Everything that has and will ever happen walking up Penglais Hill

Walking up and down Penglais Hill is the most demoralising part of anyone’s day, be it at 8:40 in the morning following a heavy night or at half four in the evening after an even heavier library session. No one enjoys it and that’s a fact.

Here’s a list of all the tedious and predictable sights and sounds you’re bound to come across so you can pay even less attention as you trudge upwards on your next visit.

1. You’re running late, everyone’s running late and then there’s that guy on the other side of the road who is running really late who enters the base of the hill at a sprint.
2. Staring at the guy sprinting, you forget there are cars and junctions and just stroll across the junction to the sound of several horns.
3. Whatever though, it’s not even nine in the morning – just shrug it off and keep struggling on.
4. You look around hopelessly one last time to see if there is someone you know to suffer alongside you, but there’s no one – just other equally lonely strangers who are just as keen to ignore each other as you are.
5. Admitting defeat and settling in for a shit time you put your iPod in, lower your head and trudge on depressingly to motivational music such as “Ain’t no mountain high enough”.
6. While walking you casually glance around again, looking at the people on the other side of the road and wonder why the hell people are on that side of the road anyway.
7. The only saving grace is that you know you’re going to have the best calf muscles in the world.
8. The uni is only on one side of the hill, and only locals dare to live that side of the hill anyway. Ew.

   “You can’t walk here”

9. Then you see the builders who seem to have the best job just sitting outside a place with no construction site, smoking and drinking coffee all day.
10. But seriously: there is no building site and they never leave the road side? Just what the hell is going on there?
11. You continue up the hill, just getting to the hospital where you can see the hill slopes of harder, just drill your eyes down to the ground once again as soon as you’ve crossed the junction.
12. While making sure you don’t get run over, the guy/girl you awkwardly grinded on in Pier last week comes straight towards you.
13. You panic because you called them 50 times a day since and they kind of think you’re a stalker and maybe you are because here you are, staring at them, at almost nine in the morning.
14. You manage to style it and give a slight nod to acknowledge. But oh wait they waved and now you just look rude for just slightly moving your head. Great.
15. You’ve passed each other and now you can continue the plod. Plod plod plod. Bloody hell, just how long is this hill again?
16. You walk past the bus stop now and there’s the homeless guy – absolutely lovely chap – just don’t get too close because you see that he’s writing on the Aber Uni prospectus in tiny writing and now its gonna bug you for the rest of the way because you want to know what he’s writing.
17. And there it is: Pantycelyn – the abandoned halls that some people really care about and many more don’t.
18. But seriously, what was that homeless guy writing about?

    This hill is too long

19. That’s it, you’ve made it: you started at the bottom now we here. You began at 08:40 its now only 08:47, but that can’t be right. You spent eternity getting up the thing and you swear you listed to more than just two Taylor Swift songs.
20. You go to lectures and as the hill disappears you become consciously aware of the fact that yes, you’re sweaty as hell and wish you hadn’t bothered turning up to the lecture on “The thermodynamic and anthropogenic understanding of a fascist poem written by children”.
21. That’s because given the fact it’s nine am and  the lecture is actually about glaciers, there’s no one there that cares and all you can think about is how you’ve got to walk all the way back down the hill again…