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2004
Student diaries - week 3 | |
|  | | Darren's a techno addict! |
| | Follow the ups and downs of life for a disabled university student in Staffordshire.
Darren is a self professed geek, his passport says 'Country of Origin: internet; on it. He's blind and is studying a mixture of Computing and History at Keele University... |
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Ouch is a website from the BBC. Its aim is to reflect the lives of disabled people right here and now in the third millennium
Ouch student diaries
Four disabled students post diary entries all about their experiences, about living away from home, social life and the high and low points of accessibility: on campus, in their accommodation and for study resources. |
| | Week threediary excerpts
 ...Back in halls, and the evening begins with a series of phone calls. There are big plans afoot for this weekend. You may remember that I went to a special school before university - RNIB New College, Worcester. Well a bunch of us blindies are all planning to meet up in Birmingham on Saturday. Some are current students at Worcester, and some of us have moved on to University. We're all going to share our new experiences. Also, a group of us here are all off out for the England match on Wednesday, which should be a laugh!
Grocery shopping online is considerably cheaper than the small student shop on campus, however while buying in bulk more than makes up for the service charge, remember not to buy too much. Space in our shared freezer is limited; I have the one shelf and don't want to be on the receiving end of complaints from fellow freezer users about missing chips...
5:34am: The block's first fire drill. Needless to say our two dirty stop-out physios were far from impressed. As it turns out, the bell inside each room isn't nearly as bad as it might be: It's quiet enough so I can hear some things and don't completely lose orientation. Mind, I don't particularly want to make a habit out of putting a T-shirt on over my jumper...
We discovered today that there has always been an occupant for the room we all thought empty. Today, I saw the elusive occupant for about two minutes in the kitchen area, but when I returned he'd gone again. Maybe he has another life elsewhere in the block, on campus, or a few miles away or something...
Needed to take relevant books with me today but since I didn't have a clue which book was which, I had to squash the whole shelf's worth into my old school bag and take them all. Could never have done that with Braille books at my old college, have you ever seen the size of them?
Today's the day of the blindie reunion. The journey up to Birmingham was almost flawless. The slight delay was entirely due to me choosing to wait for another friend, Joy, coming up from Norwich...
We played all sorts of silly games, including "the name game", where each person took turns at describing as many people as possible in two minutes on the list in front of them. Eventually everyone manage to find a few square feet of floorspace for the night...
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Stoke-on-Trent
Staffordshire
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