It's exactly 40 years today since I went to university. 40 years since I left home for the first time. 40 years since I met a whole new circle of friends, most of whom were looking equally lost. 40 years since studying got harder but more infrequent. 40 years since I discovered that food comes from the supermarket and not from the fridge, that eventually you run out of clothes that smell nice, and that beds don't make themselves if you leave them for long enough. All in all, 40 years since I became vaguely independent.
My university adventure started with a car journey to destiny, and a selection of my worldly belongings packed into the boot. It had looked like a reasonable number of belongings when piled up in my bedroom, a stack of clothes and books and gadgets I wasn't used to living without, but crammed into the boot I now suspected it might be too much. I had £25 in my pocket, freshly withdrawn from my Post Office account, and was wearing what I hoped would be an impressionable outfit - a striped sweatshirt and a pair of grey corduroy trousers. Looking back 40 years, I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.
On arrival my Dad struggled to explain to a traffic warden that he did have to park here thankyou, and that hundreds of other parents would be doing so imminently. My Mum coped with her eldest leaving home by unpacking everything and then going shopping for a tray "because it would be useful" (and it was). Tears were shed when they departed, and I suddenly realised that today was almost as big a day for them as it was for me. The halls of residence were briefly full of suitcases (none of them wheelie), parents (proud but anxious) and children (very soon to be adults). During the melee two classmates from my old school turned up to say hello, before heading off to their own new social lives (and I don't think I ever saw them again after that). And then I was on my own.
The first week at university was full of 'getting to know you' moments, both planned and unplanned. On meeting someone new, the conversation invariably followed the same threefold path ("My name is..." "I come from..." and "I'm studying...") after which you hoped you still had something left to talk about. Sometimes we were invited to informal gatherings, lubricated by tea, sherry or beer, in the hope we'd mesh as a group a little sooner. Inbetween we just piled randomly into some just-met acquaintance's room and swiftly discovered whether we had anything at all in common. My preferred social groupings took several days to coalesce.
At the Freshers Fair everyone was keen to get you to join things, not because they had our student welfare at heart but because their tinpot clubs, teams and societies would have collapsed without a fresh injection of bodies. I avoided joining anything even vaguely sporty, especially those with teammates who'd knock on your door at 7am to demand that you come out on a training run. I tried joining something dramatic, having enjoyed acting at school, but failed to impress at the audition which killed my thespian leanings stone dead. I joined one jovial-sounding society which it turned out existed purely for socialising and drinking, so only attended once. And in my unwillingness to commit I failed to sign up for anything else and, I now see, cut myself off from multiple once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
Communal meals brought us all together, although within a few days I decided to skip the breakfasts in favour of a bowl of Coco Pops in my room. The common room had copies of all the day's newspapers so I made regular visits to the comfy sofas to catch up on the latest gossip about Cecil Parkinson's affair. The washing machines were located in a gloomy basement which, as infrequently as I could get away with, provided additional opportunities for random bonding. And on that first weekend our student bar organised what is still the very best new wave 80s disco I've ever been to, helped of course by the fact it was the 1980s at the time.
Three liquids became important. Alcohol was freely available, or at least very cheaply available in the student bar, which saved us ever having to mingle with the real people who lived in the city outside. Coffee became the perfect excuse to sit around and talk into the early hours of the morning, and a means of staying awake to be able to do so. And milk was absolutely essential if you wanted people to come round to your room to drink coffee, so it was a constant battle to make sure that nobody had raided your supplies from the shared fridge.
I gradually made some good friends, not least because my parents had had the sense to pack me off with a kettle and a toaster. I was also one of the few people to own a portable TV, my aforementioned 9CT 2100, so lots of people came round to watch it. In the first week one of my new friends (she still gets a Christmas card) appeared two days running on this brand new quiz show called Blockbusters, and a week later a coursemate wanted to watch her brownie pack on Crackerjack (she was well chuffed when they won Take a Letter). One of my new friendship group had brought a record deck and LP collection, another a stack of games for his BBC Micro, and all of a sudden things didn't look too bad at all.
University was very different in those days in that they paid you to go rather than you paying them. It was much easier for governments to cover the bill when only one in six students entered higher education, not one in two. My first term's grant cheque was for £408, which may not sound much but easily covered my accommodation charges and was a darned sight better than getting an instant four figure overdraft. And there were no tuition fees either in those days, which was just as well given how little tuition I think I actually got. But I learnt a lot, even if most of it was more relevant to life than to my increasingly-baffling degree course.
If I could go back and give myself some advice I'd suggest using the library a lot more rather than relying overly on lectures. I'd recommend getting more involved in student life rather than sitting in my room listening to Steve Wright In The Afternoon. I'd nudge myself towards perhaps getting involved in student journalism, because I was capable of writing satire that needled authority even then. I'd urge myself to get to know one particular friend better and not to waste so much time on another. And I'd point out that you're only young and cute with a room of your own once and maybe to take a lot more advantage of it.
I knew none of this when I drove off in the family car to take my first faltering steps into higher education 40 years ago. And I'd not be who I am today and where I am today if I hadn't basically played it safe for three years instead. But I understand now, as I suspect many do, that education is empowerment, independence is opportunity and university is what you make of it. It was an amazing time, but it could have been so much more.
