College

Downstairs there's a plush, public-friendly shopfront office which is run by a nearby college and where a helpful lady will supply you with a thousand useless leaflets plucked out from a wall display, with little helpful warmths and a "have a nice day" kind of demeanour. She works behind a desk here for a grey lumpy college building full of dim windows and the ugly clutter of concrete annexes and cold marble stairwells. Dim mature students clamber off motorbikes in the morning and wander inside with their bags to study signpainting or media studies or ceramics or some awful course like that.
The fat building swallows them up with its blank window eyes, holds them inside all day while they swill down stairwells with dank hippy lecturers into the cafeteria where they'll munch at splutters of roll and discuss their latest popculture inadequacies. Then as the November skies begin to darken overhead they'll be spewn softly out again with serious, grim, adult smiles back into the grey world of evening. Not even like honest high school kids who as soon as the last bell rings run out of school as fast as they fucking can with frenzied yells of glee. No, they with their grim beards and fashion and hateful routines have to smile softly and be content with it.