I Survived Huddersfield Polytechnic
A Reminiscence
James Gibbon, July 2025
Part 1: A New Hope
It’s the late evening of September 22nd, 1979. I’m at Stafford Bingley Hall, watching Rush, my favourite band, bring the second of two mesmerising concerts to a close. But as the dying strains of La Villa Strangiato fade, an odd thought arrives in my head.
I’m not going home.
I was in a surreal sort of limbo; this weekend excursion to Stafford to see my favourite band was a sort of gateway between one life and another. The next day, I was to take a train directly to Huddersfield, to begin life as a student. I’d flown the nest. Henceforth, the cosy little corner of suburban Hartlepool where I’d lived my whole life was no longer home.
I know that I stayed in a guest house in Stafford both nights but oddly, I can’t remember a thing about it. The room, the proprietor, the location. All completely blank. But I do remember arriving at the railway station the next morning. A large sign at the front of the station advertised a special service (to Manchester, probably) for fans of “The Rush”. Unfortunately, due to engineering works (this was of course a Sunday), I discovered that I had to take a replacement bus service to Huddersfield.
I remember that the bus journey was long and tedious, calling at at least four railway stations on the way. You might think I was excited to be at the precipice of life as a student, but I wasn’t really. I had no particular desire to do a Humanities degree. I’d just drifted into it by default because English and French were my A level subjects.
I’m not sure, all these years later, why I didn’t just do French. I had a far greater affinity for that than English Literature. Perhaps I’d applied for a French degree unsuccessfully. I can’t remember.
As I gazed out of the bus window at the bleak, rolling Yorkshire landscape, I was more apprehensive than excited. I knew I’d be sharing a room with another student, which would certainly be a new experience and possibly not a particularly positive one. Also, my parents were due to meet me at Huddersfield Station. I’d told them I’d be there at 1pm, which was a blatant guess. I just couldn’t be bothered to check the railway timetable. If I had made the proper enquiries in advance, I’d have known that I’d be taking a replacement bus service of course, and no doubt I’d have been furnished with a reasonable estimate of my time of arrival.
By a remarkable coincidence, the bus rolled into the car park at Huddersfield Railway Station at 12:59pm. My parents were there, standing next to their car in the late summer sunshine, smiling broadly. I strolled over to the car. My mum thanked me for having provided them with a diligently accurate arrival time. I climbed into the back seat, next to my acoustic guitar, a record player and my radio cassette. In the boot were a large cardboard box full of tinned food, pot noodles and a massive tin of instant coffee. There was a box full of books, and bags of clothes.
Next stop — a place called “Woodlands”.
We must have arrived there about ten minutes later, I suppose. We pulled up into the courtyard of a rather large, grand house — really nothing like my expectation from the term “halls of residence”. A few other parents were there, unloading student belongings from cars and carrying them into the house. I remember that my dad struck up a conversation with an amiable chap who’d brought his son from Stanley, in County Durham. On learning that we were from Hartlepool, only twenty miles away from there, he gestured to me and said “at least he’ll have someone to talk to”.
My parents hung around for a while, naturally. Inevitably they had plenty of advice — don’t drink too much, please study hard, eat properly, keep the place tidy. After about ten minutes of it I couldn’t wait for them to leave, but I’ll never forget the moment when they did. This is it, I thought. You’re really on your own, now.
If I were 19 years old now and moving into my first accommodation away from home, I’d probably be typing a WiFi code into a smartphone in the first five minutes. I’d have removed a laptop from a backpack before unpacking my clothes. I’d be exchanging messages with online friends via Facebook, Insta, a WhatsApp group or a web forum within the first half hour, probably. Socially, I’d still be connected.
But for the late-teenager of 1979, those circumstances were a lot more isolating. There was a payphone down on the first floor. That’s it. I didn’t have a TV in the room either, though I did have a radio. Laptop computers did not exist, and neither did the Internet.
So I set about installing myself in my new living space. It was at the very top of the house. My roommate hadn’t turned up yet. It was a pleasant enough room with a window looking down over the garden at the rear. I took the bed next to the window. It was small and a little bit rickety. I started to put my clothes away, arranged a few things on the desk, set the radio cassette up on the bedside table. There was a huge wardrobe, arranged as a sort of half-partition down the middle of what was a decent-sized room, giving me a bit of a private space next to the bed. I wandered tentatively along the corridor to check out the bathroom. There were about four of them in the house. The one on the top floor was very close to my room. Handy.
