Student rooms

Similarities and differences

I saw a photo recently of a current student’s bookshelf, in a remarkably tidy college room unlike anything I remember from my distant university days. Seeing it sent me scrabbling around in the photo albums until I could find some (most of them completely unpublishable) photos of the room I was in for my final undergraduate year, back in the dark ages. It was quite interesting to see what I had (and indeed what I didn’t have), and to wonder where some of my stuff is now, so here we go:

· LPs. Lots of LPs. Hundreds. Most of them now live on top of a wardrobe upstairs, so I’ve still got them all (and more). Occasionally some of them take a trip downstairs to the turntable in the living room, and a handful of them have taken up permanent residence in that room, close at hand.

· Cassettes. I never really liked cassettes, except in the car, and they’ve all disappeared, except one. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve still got Frank Zappa’s Zoot Allures on a cassette, even though I haven’t been able to listen to it in that format since some time back in the last century.

· An amplifier, turntable, cassette deck and speakers. The speakers back then were a pair of Goodmans RB35s. I’ve just had a look online and they’re still worth a bit, but I traded them in quite a while back for something bigger, and better, at a HiFi shop in High Wycombe that’s no longer trading. Looking back, having a pair of 12-inch bass speakers in a student room could be considered a bit antisocial, but I don’t think I ever turned them up too much (did I?).

· A guitar amplifier. It gets worse, I also had a JMI (Jennings Musical Industries) Domino amp (the immediate precursor to the Vox AC30, apparently). It was already old (made in 1960 or so) when I bought it from Mick Doyle’s shop by the White Hart on the Green in Sherborne, and lives in the corner of my office now. Back then, it only really had two settings, (off or loud), but with a pair of Celestion Blue speakers you could definitely hear it right across campus (we checked, once and only once). Also, when the room was cold you could turn it on and keep warm as the valves heated up. At one point a few years later, I worked in a company in Woking where we had some sort of office band (well, we used to play in the boardroom from time to time) and it could bring ceiling tiles down on a good day. It now lives in the corner of my office, but I don’t turn it on very much because it still only really has one volume setting (eleven), which wouldn’t go down well with the neighbours.

· A pair of guitars. One was an extremely cheap Fender Stratocaster copy, which I’d rebuilt but which ultimately suffered from a warped neck. It lives in the loft now. The other was a very old classical guitar which is on a stand right next to me as I type this (which means that anybody who has ever seen me on a screen has also seen it). It’s quite scary to think that, apart from the usual (work, holidays, travel, living abroad, etc.), this guitar has been about the same distance from me for decades. One day I’ll have to work out how to play it, but here’s a photo I took of it, in the same student room, a long time ago (I think it was a study of depth-of-field, or something).

· A set of Golden Lodge spark plugs. I had an Alfa Romeo in my final year at University, which needed a lot of tender loving care just to keep it going. I could probably still strip an Alfasud Boxer engine in my sleep since I spent so much time tinkering with it, and I can still remember the horror of trying to work on the inboard brakes, which were an absolute nightmare.

· Books. Unread. Some of them are probably still on a shelf upstairs, and probably still unread. I think some of them were dictionaries. I can see that I had a copy of Quid, which was an amazing French reference book. A bit like the Internet, but more portable (and less complete 😉). These days, apparently students read books at Uni, but back in the day, activities like that got in the way of doing proper things.

And not a computer in sight! Nor indeed any intelligence, either artificial or human.

In the last photo (the one of the spark plug in a Coke can) I’ve just noticed a bottle of Tippex in the background. Does anybody still use Tippex?

Thank you for reading.