Going Away To College

Those six weeks had been everything I’d wanted them to be and more. The warm months spent outside of school were always special because of being with friends, being free to laze around on hot days breathing in the enchanting aroma of freshly-cut grass and daily barbecues, while celebrating a birthday in August had always been a bonus. But there were a few extra cherries on top of the cake that was the summer holidays that year. 

It hadn’t been any old birthday either, it was my 18^th. A seminal milestone in any person’s life – in fact is there a bigger landmark birthday than 18? Sure, turning one is pretty significant, for the parents anyway. But you don’t know anything about it yourself. What’s the next big one, sweet 16? Sure, but only in America. Us Brits don’t really pay any specific attention to it. Hell, even the big card companies don’t really care. 

Of course, 21 is a big one, but then it’s kind of too close to 18 to represent anything vastly alternative. Both encapsulate coming of age and transforming into adulthood, but 18 is the one that truly has that feel of exiting childhood and donning the metaphorical adult’s suit that will help shape the rest of your life. You learn to drive at 18, your school education ends, you’re legally allowed to drink so getting trashed on the weekends loses that sensation of tasting the forbidden fruit. By 21 you’ve graduated university, if that’s the path pursued, and might already be in your first full-time employment. If university wasn’t for you and you chased a career in the trade, or ventured into some other arena, then you are already a few rungs up on the career ladder. 

Later on, there’s 40 – my dad used to have a coffee mug stashed in the back of the cupboard he never used with the phrase ‘Life begins at 40’ etched on it. To me, as a child when I saw that, 40 seemed ancient. I wasn’t even born when he was 40 but I remember the massive party we had for his 50^th. I was only 6 but vividly recall the joyous night. The significance of 30 was one that crept up on me, personally. They don’t talk about it much when you’re young, it only gains stature when the end of your 20s are looming. And that was pretty iconic for me. It’s supposed to signify the end of your party days, when words or phrases like ‘marriage’, ‘starting a family’ and ‘savings’ should be the goals, if you haven’t got them already. It's when you realise, subconsciously, whether you are actively participating or not at the time, you begin to part with the initial vestiges of youth. I was too busy still having a good time to worry about turning 30.

Immediately prior to my 18^th I’d been on my first lads holiday. The island of Zakynthos, in Greece. Or Zante as it was more commonly known. What a ride that had been. I was 17, a real greenhorn. So was another friend on the trip, Chris Evans. We had to have two of the guys who were already 18 act as our guardians for the trip, to look after us. They were essentially our parents. Laughable really considering looking after us involved making us drink copious amounts of sickly red liquid from unfathomably large fish bowl-sized glasses. 

As I grew older I became more confident and popular, the well-liked and sociable character I am today. But at 17 I was still very naïve, shy, bashful and completely unaware of anything remotely worldly. I had my first real kiss on that trip – a beautiful blonde-haired Norwegian girl, called Anya. On subsequent holidays abroad I realised the mantra for most guys was to pull or sleep with as many girls as possible. But for me, she was the one – just for that trip or forever I wasn’t sure at the time. But I followed her round most nights like a pathetic little puppy dog. We almost missed the bus back to the airport on the last night because I’d gone out to a nightclub trying to find her. I cringe about it now but, looking back, it was sort of adorable. I was only really starting out in life. I was just starting to emerge into the world from my cocoon of isolation and safety.

A few weeks later it was my uncle Andrew’s wedding and I look back fondly now on old Kodak pictures that show off my impressive tan from the Greece trip. I wouldn’t say I resembled a bronzed Greek Adonis or anything, but I looked pretty good. Again, I was pretty timid though, so had no idea about the undercurrent of single life status at weddings, and how they’re hotbeds for romantic liaisons. If I remember there weren’t a lot of eligible ladies in attendance anyway – even though my aunty Julie was closer in age to me than my uncle – but my head was probably still swirling about Anya anyway, and I would not learn this lesson until later on in life.

At a time that my future persona was being sculpted, or at least beginning to, so too was my musical taste. It hasn’t changed a lot over the ensuing years, only honed really. I still listen to a lot of the same bands and artists that I fell in love with at the start. My early dalliances are embarrassing to recall – The Honeyz, Natalie Imbruglia, Ant & Dec and 5ive (actually, I’m not too ashamed of the latter two). But my life was set on a particular course when mum and dad – fresh from a typical Saturday morning visit to clean the static caravan they owned and rented out during the busy summer season near Tenby, in preparation for that week’s guests – brought home an old mix tape the most recent holidaymakers had left behind, or one of their kids had. 

I was 15 and it was the first time I’d listened to Blink 182. I was hooked in immediately by their goofy toilet humour and profanity-laden lyrics. That Christmas – 1999 – I got the Enema of the State album as a present and listened to it repeatedly. They formed the foundation of what was to become an obsession and my taste developed and deepened to include Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, New Found Glory, Finch, The Movielife and Something Corporate to name just a few.

Even though I wasn’t leaving for Swansea and university until September, the curtain on the summer of 2001 was brought down in epic fashion on August bank holiday weekend when I attended my first music festival – Leeds. Eminem, Green Day, Manic Street Preachers, New Found Glory, Feeder, Papa Roach, American Hi-Fi, Grand Theft Audio, Alien Ant Farm, Hundred Reasons. A smorgasbord of moshing, crowd surfing, sweating, drinking watered down pints of Carling that tasted like piss and then pissing in the vacated cups because you daren’t miss the next band by traipsing all the way to the toilets, which were hardly inviting; overcrowded and overflowing with shit anyway. 

