Every person you’ll see on your way into the city centre

The fitness freak

Usually found jogging by the Trent river, cycling to work ‘because it gets you there so much quicker’, or walking briskly to one of the city’s many gyms, the fitness freak is most commonly dressed head-to-toe in Lycra, accompanied by a hiker’s backpack full of water and energy bars. They’re mainly seen in the mornings at the ridiculously early times of 7 or 8 am, getting their quick fix of exercise before the day even properly begins, or in the evenings, squeezing in a workout after work while most of us are scoffing dinner and catching up on TV. The fitness freak is seldom under the age of 25, although you do catch the occasional rare sighting of a student jogging around the playing fields of Clifton campus.

The venue promoter

The moment you get off your bus they’re there, brandishing flyers and checking you’re worth speaking to by very cheekily demanding your age. The venue promoter is someone we’re all very familiar with, as it’s a guarantee every Nottingham student has been pounced on during the journey from the bus stop to their lecture theater. They shamefully admit to having acquired this job during a particularly skint, desperate period last term.  A favourite hideout of these in the city is outside the Newton building, for all NTU students. Watch out for them, or you too will fall victim to being forced to sign up for free shots at a club opening and tagged with a fluorescent wristband.

The charity promoter

Not to be confused with the venue promoter, the charity promoter goes that bit further in attempting to persuade you to sign a form to give away chunks of your student finance on a weekly basis. Arguably the slightly more annoying of the strangers who approach you on the street. Once again many of the charity promoters are students in dire need of some cash, who have decided to apply for a job where they can make others feel incredibly guilty about the fact that they have no money. Don’t get me wrong, if I was rich I’d donate to every charity in Nottingham. But the fact is I’m a student, and am therefore not rich. Please leave me alone.

Ah, the famous NTU bus… how we love you

The ‘I had a little bit too much of a good time last night’ person… To the point that they’re still ‘out’ now

Somewhere just on the outskirts of the city stumbles a figure, usually male, who decided with his mates earlier this morning that they would all walk their separate ways back home – looking around in a dazed manner. Commonly known as the weekday-morning drunk, this lonesome species can be seen wandering the streets like a lost sheep in the early hours of almost any day of the week, thanks to the Forum’s dirty Mondays, Oceana’s Tuesday £1 drinks, Ocean Wednesdays, and Tuned at Rock City on a Thursday. They’ll have disappeared by around lunch time; either sobered up enough to get home or having taken solace in a bush somewhere.

The tired, flustered-looking student

These are everywhere, and you see them no matter what time of the day it is, because when you’re a student, there’s always a reason to look tired and flustered. The most common times however are in the mornings, when a combination of being unable to slither out of bed until the last minute and the unreliability of the buses. This means that those with the most pained expressions are most likely already over half an hour late, and are calculating how many times it is that they’ve missed their first lecture now. But every expression tells a different story: maybe it’s anxiety over tomorrow’s exam that you’ve somehow conveniently been ‘too busy’ to revise for until now. Perhaps it’s despair over the fact that you managed to spend the entire chunk of student loan for this term last night. It could even be panic over the assignment you have to hand in at the end of the week, when you still don’t even understand how to Harvard reference. It’s a hard life being a student.

The bemused, lost tourist 

There’s such an abundance of tourists in Nottingham that you’re beginning to wonder what it actually is they’re all flocking in to sight-see. Sure, it’s a beautiful city, but that’s not worth a trip all the way from China or America, surely. Although you mostly see them in the city centre, it’s not a rare occurrence for you to pass an even more bemused-looking cluster of non-locals, who have somehow found themselves on the outskirts of the city after a wrong turning from the train station. They’ll figure it out in the end… hopefully.