Extract from Phthrrt! D2, 4th November 1996.

September 1986 was the start of my academic second year over in rugged but picturesque Bangor and most of the arch-Postgrads had literally just arrived as first years. I wrote a few little notes, the way I do, and my excuse for doing it is not all of you reading this were around Bangor when the Postgrads met up, even before we started using the name BA and the Postgrads in 1987. So - without delving too deeply and making an essay of it, here are a few choice clips for you. Anybody who's read or heard them can go and put the kettle on.

Rachael (Carrick)(absently): I shouldn't - it wouldn't suit you.
("Wonderkate - The thing that Ate Bangor". Not Guilty Press, price £2.50)

1986

Why make such a fuss about this year? Well, to me it's pretty significant. I started back in my second year having spent nearly a whole academic year on pretty but isolated Anglesey, walking to and from lectures and Bangor across the Menai Bridge and looking at the tide and the canoeists from there. I got a room booked in good old Neuadd Reichel early that year, and arrived at the ivy-covered fortress not really knowing anyone, so it was a bit of a readjusting and starting out process for me, as though I was just starting. My black cat died aged 12 in September 1986 and I wanted to know if animals had souls, so I asked at a handy CU meeting during Welcome Week. I asked Nicola Grainger from my German Department group and Jackie Stringfellow, the vice-president of the CU while Chris "Head & Shoulders Bottle Full of Water" Thomas from Reichel was its president, and these two girls were very enthusiastic to talk to me about this subject in general. I started in AOG (The Bangor Assemblies of God church), which moved from the pokey community centre in Bangor high street to Princes Road; the CU moved its meetings from a room with green painted inside walls in the belfries of Top College to the room above the Ffridd Bar. Ying Wah's Chinese takeaway stood where it was. Probably just as well. In Reichel, I met up with Moray, Stuart and Neil. Dave, Andy Rogers whom I already knew from my first year as we'd started in September 1985 and Nick were just over the sports field on the Ffridd site and well within visiting range. Meals and menus varied in Reichel, yo must admit. I remember the charcoal black and pink sausages - depending on which way up they were on the plate, and I noticed a peculiar dessert which I nicknamed "Chocolate Monolith" which consisted of a chocolate chunk shoved rudely in a sea of white sweet sauce. Very Interesting. We also had long shiny-walled corridors to run on and a roof offering beautiful views of Snowdonia and Anglesey although we shouldn't use kitchen windows as access ways onto felt roofs strictly speaking. Other first year students included the threesome "Salt and Light" (Julie Guard, Ali "Silver Moth" Colquhoun and Rachael Carrick) who featured on the "I've found a Love" tape; Rachael and Alison helped form the Lovelaners, of course, (they lived in a madhouse in Love Lane) with Sarah Howard and Kate Lambert (is her middle name "Heidi"?), and everyone sang in harmony. Musical tastes I got to know included the Bangles (of course - could easily be mistaken for Rachael and company if the lights not too good), and others like Dire Straits, Belinda Carlisle... Sigue Sigue Sputnik, The Timelords... Andy and myself usually discuss music and I've got quite a bit of Eighties music.

I arrived like we all did and got used to student routines in this picturesque, geographically partly sheltered corner of north west Wales - with its long ridge called Bangor mountain separating it from the start of the Snowdonia range and the Menai Strait along another side and Anglesey beyond. I got used to the notorious rain in North Wales, and got some rain-wear. In town, I got used to seeing abseilers attacking nearly every standing structure in sight, and the stairwells inside the Student Union building, and possibly other, taller stairwells as well. And climbers; it was mighty difficult sometimes to even stand on a quiet stone terrace outside Top College with your (polystyrene) cup of coffee from the coffee bar without some lanky, bedraggled-looking hobby climber lurching into sight suddenly, or dropping nimbly off a wall because their grip had gone... I went to a couple of students' General Meetings - the ones they were complaining were badly attended - and walked there from Anglesey! Noticed how some "rag" trips seemed to take in a distillery or brewery somewhere on the way, and avoided "pie-in-the-face" or "kidnap" treatment during Rag Week 1986. The Rag president then was a student in the German department called Tim. The furniture in his room was removed and earth put down and grass seed sown once while he was away; he told me. Got used to signs and notices being in two languages - except for some painted in white on walls or footpaths, for the attention of English students studying in Wales, like me. But I didn't get into any bother. Actually, the police force in the city is the only area I've come accross which has Minis in its fleet - they must see the patrolling area as requiring them.

"Put a saucepan on your head and pretend you're a Dalek" - cookery hint.

