Saturday 6th September 2025 marked the day that I was to move away from home, as a full-time student. However, my first 2 weeks in Huddersfield were spent as something entirely different.

I spent my time as a full-time kitchen associate at Wetherspoons. My original plan was to use one week to settle in and explore and then start work the week after. Despite this, I was put to work just 2 days after I moved in.

Naturally, I decided the best course of action would be to do as much as I can outside of work. The next few hundred words will cover those choices.

Being the music nerd that I am, I physically lack the ability to walk past a HMV without buying a vinyl. This hypothesis has been proven true on 5 separate occasions, in just a couple of weeks.

What really doesn’t help is the fact that my place of work happens to be on the same street as Kingsgate shopping centre, the home to my local HMV.  

So, to draw myself distant from my bad spending habits, I turned to my other interests.

First on the list, quite ironically was tattoos. Funnily enough, in my attempt to stop spending so much money I booked out a tattoo and spent more money than I had done on any vinyl purchase beforehand. 

As it turns out, having a mother who tells me what I should and should not spend money on is rather helpful.

I spent the remainder of my 2nd week in Preston for my birthday, where I sought my mother’s wisdom only to be distracted by cake and the dog.

Due to my second week being interrupted by my home visit, I shall count my induction week as my actual second week. I had quite a fun time.

Monday night however was a very different story. That’s because Hud Crawl took place which for students across Huddersfield, this tends to be a great night with lots of fun and lots of alcohol. But for poor me, it was a night of non-stop pot washing in a Wetherspoons kitchen.

I had entered the kitchen at 6pm, expecting to be done with the close by 00:30am. Around that time I was almost done closing down the pot wash station, and things were looking good until one of the floor staff brought me two entire trolleys of plates.

I ended up washing pots until almost 2am, which was not fun at all. I left the pub with disdain in my eyes and a bed that called for me.  

Thankfully I woke up in time for the classes on the Tuesday and spent lots of time with new friends completing scavenger hunt missions and doing little quests while exploring new places.

The group worked together and completed every mission that was given to us, and we got our £15 gift card as a reward. With that my first two-ish weeks were now finally complete.  

Joe Simpkin

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