I probably hung around my room for at least half an hour, hoping my roommate would turn up, before venturing downstairs on my own. Eventually I did wander down there, hesitantly, to check out the kitchen. A group of people from other rooms were standing around in there, two girls and a young man. I said hello of course and they were pleasant enough, but I didn’t try to join their conversation. I was a pretty shy and withdrawn teenager. I made some coffee — my mum had thoughtfully included some powdered coffee whitener in my large cardboard box of goodies — or possibly a pot noodle, and retreated quickly to the room.
I already felt like an outsider.
The late afternoon dimmed into a long, solitary evening. My roommate didn’t materialise. I composed a long letter to a friend in Yugoslavia. I must have discovered the off licence along the road at some point, because I recall that cans of Kronenbourg were involved. It’s highly unlikely that my mum would have thought to include them in the cardboard box with the tinned spaghetti and pot noodles. I went and had a bath, along the corridor. The water was hot, but the bathroom was cold. I listened to my radio. And eventually, I slept.
I don’t think I made breakfast, the following morning. I’d have felt too self-conscious going to to the kitchen on my own and possibly queuing for a toaster. I got up, brushed my teeth, dressed, got my things together — pens, note paper, documents from the Poly — and performed the five minute walk to the bus stop, next to a little bandstand-shaped bus shelter along the Old Halifax Road.
I was a student! And now I’d arrived at Huddersfield, I’d started to feel pretty excited about it.
I still have my ticket from that first bus ride into town. The print faded years ago; now it’s a completely blank piece of pale yellow paper, about 3cm square.
I don’t remember a lot about the first day. I do remember that everyone in First Year Humanities gathered in one of the lecture rooms in the main building for a sort of welcome / introduction talk given by one of the course lecturers. Very friendly, very pleasant. Everyone was given more handouts, timetables, information about services on the campus and the Student Union.
My roommate, a young man from Warrington named Chris, arrived the next afternoon. He’d just recovered from glandular fever. His slightly taciturn stepdad helped him dump his suitcases and cardboard boxes into the room we shared, then left immediately.
Chris was a very down-to-earth and friendly sort of chap, with a fetching quiff of ginger hair. We got on really well. In the following weeks we’d spend many hours together in the local pubs. Sometimes we’d buy one of those seven pint beer cans — a peculiarly 1970s phenomenon — to bring home with us so we could continue drinking into the late hours. We’d sit on the floor and sing along to Chris’ Bob Dylan records in our room on the top floor. Ballad of a Thin Man and Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 were particular favourites.
Fresher’s week passed in a sort of slightly surreal blur. Wilko Johnson played the refectory hall one evening. I remember a talk by a twenty-five year old Trevor Philips, then president of the National Union of Students, in the Polytechnic main hall — although I can’t remember a word he said. I remember a talk by a local police officer, also in the main hall, concerning useful precautions to take to avoid the attention of the “Yorkshire Ripper”. Peter Sutcliffe had killed two students that year and some of the girls I knew were terrified.
I’d committed to studying English and French, but I hadn’t chosen my third subject yet. I chose Philosophy despite attending a presentation given by an unsettlingly stern South African lecturer, and after few days’ deliberation. The Philosophy department organised a memorable cheese and wine event one afternoon. Nothing fancy — cubes of Red Leicester or Cheddar on cocktail sticks accompanied by cheap white wine in disposable cups.
To be honest alcohol played quite a prominent role in my life that first week. There were frequent visits to the Student Union bar on the campus, a run-down but cosy little establishment where Newcastle Exhibition could be acquired at the student-grant-friendly price of 35p a pint. A go on the Space Invaders machine cost 10p. I inhabited a gently alcohol-impaired haze.
Lectures and tutorials were a curious mix. French lectures were actually pretty similar to my sixth form experience — pretty much a classroom situation with about thirty other students. I was surprised to find that I was one of the most capable of them. It had always been my best subject at school.