Reichel room 24 has a view of the mountains, and is far more convenient for the university and shops ("Smokemart" and the little one on College Road served us well for smaller items, in upper Bangor) than the island of Anglesea is; now, instead of not having secure accomodation and having to bunk down on people's floors as I had to during my Welcome week in 1985, I could shop with confidence and stock up with cutlery, a teapot, tea, coffee and biscuits in case of visitors, and two squeezy plastic condiment bottles in case of water fights. Now, at the start of the new, second academic year, I found myself living just up the hill (Glanrafon Hill - remember how it tested your leg muscles) and up Ffridd Road in upper Bangor, I gravitated away from visiting the Students' Union for their evening entertainments in the bar or wherever. I was now becoming part of a new, informal team - the Postgrads although we'd not started using the name - another set of individual people, who'd come away from their home areas to quiet, coastal, partly mountainous north Wales, each with their own contributions to make to this team - and it was the first team I'd really been in.

So - we started exchanging ideas, wandering off out, making up songs, gags, sight gags and so on - improvising with what was there and with a spontaneity which you couldn't really copy, let alone try to plan out. We had sheets of paper which we put comments and jokes and artistic efforts on, in Stuart's room. From these came quotes like "Can't sleep at night - take 'Night Nurse'. Can't sleep in the day - Take Statistics". I've no doubt that one reason for interrupted sleep in Reichel Hall at least, was the fire alarm bell, which led to anyone who was in trooping out in what was almost sure to be a freezing cold night, in their night wear to stand around in the car park and watch the fire brigade arrive and check that the building was safe. Stuart did actual compositions using his trumpet, sometimes late in the evening, because he had assignments given to him by the Music Department. We used recognised tunes and put different lyrics with them to make songs we could use - songs like "We're all going on a Bangor holiday, no more working for a term or two; fun and laughter on a Bangor holiday..." and you can see which tune fits those words quite easily. We met up in the refectory or curved lounge down at the bottom of Glanrafon hall right next to the crossroads with the main road, for dinner, if we weren't meeting in the hall, and most of the rest of you would then be off to do some electronics work or analysis of some marine life fetched out of the Menai strait, depending on what sort of practical you were having. After dinner too! Work - there's an interesting thought worth investigating... Chasing about and fighting with water - yes; dropping people in baths, water-bombing people on patios below and being dropped in baths of water - sometimes; climbing fire escapes - sometimes; work (ha ha ha ha) - yes, conceivably.

Actually, in our German Department, we did things like phonetics lessons and essays about the Berlin Wall and would it ever come down, nuclear disarmament, East and West Germany and so on. We had a lecturer who kept going on about the Stasi (East German secret police). Maybe not with your group, Neil. Then there was that adventure with the Swiss prize-winning author, the coffee percolator, the pile of coffee whitener and the embarrassed silence. Did he ever come back after that? Did we hear from him? You can ask Neil or myself about that one.

I agree, I sometimes thought of university and especially the leisure side of it almost as though it was some kind of holiday camp, with different entertainments laid on by the guests who are there. I spotted a striped sports blazer purely by accident in the Oxfam shop in a Bangor shopping parade and bought it - it seemed to go with the terrain- but I took it off sometimes when I was in the high street and places like that in case any of the non-student locals laughed at me wearing it. The atmosphere was agreeable to me anyway; things were certainly moving faster as one of the Postgrads than they had done when I wasn't. Going back to music, I heard quite a bit of classical music which I don't know a great deal about - from Stuart's tape collection to, I believe, Dave's rendition of "Toccata and Fugue" on the organ in the university's Prichard Jones hall on one occasion. I told you I learned a lot from mixing tastes.

One of the most famous tastes other than musical ones to emerge in Bangor is good old sweet-and-sour-chicken from the takeaway, of course, with its obligatory tub of warm sticky cornflower goo. Another is the custard served in our hall, and compared to more than one industrial sealant, I'm sure. There's the "rocket fuel" coffee, and the "vinegary" tomato sauce we had in our dining hall, and no doubt people have mentioned other items. An early and spontaneous sort of "impression" Moray and myself did in the dining hall was the "television botanist", commentating on who was referred to in fake botanist's terms as studentis networkus, the undergraduate, and whose "natural habitat" was the "watering hole" (the Menai Caults, Belle Vue...). The first superhero sketch in script form was written as well, and featured no "Lovelaners", and jokes like "Can I join you..." and "I've just flown in... boy are my arms tired" were tried, over and over. Meeting students from other departments, I learned about their courses as well - I was told the tallest building around, the Maths tower, has a crack in a central pillar, and this idea was exploited as well.

My Soviet made camera was busy, taking general shots and some action ones, which even I can't explain the success of when some were taken on only 1/30th of a second, because they were indoors. There's an excellent vantage point just back off the A5 heading towards LlanfairPG on Anglesey - a statue of a naval person on a stone column, and you can see right back to the Snowdonia mountains, plus trees, the Strait, bridges - and you can't, I don't think, see much of Bangor at all.

It's a compact place with enough facilities for someone like me - even a pier, although it was closed when I arrived - and I prefer it to a larger, less "personal" place of study. There's more I could add - as you can see, this is a subject I enjoy going on about - but I realise this is a letter fo everybody, and not all of my references will strike a chord with all of you readers. I'll see you soon, and "Yo", readers.

Geoff.