All the things you will understand if you went to West Somerset College

West Somerset College (or Community College if you went back in the day like me) is situated in the beautiful yet extremely chavvy town of Minehead. If you went, you will know a few things to be true.

Every school trip ended with a fight with another school

For some reason there was always a couple guys who ended up in a scrap with the other visiting school. Chepstow Castle will forever be our rivals.

Activities week

Activities week was the most fun of your whole time at school. It all went downhill after that.

If you were good at sport, you were popular

It’s pretty obvious, but the boys who were good at football, rugby, or cricket were usually the popular ones. The girls who were good at hockey and netball were the most popular. Unfortunately, the same correlation did not exist with being in the drama club.

If it was raining or cold at lunch you were screwed

There has been lots of new improvements made since recent years at WSC, but a few years ago unless it was hailing or snowing the teachers would look out the windows of their nice warm classrooms and wonder why we couldn’t do work after lunch. New
meaning of brain freeze.

The buses were terrible

If you had sports practise, or an open evening you were helping out with, you better hope your mum was picking you up because the ‘late’ bus in Minehead is around 6.30 pm. Not even late enough to watch the school play.

Prefects existed for about five minutes

Either there were prefects and no one knew or cared, or there was prefects and our apathy for it meant no one applied.

The two-year rule

It’s a rule that transcends over the country, but we took it seriously. If you were a guy, you were able to date a girl two years below you acceptably. However if you were a girl you could only get away with dating a guy younger than you if you were both in Sixth Form, and you were the most popular girl in college.

You would dodge some teachers like the plague if you were wearing a coloured vest top

Wearing a pink vest top underneath your polo shirt was the ‘in’ thing, but not when you were made to go to the toilets to take it off and it to be confiscated just for even a thread of colour showing.

At least one girl from each year will be pregnant, or have just given birth

In Somerset you could definitely say we start everything young: drinking, drugs and sex. So inevitably, a few end up pregnant, but why is it that they seem to all get pregnant in the same few months?

Seagull attacks are real and are scary

My biggest accomplishment in life so far is that in my four years at WSC, I wasn’t shit on by a seagull once.