English lectures were very formal, conducted in a large lecture theatre, not very interactive. But there were also tutorials, cosy little affairs with six or seven of us sitting round in chairs in a small office. I remember a happy hour spent talking about Philip Larkin and his poetry with a particularly enthusiastic lecturer. Mostly though, the English course was based on impenetrable works of fiction that held no appeal for me at all. It didn’t bode well. I’d scraped through an English Literature A level by skimming through the course material and reading notes I’d taken during lessons. I’d never read any of the literature properly. Would the same approach work here? On a degree course? I knew I wasn’t going to be able to motivate myself to read the tedious old books in the curriculum.
Philosophy was interesting. I remember the first lecture, again in a fairly informal classroom setting, being about logic and “truth tables”. I found the content puzzling. The lecture covered methods to address concepts in logic that to me, were simplistic. Childlike, even. Later in life I would come to realise that my brain is just wired differently. Logical relationships and patterns that frustrated or confused other people were instantly intuitive to me.
Chris would go home to Warrington at weekends and although I was on friendly terms with some of the other residents of Woodlands, I wasn’t really pally with any of them. I might have a chat for a few minutes in the kitchen, but certainly I wouldn’t think of going drinking with them. I tended not to bother with the TV room on the ground floor, unless I had it to myself. My first weekend was fairly solitary mostly, although I did go for an impromptu football match on a nearby field with some of the lads in the house. I think I was a last minute addition to make up the numbers. I played in goal, and the opposition gave me little trouble.
So on the second weekend, I decided I’d go home to Hartlepool. A surprise visit. As much as anything actually I was looking forward to the train journey. A bit of an adventure. I had one lecture on a Friday. Philosophy. So I skipped it and took the train home on the Thursday afternoon.
I ran into my cousin Patricia in Hartlepool, while walking home from the railway station. She asked me if I’d like to go to a party on the Saturday. Her parents were away. Why not?
My mum was pleasantly surprised to see me. My relationship to my old home was different now .. as a degree student, living independently — sort of — I felt a certain validation, a stature that had hitherto been absent. It was decidedly misplaced. But we shall explore that in later paragraphs, reader.
At Patricia’s party I met a young woman called Janet and somehow, suddenly, I was in my first relationship. I’d spent my whole life in my home town without any appreciable interest from the opposite sex but two weeks after I’d moved somewhere else, I had a girlfriend there. Fabulous timing.
My first relationship brought with it a sort of personal renaissance. I got my hair cut. Hitherto I’d been a sort of gangling scruff with a mop of bushy hair. I started buying clothes. I bought some straight-legged jeans — and while it may seem difficult to understand now, I can’t tell you what a profound fashion statement this was in the late ’70s. Actually they took a bit of getting used to. I felt like a two pin plug for the first few days. But eventually, I felt a thrill every time I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, with my trendy short haircut and my “straights” on. I had an Indian cotton Nehru shirt as well. I felt like a radical New Waver. I smoked very occasionally at this time I’m sorry to say and a pack of Gauloises Longues protruding from my denim jacket’s breast pocket usually completed the look.
I became enchanted by male bathroom products, especially fragrances. I’d spend hours in Boots. I discovered Blue Stratos and (yes) Brut 33. I even bought some conditioner. To this day there are few things I like more than browsing the male toiletries shelves at a supermarket.
From this point on I spent every weekend in my home town, always missing the single Friday lecture to travel home on a Thursday. I’d call in at the Student Union refectory where I’d queue up for a chicken pie with gravy and chips, which came to 25p. Then I’d walk briskly to the railway station and buy a weekend return to Hartlepool. It cost £4.75, which seemed a lot at the time.
The railway journey home was always a joy. It took about three hours. I’d have to change at York, then Darlington. Sometimes the train to York would be towing an old-fashioned compartment carriage and more often than not I’d get a compartment to myself.
Occasionally I’d change at Thornaby, just ten minutes from Hartlepool. The railway station there had been a grand old place in the 19th century but by the late 1970s it was damp, decaying and overrun by grass and weeds. It had a dusty old waiting room, with a huge, tarnished old mirror dominating one of the walls and an empty fireplace, superseded by a single bar electric heater suspended apologetically from the high ceiling. It was flattened a few years later; it’s just two platforms with little brick shelters now.
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Sometimes (somehow), I’d take the wrong train from Huddersfield. I’d find myself in some remote place I’d never heard of, then have to work out which combination of trains to take to reach Hartlepool. I remember spending more than an hour at Stalybridge, one Thursday afternoon. To this day I have a recurring dream about being lost in the rail network, unable to find my way to Hartlepool. Usually there’s a train arriving and I’m unsure whether I’m supposed to get on it. Honestly, I have a variation of this dream about once a week.
