Saturday, September 18, 2004
It's ten years ago today that I started at university. Well, ten years ago was either a Saturday or a Sunday, so ten years ago today was when I moved into the Halls of Residence at the University of Central England. I was reminded of it when I went to Manchester University this year for Bicon, both times I went feeling pretty confident of my ability to cope, both times finding out that I couldn't, both times having several days of feeling disorientated and depressed on my own until I managed to adapt. Then, as this year, I was the first into my Halls. They were newly constructed, so newly that they were still building some of them and we crossed a building site to go to the university. We had to run both the bath and the shower for a while to get the mud out of the tank.
I started a diary on my first night at university. And I've kept it ever since. Not filled in every night, because sometimes I've managed to have a semblence of a social life to keep me busy. But I've kept it going for ten years which, seeing as my previous best had been for the fortnights of family holidays is something of an achievement. I'm not going to bore you or embaress myself with any choice extracts, save that on my first night I was so depressed at being away from home for the first time in my life that I sign off the entry as though I'm not long for this world when all I did was go to bed and fall immediately to sleep. It's not entirely thrilling, people drift in, people drift out, because I'm usually hopeless at remebering people's names new characters tend to be nameless for several weeks, then wrongly identified before I finally get it right, at which point I'm writing about them with complete familiarity. This is no work to put up there with the great diarists of history, unless cockroach-sapien finds it fossilised in several million years time and concludes from it that they truly are the first intelligent race to arise on the planet.
I started a diary on my first night at university. And I've kept it ever since. Not filled in every night, because sometimes I've managed to have a semblence of a social life to keep me busy. But I've kept it going for ten years which, seeing as my previous best had been for the fortnights of family holidays is something of an achievement. I'm not going to bore you or embaress myself with any choice extracts, save that on my first night I was so depressed at being away from home for the first time in my life that I sign off the entry as though I'm not long for this world when all I did was go to bed and fall immediately to sleep. It's not entirely thrilling, people drift in, people drift out, because I'm usually hopeless at remebering people's names new characters tend to be nameless for several weeks, then wrongly identified before I finally get it right, at which point I'm writing about them with complete familiarity. This is no work to put up there with the great diarists of history, unless cockroach-sapien finds it fossilised in several million years time and concludes from it that they truly are the first intelligent race to arise on the planet.
