47

The other side of the purple door circa 1984

It was never the most prestigious of addresses, but for three surprisingly consistent years in the early-to-mid-1980s, Room 47 in Hostel 3 on the Caerleon campus of Gwent College of Higher Education was the place I called home.

Despite what anyone who might have known me during those three years might now think (if they think about it at all…) in many ways I realise now that they were the golden years, the three years of the most consistent actual sense of happiness that I ever spent. Don’t get me wrong, I spent much of the time feeling thoroughly miserable on a day-to-day basis, and during the final year my father died, but that basic sense of doing something you actually quite enjoy and not having the responsibilities of much other than paying your rent and not feeling beholden to anyone else, somehow now remind me of a spirit of freedom that I don’t really recall having ever since.

Typically, of course, I never really capitalised upon those freedoms, something which I’m sometimes think that I might start to regret slightly as I stagger through middle age. Occasionally, I think it would be nice to have a more exotic past to look back upon, or maybe to have been a little bit more of a scoundrel and possibly had a bit more fun to remember, but I suppose that I must accept that that was never the kind of person I was, and anyway, the scruffy moron I was back then would have been no more appealing to the world in general than the tedious moron I am nowadays would be if I were still alone. I think that those frankly terrifying government sponsored adverts from those disease-ridden few years of the mid-1980s certainly managed to put the lid on any thought I might have had in such directions, but probably meant that I managed to remain friends with people whose lives I might have complicated in some other reality.

It could have been so different. I headed off down to that part of the world full of fear that I would spend three years not talking to a living soul. I was, quite frankly, terrified. Talking to complete strangers was never my strongest suit, but most of the people I actually talked to on my foundation course seemed to have all gone off the Stoke-on-Trent, although my own application to that particular establishment had been hobbled by an unfortunate series of misunderstandings and incompetence by those who were supposed to nurture you through these obstacles.

Anyway, I try not to dwell, and, because the wheel of destiny chose to turn the way it did, a few months later I turned up in South Wales on a Sunday lunchtime, having arrived far too early as usual, and staggered blinkingly around a deserted campus trying to find out where exactly I was supposed to be. Eventually, a few more early birds started to appear and I was pointed in the right direction and soon found myself in one of the many queues I would join that week, still feeling rather alone and frightened and not knowing how to start any conversations with any or all of these confident seeming people who all seemed to know precisely what they were supposed to be doing.

By one of those strange coincidences that sometimes smooth the wheels of life a little, I overheard the chap ahead of me in the queue saying he was supposed to be in room 48, hostel 3, which sounded to me like he was very probably a neighbour of some sort, so I suppressed all the mounting fears and said hello, and, somehow a slight connection had been made and I was no longer quite as alone as I had been. That connection led me to others and, within a surprisingly short space of time, I had a circle of friends that was as close as any I have ever had and who I still miss even to this day.

Pretty soon, back on that long-ago Sunday, I had my key and someone else to talk to, and I was strolling across the campus and eventually found my room on the top floor of a building with internal paintwork that was all an institutional deep purple, and, with that slight rock music connection, it seemed that I had managed to find my new home. It turned out that each of the buildings was colour coded, perhaps to help you find your way home when the worst for wear, with Hostel 1 having blue doors, 2 red, 3 purple and 4 yellow.

I staggered back to my trusty old Cortina which I’d had for what seemed like an astonishingly long time back then, although it must have been less than a year, and lugged my various bits of tat up those many stairs and made myself at home. How many times over the next three years would I lug my entire life up and down those stairs at the beginning and end of every term.

Couldn’t do it now.

Unusually, that purplish room would remain my home for three years as I chose not to venture into the dark world of student housing in the seamier parts of town (I was terrified enough as it was without such additional adventures to consider) and the administrative gods took pity upon me and allocated me the same space each year. Perhaps no-one else wanted it, or perhaps my obsessive inclinations were always more evident than I realised.

Anyway. It was generally a happy, if uneventful, place to be. The door might close and conceal the darkest moments of my miserable existence from the prying eyes of the world, but people knew where I was and would come knocking for a cup of tea and a bit of a chat, or to watch some telly, or (most often) drag me “kicking and screaming” down to the pub. There are many tales I could tell of those three short years so long ago, and pretty much all of them are pretty unspectacular, although that’s never stopped me before. Tales of forgetful Maurice and his various attempts to inadvertently burn the place down, my first experience of tea that tasted like pond water, or the day I nearly took off Leigh’s nose as I got so angry that I flung my keys so hard at the door that they embedded themselves in it just a second before he emerged from his room to see them sailing by. That was a lesson learned.

Generally, though, I enjoyed my time in good old room 47 and it was a wrench to have to leave. Strangely, despite my aversion to numbers of the odd persuasion, I’m only just beginning to realise that pretty much everywhere I’ve ever lived has been an odd number, 29, 47, 3, 37 and 15, and even the years spent living at an even number were at a 2A (which is probably really a 3, if you think about it).

No wonder I’ve spent so many years feeling slightly uncomfortable with my lot in life. Like many things, when you look into it further, it’s all down to the numbers.