Chris and I frequented a pub called The Junction. Late one night in December, on returning from an evening there, we heard some sort of commotion round the back of the house. It sounded like fireworks were going off. So we strolled round the side, to the garden, to investigate. Unfortunately, in the pitch black darkness, we both casually walked off the edge of a ledge onto the driveway running about six feet below. Chris fell on his left arm. I fell very painfully on my left foot.
I assumed, or hoped, that it was a sprain. I spent a very uncomfortable night failing to sleep. The next day, one of the girls in the house insisted on examining it. She declared that it was broken. She called an ambulance. She actually dialled 999; the ambulance arrived about 15 minutes later, blue lights flashing. But at least she wasn’t wrong about my foot. A couple of hours later, it was in plaster.
Chris had broken his arm.
Part 2: Into Darkness
You might assume that my broken foot made attending lectures more difficult, but the unfortunate truth is that by this time I wasn’t even trying to attend them. My participation in the degree course I had left home to pursue had collapsed.
There had come a tipping point a couple of weeks earlier. I’d been given a handout for a Philosophy assignment I was expected to complete, I’d left it until the last minute to do it (of course), and I’d lost it. I couldn’t face going to the lecture at which I was supposed to hand it in, not having done it. So I didn’t.
It seems ridiculous to me now but I just couldn’t confront the idea of going to see the lecturer to apologise, or explain what had happened. I didn’t intend simply to drop out, of course. But I let the problem fester rather than dealing with it.
Pretty soon I wasn’t going to any of my lectures, for any of the three subjects. To be honest I’m not exactly sure, now, why I simultaneously withdrew from the English and French lectures as well. Perhaps I thought it was pointless to turn up there, since I’d disengaged from the Philosopy module. More probably, I just didn’t dare show my face around the polytechnic. It wasn’t long of course before the problem had become, in my mind at least, unresolvable. My protracted absence from the lectures had became harder to explain than the unaddressed coursework.
I was of course dismayed to have come off the rails of the new life I was supposed to have started only a matter of weeks earlier. I felt very insecure. It was agonising. But the underlying truth was that I hadn’t engaged with the course. I had no motivation for it. I hadn’t completely ignored the course material, but I’d done the bare minimum at best and even if I hadn’t had a ridiculous episode in which a missing piece of paper with a course assignment sent me spiralling down a deep hole, I would have come unstuck at some point.
Some time toward the end of that first term, I had a difficult phone call with my mum. I didn’t dare tell her what had happened, but I told her that the course wasn’t going well, and that I wanted to come home and look for a job instead. Predictably (and not unreasonably) she was dismayed by this. And she was adamant that I wasn’t going to do that. No: I was going to study hard and keep at it.
I was doomed. But that was that, I was just going to have to maintain the pretence. Before the end of the first term I was taking a train to Huddersfield every Sunday afternoon then coming back again on Thursday, without attending a single lecture in between. How all this was going to resolve itself eventually I had no idea.
I was supposed to attend hospital to have my foot examined, with a view to having the plaster removed, four weeks after I’d broken it. The plaster had become a massive inconvenience. The hospital hadn’t given me any crutches and it was very hard to get around, although somehow I did manage to get to Hartlepool and back at least once, very self-consciously.
But after two weeks I’d decided that my foot must have healed sufficiently, because it seemed to have stopped hurting. I sat on the edge of my bed in my room at Woodlands and removed my plaster with a dinner knife borrowed from the kitchen. You won’t be surprised to hear that this was a mistake. As soon as I put my weight on my left foot: agony. I could barely walk on it. I’ve no doubt at all that I made my recovery from a broken foot more protracted and painful, but fortunately it did seem to heal regardless over the next few weeks. I still get a twinge of pain in it after a long walk sometimes, especially when it’s cold. But you’ll be relieved to know I don’t walk with a limp.
Chris decided to leave at the end of the first term. I often wonder what he did with his life after that, but I didn’t keep in touch.
So in January 1980 I returned, after a Christmas break during which I’d done my best to forget about Huddersfield, to Woodlands. I was required to vacate my room on the top floor and share a room on the first floor, at the front of the house, with a diminutive young man from Rochdale named Simon. Simon’s first term roommate had also decided to leave the polytechnic.
