Is this the worst college room in Durham?

When Cambridge rejected me, pictures of the beautiful Bailey and the Castle comforted me.

But I missed the room ballot for my college room – leaving me with a beautiful view of the bins and 9am wake ups from the glass being thrown in.

But the “temporary” status of the bins and skip leaves much to the imagination. What’s worse, I have the room at the end of the block meaning I am almost always freezing cold.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the ‘Wood. Even though it does look like the UK’s version of The Wire. But, my room in first year overlooked our lake we got going in the back.

In third year however I have been given the worst view not just in college, but the whole uni. It’s of the bins. The glass is delivered from the JCR bar and dumped underneath my window in the morning, waking me up after doing night shifts.

I’m now on distant nodding terms with the bin-men – soon we’ll be talking about their wives and children.

You learn to respect the horrors of actual work because who wants to get up at 8 to start picking up garbage and then move it to the back of the college. Also known as my view.

How much pizza does my college eat? Or rather how many pizza boxes are thrown away every day? I can tell you: a fuck load. Endless boxes of pizza are thrown out and lays frozen frigid next to my window in a skip. Decomposing cardboard pizza boxes doesn’t replace the sheer freezing cold of being an end of terrace room in the North East.

How much do we pay and how shit is the heating, with the little radiator vibe going on? Someone’s personal heater was actually carried away from them. Probably because people who don’t live in the cells don’t appreciate how cold they are when the sun goes down and the heating is switched off.

But the bins. Look at the bins. Who cares your room in a Norman castle is cold: you’re in a bloody Norman castle. Does the skip that I look out on, look like a bloody Norman castle to you?

So no, it’s not the Bailey but in many ways Collingwood is home, and every home has to have a waste storage area. Just generally bedrooms don’t look on to them.