July 23, 2014, by Mike Munro

Life in the athletes’ village

Economics student and England hockey international Harry Martin provides an update from the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth village.

We’ve now moved into the village — I forgot how cool these places are! We’re all living in one big house; the majority of rooms are pairs with one three and one five on the top floor. I’m in the 3 and, although there’s only one bathroom between the eight of us up here, the room is nice and pretty spacious. There’s only one wardrobe so I’m making good use of the floor space as you can see.

The masterful art of ‘the floordrobe’

The best part of being in the village is all the free food and there are a lot of options from all around the world — it’s difficult not to overeat! There is also a decent games room with a variety of consoles, pool tables etc, which isn’t far from our accommodation.

 
All the latest revision aids

A few of us on the top floor have also set up COD (a shooting game – most guys will know what I’m talking about) on our computers so we’ve been doing a fair amount of gaming against each other on that. As you might expect it gets fairly competitive and there is a lot of talk about buying special controllers to improve performance — which sounds very tragic now I’ve written it down. This has all been very fun but has made revision a bit of an impossible task.  I have, however, put up a desk from IKEA in our room, which is a strong start to the revision process.

The only downside so far has been the weather. Up until today it it has rained almost constantly. The conditions made it difficult in our first and only practice game, which was against India the other day. Practice games just before a tournament are always a strange one, everyone plays hard as it’s good preparation but no one wants to get injured and it’s just not the same as a full international match. We’ve had some good training sessions since and everyone is looking sharp and ready to go for our first game against Trinidad & Tobago this Thursday.

Practice match vs. India

The opening ceremony is later this evening and they have always been pretty spectacular and special to be a part of in my experience – I am looking forward to it a lot. My Mum is a huge Rod Stewart fan and he is apparently playing so she is very jealous. Look out for us tonight !

Keep track of Harry and Team England’s progress during the Games by following him on one or more of these accounts:

Twitter – @harrymartin_9
Instagram – harrymartin9
Facebook – harrymartinhockey

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