I liked Simon, apart from the time he drank an entire bottle of Smirnoff then begged me to call an ambulance for him. He was pleasant and friendly, but we never bonded. We didn’t go drinking together. He was already in a relationship with another Woodlands resident, a plump girl called Wendy who ruled him like a stern schoolmistress. Simon liked that. He didn’t spend much time in our room.
Simon was the only other Woodlands resident on the Humanities course. But we only had the English module in common and we hadn’t ever attended the smaller tutorials together. I don’t think he ever noticed I was missing from the lectures, or if he did — he never mentioned it. And neither did I.
I settled into a sort of routine. During the day, I’d stroll into the town centre. Rummage through a few bookshops, browse the record shelves at Boots and WH Smith. Sometimes I’d get a few groceries to augment my dwindling supply of tinned spaghetti and rice pudding, thoughtfully provided by my mum. Lunch was often a coleslaw sandwich. Dinner, always carried to my room from the kitchen, was sometimes a ‘Knoodle’ (a proprietary brand of pot noodle manufactured by Knorr. I was especially fond of them).
Sometimes I didn’t go out during the day at all. I’d spend it in my room, listening to Radio One — Simon Bates, then Paul Burnett. Or I’d occasionally spend a couple of hours on my own in the communal living room downstairs. It had a perpetual slightly acrid aroma; dust and stale cigarette smoke bonded to the old upholstery in there. But it had a telly and I quite liked to watch an old film in the afternoon.
Quite often I’d chat to the cleaner who came in once a week. She was about seventy I think, or perhaps she’d just had a hard life. She was called Elsie. She usually wanted to hear about my love life. In one of our conversations, she tried to convince me to propose. “Eeh it’s a lovely age to get married that Jim, nineteen”.
I was happier in the evenings, when (after all) I wasn’t supposed to be somewhere else. Most evenings, I’d give Janet a call from the payphone along the hall, for as long as my 50p lasted (about 15 minutes, I think). I’d sit on my bed, listening to Mike Read, then John Peel on Radio 1 — or picking at my acoustic guitar. I taught myself to play Yesterday in there. I read music magazines. And I spent many hours absorbed in the NME Encyclopedia Of Rock. It had been a Christmas present from a cousin. I did drink occasionally, but not often. I was a moderate drinker, as you’d hope at the age of nineteen — though I do remember getting absolutely hammered on a bottle of white vermouth one night and making myself thoroughly sick.
If this all sounds a bit tragic, well — oddly enough I remember those solitary evenings with some affection. They were only four nights of the week after all, and I had my extended amorous weekends in Hartlepool to look forward to. But in the back of my mind I felt like I was standing paralysed in a dark tunnel, waiting to be hit by a train. Surely, trouble was coming — in the form of an outraged parent, or incensed degree course administrators. I was also acutely aware that I was the author of my own unravelling. I had no plan. I just buried my head in the sand. I was better at that than most.
It was all a lot easier to forget about in Hartlepool of course, and those long train journeys from my home town to Huddersfield on a Sunday, especially on dark winter evenings, were more depressing than I can describe.
An excruciating episode occurred on a Thursday in the second term as I was walking across the campus to the Student Union, to consume my weekly chicken pie and chips before catching the train home. One of my French lecturers spotted me.
Oh God, oh Christ, no.
I tried to turn away, as inconspicuously as I could. He laughed, either thinking I was joking or trying to defuse the tension. He came over to me and asked me to come to his office, which of course I did.
It was a cosy little space. I was probably in there for about ten minutes. He was kind and empathetic. He didn’t ask what had happened, but he wanted to help me to salvage the situation. I can’t remember what I said, or what his plan was. It must have been exquisitely awkward and I suspect my mental operating system has mostly erased it to preserve my sanity.
I’m certain though that I nodded appreciatively and went along with whatever he said. But it was too late. After all he couldn’t do anything about the English or Philosophy courses. I assumed that he didn’t know the extent of my academic withdrawal and I didn’t tell him. I felt awful to be letting him down when he had offered genuine concern and help, but I knew I was wasting his time before I left his office.
