and so went for a bit of a wonder. I looked around me for inspiration and saw a Morrisons sign and naturally made my way towards it. Apart from getting stuck briefly in a David Lloyd fitness centre I made good progress towards the sign. I did get a little confused at the location, it seemed a little secluded and that’s when I saw it, the Morrisons sign that I had been making my way towards, unfortunately not the supermarket but the regional head-quarters. A good hour and a half after I had initially left I got back to the room with as little food as I had started with. We then had a nice Chinese take away to celebrate.

That was the Thursday, on the Friday we went to the cinema to catch the latest Mummy film, for anyone who hasn’t seen it I am just about to ruin it by saying it is exactly the same as the other ones but in China . Saturday I went into town which apparently, as I read on the signpost, has the widest high street in the UK . Stockton has everything you would expect in a town, a variety of shops and a good selection of pubs. It also has a market on a Wednesday and a Saturday which is ridiculously cheap and has the coolest named building ever ‘The Shambles Shopping Centre’. But it was Sunday that boasted the next really exciting events.

We woke up late on Sunday, too late for our planned visit into town and so we spent another day of me mindlessly playing computer games and her doing her best to do anything except revision and this is the way it stayed until approximately 8 o’clock-ish when we decided to take a little stroll as we were tired of being cooped up in the room all day. We made our way over the bridge into Stockton , taking a few pictures as we went, for memories and then made our way onto the deserted high street. Well not quite deserted, there was only one man that we could see and of course he came up to us. A slight fear came upon me as it always does when a beggar comes to you but soon enough he turned out to be the greatest beggar of all time. He introduced himself to us as Paul and he made up a lovely little story of how once a few years back I had seen him in a café and leant him some money for a cup of tea, he then told us how he was still homeless but getting out of a bad patch. As if this wasn’t enough he kept telling me that I was gorgeous and that my hair was beautiful, anyone who knows me in the slightest will know that this kind of compliment will get you just about anywhere with me, and it would have got into my wallet had I been carrying more than 17 pence on me at the time. He did on several occasions feel the need to point out that he wasn’t ‘a queer’ whilst telling me I was gorgeous which was nice to know as we hugged and said farewell.  I did feel bad that I had no money to give him after such a magnificent effort from him. A tip for you if you ever find yourself begging on the street, don’t just sit there and ask for money, be like Paul and do a whole speech, it really worked on me.

I bet you are thinking wow! That is a pretty exciting story but no it does not end there on that very same night after we had said goodbye to Paul we walked a little further up the street and decided to have a photo next to these weird dog statues when an elderly lady asked if she was in the way. At first I had thought she was angry but she wasn’t and soon enough we found ourselves in our second conversation with a stranger of the night. Her name was Joyce and she was a little old fashioned which some may construe as racist especially in the company of my Asian girlfriend but it was clear that she meant nothing by it, she had just clearly grown up in a lot less politically correct time. Her racism was not the only thing about her though; she had an amazing grasp of language. She asked Kali where she was from and when she heard Sri Lanka she immediately said ‘nundri’ which means thank you. She then listed how many languages she could say thank you in. From Urdu, to Polish, to French, to German, it was truly inspiring her stories of how a man called her a pig in Urdu and she replied who are you calling a pig in his own native language. Language though was not her only talent she then got out her little pack of cards and wrote our names in an old English font which I shall now keep as a souvenir for ever. The conversation with Joyce went of for what seemed like half an hour but we soon said goodbye and then started on our way back to the room and I found myself in an extremely jubilant mood following the evening’s proceedings (well that the absurd amount of sugar I had consumed that day). We got back to the room by about 11 and went to bed.

And here we are on Monday we are going to go into town today again because Kali wants to get some stress relief in the form of shopping which I am a bit apprehensive about. I have never been shopping with her properly yet and I am sure I will end up spending hours waiting around clothes shops waiting for her to try on clothes but you never know it may just be fun. Tomorrow is her next exam and then we shall be headed back home soon after on another six and a half hour coach ride…

This is the end of my Durham blog, and just because I am writing it in word I will give you a word count so here it is… One Thousand, Three Hundred and Twenty Nine words, wow!

See you soon, END

I'm a little bored right now and rather doing anything constructive like looking for a job which would help me combat my boredom as then I would have the money to actually do something. But hey, here I am writing this.

Ok so I shall start where I left off in the last blog - That KOKO visit turned out to be quite an influencial one in the end as it was pretty much the start of my current relationship with my girlfriend Kali. It may have not been any official start to the relationship but it was pretty much the day that I realised what an awesome girl she was and thus we moved on from being the 'just friends' to a little more than that and here I am nearly 6 months down the line and we are still together. I mean obviously there has been the odd rough patch not helped by her parents (anyone who knows of Asian parents will probably understand the problems) and the problem of during term times her living over 200 miles away from me but there you go, these are the things you do for love. Yes I did say that, love. Ant D has turned into a mushy ball of fuzzyness.

