Going to University

01 Oct Going to University

I feel for students each evening as they appear on the news, their faces pressed against the windows of the hall of residence, their messages pleading for food and beer, their shoulders drooping as they stand in small groups behind fences and gates, their hopes and dreams up in the air. I remember being one of them, remember the anticipation of escaping from home, leaving childhood behind, remember my too bright, too talkative excitement as I arrived in Hall concealing my nervousness about how scary everything was, whether I would make friends, make the grade, hold myself together. The whole world revolved inside my head and my own terribly important and very fragile emotions. But I was, at least, secure in my sense of immortality. Maybe the media, whose reporting somehow implies these unfortunate students are careless, disinterested in others, wanton, and spoiled, have forgotten their own moment. 

Forty-nine years after my moment, I’m going to university again. I write this suppressing a smile that wants to be a giggle. 

For me, it won’t be like it is for those students. I’m going to Aberdeen (again) but I use the word “going” in a metaphorical sense. Physically, I shall just climb the stairs to a wee room at the back of the house, a room of many faces: study, den, bolt-hole, refuge, nest. The place where I write, think, wonder, procrastinate, doubt, dither and sometimes decide. It’s the smallest room in the house and overlooks the garden and, beyond that, the gardens and back rooms of neighbours. Often, these days, I wonder how they are spending their time. Are they going to work or school? Are they working from home? Exercising on zoom? Watching telly all day because everyone who used to come and visit no longer can? Are they thinking of embarking on some new enterprise to help them traverse the indeterminate interval between now and a time when life will be more like life used to be? 

And wondering if they are happy or sad. If, like me, they fluctuate a lot and are never sure which they feel the most. I imagine they feel anxious in some way some of the time. Maybe fearful. Scared to contemplate how future time is stretching out so unreliably. Joyfully relieved to be less busy or deeply unhappy to be so alone. Or somewhere in between. I wonder if they look out of their windows and wonder about me. Clearly, all this wondering is going to get in the way of my studies! 

Now, there will be new faces to my little room. It will be my part-time lecture theatre, tutorial room, library and study for the next three years, if I last the course, while I reacquaint myself with student life, embrace the study of Scottish Heritage and work out whether this whole plan to do a masters’ degree that I don’t need is simply bonkers.

A few months ago, I looked ahead to the winter and wondered: How will I spend my time if I am mostly under house arrest? How will I take myself out of the vicious circles that might arrive in my head about things that make me feel bereft, the people I can’t see, the things I can’t do? About losses? Would studying be bonkers? The pandemic world makes bonkers more appealing and, somehow, less bonkers than it ever was in the past. At least it does if you’re lucky enough not to wake up each morning desperate about how you’ll manage if you lose your job. Though vulnerable because of age and health, in every other respect I’m one of the lucky ones. Gone is the necessity for things to have some longer-term purpose, to ‘lead’ somewhere and yet, with life so strangely transformed and confined, a sense of purpose could prove good for the sanity. I can hear the Scottish heritage kicking in there, the ready Presbyterian work ethic popping up to remind me that you never quite escape its clutches. On top of that, and I don’t mean to be maudlin here, the longer-term does get shorter with each passing year. With the added serendipity of COVID-19, who knows? Just go for it. Why not?

That was my thinking when I applied, gathered the necessary documents together from deep in the loft, brushed off the dust, wrote a personal statement and trusted to luck. There were other options, of course. Put my feet up, read the literature of entire countries and eras, knit socks, learn the violin, write a book, write two books, make bread, eat chocolate. Some of those things I’ll do, especially when my sense of purpose, with its new academic formulation, becomes too burdensome. 

This term’s module, A Millennium of Scottish History, is a romp through Scotland’s story from 1100 to today. This week I’m back with David I, William Wallace, Robert Bruce, some Scottish Alexanders and some English Edwards (I know, they do sound like potatoes – not intentional, honestly!). It’s comforting, in a way, returning to familiar territory, reading some of the history I studied all those years ago and finding the same characters are still there, with the same flaws and the same fate. When the present is so unsettled and unsettling, the past feels grounded and grounding. Comforting too, that looking at them again reminds me that I haven’t forgotten everything – while the mind may be a sieve, at least sieves retain something solid even when some precious liquid of memory is drained away.

In amongst the old familiar there is also much that’s new. I was reminded very quickly that our understanding of past events is never complete. There are always new interpretations, sometimes new facts unearthed from forgotten sources. There are always new ideas about old events, new ways of seeing as perspectives change, as we find different filters in ourselves to rethink old assumptions.