I was bruised. I’d suffered a glancing blow with reality. But: the charade continued, the weeks passed, the Easter break came and went; the oncoming train, in whatever form it would arrive, drew silently closer.
On the ground floor in Woodlands, near the front door, were a set of pigeonholes. I checked them occasionally and some time in May, in the third term, everyone received a letter advising them of the dates, times and locations of their end-of-year exams. Including me. I took my letter upstairs, read it twice, then stared blankly at it for a minute. It was very impersonal, issued presumably by some anonymous administrator who had no idea what my circumstances were.
I placed my head gently in my hands and confronted the awful truth that I was going to have to attend these exams. My fear was that if I didn’t, some sort of active disciplinary action might occur that my parents would find out about. Perhaps action might be taken against me to recover my first year student grant.
My blood ran cold as I contemplated the humiliation of turning up there after an absence of several months. But the fear of whatever consequences might arise from failing to attend them — proper, definitive academic delinquence — was no less insurmountable.
I can never forget the bus ride into the town for the first exam, with my stomach tied in knots. Or the long wait outside the exam hall with the other candidates. I desperately wanted to be invisible. Perhaps I should have adopted a disguise. There were surprised looks, puzzled looks, looks of disbelief. No-one spoke to me.
Both my French lecturers were present for this first exam. It took place in a hall on the third floor of one of the campus buildings in the town centre. Glyn Williams, the kind man who’d offered help and concern weeks earlier, offered a sensitive, sympathetic smile as he gently placed the exam paper on my desk. I felt wretched of course. Barry Cadwallader, the other one, gave me a look of astonishment blended with outrage, morphing into a sneer of performative contempt. Much easier for me to process, and not undeserved.
It was a two hour exam. I managed to get through it in twenty-five minutes, put my pen away, got up and left quietly. As I descended the stairs to the exit on the ground floor, one of the invigilators, presumably another polytechnic lecturer but not someone I recognised, came running after me. “Someone has to come with you if you need the toilet”, he said. I explained that I’d completed the paper thank-you, turned, and got out of there.
The remaining exams — I think there were another three of them — must have passed in a very similar fashion though curiously, I only remember the first one. My dad came to pick me up from Woodlands the day after the last exam. Simon had already left. I packed my things into the back of the car in about three minutes, I said an indecently quick goodbye to three of the other students who were loitering near the front door, and I didn’t look back.
Two weeks later I’m lying in bed in Hartlepool. It’s about 9:30 in the morning. My mum arrives at my bedroom door with a letter bearing a Huddersfield postmark. She insists that I open it there and then. I suppress an internal panic and sit up and open it gingerly, hoping that she won’t demand to read it herself, and that I can bluff it out. Fortunately, it’s nothing more alarming than a set of dispassionately delivered exam results. I’ve failed them of course. To my amusement, I got what I thought was a creditable mark for French in the circumstances. And surprisingly there’s an invitation to apply to resit all of the exams.
I’ve already told her what to expect. I pass on the news. To my relief, there’s no drama. It’s over. It’s not exactly a happy ending; I spend the next few years rudderless, unemployed.
Epilogue: The Force Awakens (Eventually)
My relationship with Janet ploughed on for another four years, until she decided to pursue higher education herself in another part of the country and she naturally moved on.
But a few weeks after that ominous letter arrived from Huddersfield, I was exposed to a Sinclair ZX-81, an early (and primitive) “home computer”. I became fascinated by it. I learned to write computer programs for my own amusement. I acquired a Computer Science A level from Hartlepool’s further education college a couple of years later and in September 1985, I enrolled on a degree course at Teesside as a mature student.
This time, I engaged. I thrived. Every minute of my first year there was subliminally driven by my dismal failure five years earlier. I actually had to blink back an emotional tear when I turned up for my first end-of-year exam, comfortable, confident and prepared. And four years later, armed with an honours degree in Computer Science, I embarked on a long and rewarding career in Information Technology.
Getting that degree certificate in my hand in 1989 would not have meant nearly so much without having undergone that tortuous experience in West Yorkshire. It was more than a qualification, it was a redemption.
It’s tempting to frame my Huddersfield episode as a rite of passage. In truth it wasn’t that. It took me years to sort myself out. But it was a beginning of adulthood. You only get one of them, and this one was mine. I’m 65 years old now, and before it fades like the ink on an old bus ticket, I’m glad to have written it down.