I have managed to visit Durham no less than twice in the last term but it is an expensive business. Even by coach which takes about 3 years to get there we are talking over £50 return from essex.

Anyways, obviously that is the biggest event in my recent life. Let me see if I can make a quick list of other things I have done since that day at KOKO:

New Years in Essex
Up To Newcastle for a bit
got girlfriend 'officially'
uni yr2 term2
went to brighton with the lads
turned 20
Kano gig @ uni
had easter holidays
Akala Gig
uni yr2 term3
finished exams
Middlesbrough Music Festival

and here we are. Obviously there was a lot of drinking and such amongst that as well but they are the main points that I can remember off the top of my head. Now I am back for summer and I have no money - I am currently in the middle of re-vamping the fruit leagues football kits and thinking I might make people in football manager, things are that bad.

END

As i pointed out in the last blog, I am back down London way for the Christmas holidays and so naturally, there had to be a reunion drink in the Wimbledon weatherspoons.

So being skint and all I decided that the best idea would be to start drinking at home so that I wouldn't spend as much money when I was out, the typical thoughts of a university student. So I polished off the bad whiskey that I had brought back from uni with me and had a little drop of the parents vodka before heading towards Wimbledon at around half seven. I met Mary at the statues and then we made our way to Weatherspoons and were just about to get in the first drinks when we got a text. A few of the guys were in O'Neils.. I mean really. Don't get me wrong, O'Neils is a great pub and has provided a good end to a night on more than one occasion but for the start of a night, no, there were no seats and it is more expensive which is just something I can't deal with. But we went over had a drink there before convincing the majority of people to leave and come back to Spoons.

So we proceeded to drink and reminisce about old times and new and of course a few little jabs at various people, I appeared to be taking most of it but I didn't mind I was already quite drunk. Despite my not wanting to spend much I managed to spend all of my £20 and I even think I probably scrounged some drinks off some other people but I did have some strange ones. I joined Dave in drinking lager and lime which is quite afemminate but they do taste quite nice its true. I also had my first ever shot of Jagermeister and i don't think I will be having another, it was disgusting. Needless to say by this point I was very drunk and thus I don't really remember very well what happened for the most part in Spoons, especially the saying goodbye to people. I can only assume I did it as I am such a well-mannered individual but if I didn't I apologise.

My next memory is standing by the cash point with John, Dan and Dom who proceeded to give me money so that I could order some gig tickets for them and myself. I don't remember discussing the said gig previously in the pub but I will just have to assume we did. So there I found myself with £90. I'm not entirely sure who thought it was a good plan to give the drunkest person all the money but I had it nevertheless - then theres another bit of a blank and it was just me and Dom and we were in south Wimbledon and we decided to go into some place and buy some pizza. You know, as you do when drunk.. obviously I used some of this money that wasn't actually mine and we ate and sat down at the bus stop.

This is where it gets quite amusing.. two drunks came over to us and tried to blag some pizza, I was not having any of this and so I hugged the box and told them it was all mine, but the woman kept asking so I had to keep saying no, I even resorted to calling myself an unsharing wanker before she got the point. Then as you do when you are drunk you talk to the other drunks and the woman said to dom "what are you then? a muslim? a hindu?" to which we were both a bit shocked but he answered politely saying he was a catholic and we used that awkwardness to get away and we moved down to the next bus stop to finish our pizza, but then we heard then coming so we hid around the back behind a bush. The drunk woman and man went passed and I clearly heard her say something racist about 'the black man' and so after letting them walk on a little and politely asking Dom if he minded, I went out and shouted at the top of my voice "YOU FUCKING RACIST SLAG" to which i heard a reply of OI, so we ran and hid and then walked the back paths round to make sure they didn't find us and beat us up. Of course we were now in tears of laughter as tends to happen when something is funny and your drunk. We walked down to Colliers Wood high street and Dom went to get a taxi, and went on to tell all the people there about the story, they seemed a little non-fussed, but we were still giggling like school girls. We said goodbye and then he went.

On the short walk I still had to do on my own I decided to write little happy messages in the frost covering the cars, I must have done about ten or so before I realised that I was only doing it because I was very drunk and so I stopped and walked home, still giggling to myself. I then made a sandwich and passed out on my bed and now here I am still hung over but I had fun so it's all ok. But my money problem probably won't be changing all that soon as I just phoned REED employment and they say there are no temp jobs going, which is a bit of a bummer, ah well here hoping I get some Christmas money. Au Revoir

END