The day the moon turned red.

Today, I was lucky enough to witness a spectacular lunar eclipse over the cloudless skies of Walsall. At first, I watched as the moon was overcome by darkness, and this in itself was a fascinating image. However, after a few hours of gradual change, Earth’s natural satellite became full of a beautiful, copper-red glow. This was like nothing that I had ever seen before. I was informed about the impending eclipse via the medium of the internet, and of course, it is natural for us to hear about and understand these phenomena at the click of a mouse in 2007. This, however, made me wonder about the experiences of people living many years in the past. With nothing to explain such an occurrence, and no warning of its happening, the shock of looking into the skies to discover a sudden change in the colour of the moon must have been terrifying.

Also this week-end, I seem to have ‘come down’ with some form of the flu. This is not good news. When I first started coughing and sneezing, I imagined that I had simply fallen victim to the common cold. However, the aches and pains throughout my body worked quickly to dispel my ignorance, and I now feel as though I am steadily melting into a puddle of max-strength lemsip. My vocal performance in today’s band practice suffered as a result, but this wasn’t a problem as it was a day for learning the notes, not performing the songs.

Karma seems to have dealt me an interesting hand this week as contracting the flu has been offset by my discovery of a great sum of money! March 1st 2007 will always be remembered as the day that I found six pounds and thirty pence on the floor. The train station at Stoke was the location of my first find, of one pound and thirty pence, and my second was in a Walsall pub, where I was the lucky inheritor of a five pound note.

I will be going back to Keele tomorrow, where I hope to pick up more stories (and money!) over the next few days. Look back for a new blog soon.

Tom

Boredom

University life isn’t all that it promised to be, if you ask me. The first semester was quite exciting – meeting new people, gaining independence and above all, finding new places in which to become extremely drunk.

However, since the start of the second semester, things have started to go steadily downhill. I’ve recently decided that meeting new people wasn’t what I had expected, as I don’t really like 99% of the population of Keele. The people I usually end up chatting to are generally interested in absolutely nothing worthwhile. Seriously, so many of them have done nothing interesting with their whole lives.

The other sort of person I inevitably start chatting to, are the ones who are completely devoid of personality. They will laugh nervously at anything I say, and only give one word answers. I find this incredibly annoying, which is why if someone is so lacking in confidence that they can’t respond to a question properly, I’ll ask them a question such as “what’s your opinion on the high price of organic foods?” and that way, it’s much harder for them to shrug me off with a mumbled groan. The way I see it, I’m doing them a favour! They’re at university to gain the necessary skills to get a job, but if they don’t learn to actually communicate with the other beings on the planet, they’re going to end up on minimum wage (that’s why cleaners do that job.)

Speaking of cleaners, I sometimes feel a rush of sympathy for the poor creatures who hobble about, cleaning up the university grounds. It must be an awful job to see hundreds of people who are studying to make sure they don’t end up doing the horrible jobs that they have to put up with. The person who is meant to hoover my room knocked on my door this morning, and I shouted back “not this week, sleeping!” But it was a horrible lie. I was smugly enjoying an episode of ‘everybody loves raymond’ and thinking about all the beer I was going to buy later.

So, because this semester is becoming slightly repetitive, I’ve found some new hobbies. One of them is demoralising people who I don’t like. However, the most fun is emailing CBBC every day because they “read every email you send in.” Here is today’s email:

“Dear CBBC,

I would like to see more of Johnny Quest! He seems to get into the most entertaining scrapes, and it is great to see that his accompanying gang of fellow adventurers are of many different races!

P.S. Arthur was shit today.”

I eagerly await a reply.

This blog must end here, as I have a night of drinking alone and eating microwave dinners planned, but I will update soon.

Tom