Manchester

Manchester, Wigan and Liverpool. Six intrepid explorers from the South East venture up into the heartland of northern England. They face sinister bed and breakfasts, ferocious weather conditions but most frightening of all – themselves…

Strong personalities. Great huh? They are the life and soul of the party, the best of mates and some of the most energetic and inspiring people you know. Get them all together and what happens? They turn into humans.

Infighting and petty arguments tended to mar this northwards trek, yet fear not! For human nature, thankfully, proved once more that she is worthy of our continued faith. In the end everything worked out for the better and we took in as much as we could of two cities. I have gone from knowing next to nothing about them – to loving them with all my heart. Albeit a judgement based on only three days and two nights - I think both Manchester and Liverpool are, to borrow a word, ace.

These are most likely the words of an awe struck farm dweller taking his first few tentative steps away from his degenerate and self-destructive provincial port town – but what more can I say? Cities are cool.

It’s times like these that continue to make me regret my decision to study at Essex. It’s a great University with even greater people and I would never swap my experiences there for the world. But. It seems like a complete lack of imagination on my behalf to have swapped one backwards-looking hamlet for another only twenty minutes down the road. It is something of a paradox since it is only through the University of Essex that I have been able to get a small taster of the wider world and it is of course that which has allowed me to see the Essex decision in this context.

Perhaps one of Universities finer points is that it impregnates you with a realisation of just exactly how much more you have left to achieve if you ever want to escape your constricted origins. Even if it does not actually providing you with the skills to do so…

Since escape is not easy when you graduate with zero career prospects. Perhaps all those sneering bastards back home were right – perhaps it was all a waste of money - but I’d like to think they don’t all have this inescapable sense of inferiority that the University experience has thus far provided.

Suckers.