The weekend ended with a makeshift fireworks display when one person throwing a spent gas canister from their camping stove onto a naked flame and seeing it rocketing and wheeeeezing into the dialogue-riddled air turned into anyone who had a portable camping stove launching their canisters into the enticing flames and diving for cover. The night sky was perforated by the popping of canisters for well over an hour. By the end of the night the toilet blocks had been set on fire and there was almost a full-scale riot for the stunned security guards to contend with. The festival almost got cancelled the following year because of it. To some, all that might sound like hell on earth. But to me, it was heaven.

So much of the stuff that remains core to my principles and favourite things in life; family, friends, music – and unbeknownst to me at the time, journalism – can be traced back to that prophetic summer. 

It had been an epic way to end high school, that’s for sure. As I said, 18 is a milestone, the milestone, birthday. And is there any more symbolic summer for a person than the one before they go to uni? You’re on the cusp of leaving your old, familiar and comfortable life behind for a brand new one, full of hope and possibilities, but also full of trepidation and uncertainty. 

I was due to head down to Swansea around the end of the month. September 22^nd I think, I wasn’t totally sure. Since coming home from Leeds on the bank holiday weekend and, as September was ushered in, I remember tentatively starting assimilating myself for uni. Well, mum had anyway. 

I was still buzzing from the festival atmosphere. I’d been to a few standalone gigs already, but there is nothing quite like a festival. With its hedonistic, carefree, carnival atmosphere, increasingly foul but familiar smell of ever dampening and slowly rotting grass, balanced out by the comforting and almost constant smell of a campfire. However far you are situated from the booming speakers situated on multiple stages during the day, there is the constant reverberation of music in your ears everywhere you go. I didn’t realise how much people drank. I was and remain the sort of guy that drinks to get hammered, I slope into an even more sociable and amicable mood. I don’t actually enjoy the taste of beer. If I’m actually thirsty I’ll have a coke or water. But that weekend I drank nothing but lager, morning noon and night. The alcohol and music place my head in a constant haze.

The only reason the buzz was starting to wear off was because it was now September and I had nothing much else planned before leaving for uni – plus it was mum who was the driving force behind getting me prepared to go. Buying sets of saucepans, a shiny new member of what I think was every possible piece of cutlery you could wish to find in a kitchen. Student cookbooks and survival guides, medical kits, new pants and socks, duvet sets. I think the only thing she didn’t buy was condoms, and that was as much out of her own embarrassment about broaching the subject of sex than wanting to make me blush.

I can’t remember exactly what part of my life that was coming with me I was packing away that day, but I was busy with some task or another when my feverous duties were halted completely by the news and the smoke billowing from the towers. Having had the TV on leisurely and insignificantly in the background, I became suddenly transfixed by the sheer panic and statuesque shock simultaneously emanating towards me out of the small 16” screen. 

I know it’s a long time ago now but I can remember that whatever I was doing at the time, I did nothing else for the rest of the day but watch the coverage plastered all over the news channels. The internet was a thing but not really, not at your fingertips as it is today, and smartphones were years away from hitting the shelves, so I stayed glued to the TV screen all day. Mum and dad were both in work I think and I don’t remember where my younger brother was. They could have all been in the house for all I was aware, but I can’t remember anything apart from the mass of chaotic images; panicked New Yorkers sprinting for cover as first the south World Trade Center tower came down and then the north one and the madness that was swarming around them. 

Television reporters desperately scrambled to get hold of any shred of detail and interviewed eyewitnesses, flapping for any new information while trying to reliably inform the studio, and the world, what the hell had happened. Cut to the newsreader in the studios of the BBC and Sky News solemnly announcing the updates as the number of dead continued to steadily rise and relaying the shock that this was a terrorist attack and how the most powerful nation on the planet had seen its pillars of wealth and strength utterly destroyed, with ease. The footage of the Boeing 767 – United Airlines Flight 175 – hurtling towards the south tower and then exploding into a devastating fireball just didn’t look real, it still seems fake to me, even today. The first plane – American Airlines Flight 11 – had been hijacked at 08:25 local time (12:25 GMT) and crashed 18 minutes later into the north tower. The south tower collision, so memorably captured on film, occurred 38 minutes after. 

A third plane – American Airlines Flight 77 – even reached the Pentagon. Totemic BBC newsreader Peter Sissons later that evening uttered the memorable and chilling line about how the terrorists were “mocking America’s defensive might” after it was flown into the side of the iconic Washington monument another 37 minutes after the south tower explosion.

As a budding journalist at the time, I’m not sure I’ve ever been as engrossed by a singular event before, or since. Reports detailing the attacks and lines like “three civilian airliners which hijackers turned into flying bombs” remain etched in my memory, as was the first time I heard or read the name Osama bin Laden. 

I can’t remember what I did the next day, or in the days after the 9/11 attacks but I’m sure my mind was anywhere but university and the mix of excitement and butterflies taking such a leap entails. 

Memories of that perfect summer and thoughts of the next chapter in my life seemed insignificant compared to the thousands upon thousands of people whose own lives had been extinguished or altered forever by that destructive and death-filled day.