Yeah, you heard me, October. I’m dissing your ability to be autumnunal. Whatcha gonna do?

[Checks the weather]

Damn. Well, thanks for three days of loveliness at least, oh 10th month of the year!

Today I started University, officially.

A relaxed pace 20 minute walk (without getting lost – boom!) got me from my flat to the classroom, tshirt and backpack on my back and shorts on my legs. The morning was spent getting to know people on the course, and doing some creative “Here are some basics about working to instructions vs working to your own brief” tasks.

The first was a “make yourself out of plasticine” task. Mine was not the best thing I’ve ever made. We’ll just leave it at that, but let’s just put it this way: I felt it appropriate to add a sign for him to hold with “Help!” written on it.

The second was a “make a paper airplane” task. Pretty simple, but we had to choose a set of instructions from whichever website we chose and ensure we didn’t just do a basic, standard paper plane. So there were some odd designs in that room. Some flew better than others.

Mine… well, to give you a clue, mine was called “Death Trap” after a few trial runs.

We were told it wasn’t about the results, but that it was a way of showing a few things to us. Which was lucky, really, :)

Anyway, this afternoon saw us wandering around some little art galleries in Brighton, which was really nice (there are some pretty awesome and varied pieces of work in this town!), helped largely by the sunny weather.

Yesterday I had a nice walk along the seafront to the pier, along it, along the beach a bit and through The Lanes in Brighton, all in shorts and t-shirt. It was pretty damn nice. But not quite as impressive as the day before…

Saturday I got up early, headed over to Casa RaiNMatt to watch the rugby, then got on our bikes, got on a train, headed to Chichester and cycled to places called The Witterings.

What are “The Witterings”? Basically, a selection of beachside areas called things like West Wittering and – wait for it – East Wittering.

We went to the west, which looked and felt like a beach area in the Med. Just beautiful. And hot. Very hot. We spent the afternoon there, doing things such as swimming in the sea (on. the. first. of. oct. ob. er.), sunbathing and making sand turtles, starfish, sharks, clams and fish.

There are photos, but I’m not in the pub and I’m not waiting for Oliver RangeTelecoms to let me upload them from home (did I mention I wasn’t online properly yet? ;) ).

An 8 mile cycle back to Chichester and a tasty meal at Smith and Western later, we headed back to Brighton a bit shattered.

All in all, a very good few days.

It was nice to squeeze the last possible bits out of summer.

And now, to knuckle down and start filling up my sketch pad with work for my first module: Visual Communications *.

Toodles for now!

Pat

(* No, Carter, this Visual Communications is a different one to our Friday night “Stand at the side of a park in dirty macs and waggle ourselves at tourists” type)