Being Hatfield in the late 90s I’m surprised he didn’t leave you some extra holes
From memory he was rather short and skinny. I am 6'6" wide frame. Had he tried anything of the sort that you suggest, he would have lost his life.
Despite his obvious lack of smarts, I am sure he none the less figured it out by himself intuitively, and decided it was not worth it, that simply getting a free ride was not that bad...
To be honest I remember the town as peaceful... probably because I don't drink and am not the outgoing kind of guy, so maybe I just simply was never exposed to night life, bad parts of town, and pub fights... maybe. After the lectures at uni I would just go home to eat something, then back to uni all evening/night to use their computers at the library, 'cause they had internet access, unlimited, super fast, freely available... they had a few satellite dishes on the roof I remember. Think I could get 1 or 2MB/s, orders of magnitude faster than why I had at home in France, 28800 baud Olitec modem, then later my dad had ISDN installed, and concatenated two ISDN cards to double the speed. So IIRC we had 2x64kbps, 128kps, woohoo ! Still, was not super fast, so that broadband and unlimited/free connection at uni was truly out of this world, I got addicted and spend all my time on it.
Anyway, didn't know Hatfield had a reputation !
At week-end room mates would go to Saint-Albans as IIRC all the cool pubs and fun was down there. Me, I would stay in my room or at uni/ library again...
Going out for me was mostly limited to paying a visit to the auto parts store to buy parts to fix my old Renault, and learning car mechanics along the way. Hobby got started this way.
The only notable thing that happened at Hatfield, while I was there... I remember, was a massive railway accident. Can't remember if the train derailed or if it was involved in a frontal collision or something...
Hey it's 2021, there must be trace of it on the interweb ! Hell yes, even a dedicated article about it on Wikipedia !
Apparently train derailed due to metal fatigue, 4 dead 70 injured..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield_rail_crashMemories.....