New Term

Things are getting tense in the VE camp… as Wednesday finally heralds the start of term for the blessed MA (which has been a year in the offing).

Last Thursday things got off to a slow start when I went for welcome drinks with everyone else who was also doing a humanities course of some description – be it BA, MA, PHD or otherwise. Before I went I’d feared it would be a selection of people who didn’t know each other, stood around the edges, staring nervously into their warm glasses of wine and shifting their feet from side to side in an awkward fashion. And that’s exactly what happened… in a building that bore a harsh resemblance to a school hall. So I downed my wine as quickly as possible and plucked up the courage to make conversation… eventually finding my way towards a group of people also doing English courses of some description. I’m relieved to say that by the end of the evening things weren’t quite so bad and that me and my two new best friends were the last people left in the hall… and we all swapped numbers before agreeing to meet up for freshers’ fair on Wednesday. I wonder if I’ve met my new lifelong best buddies?

And yesterday I had the day off, so took myself off to the library to register and go on an introductory tour. After making my way through several libraries until I found the right one, I realised that a 10-minute library tour consists of little more than a mousy woman in black pointing at some books and saying, “Here are the books”. But using the common sense and basic intelligence that hopefully got me on the MA course in the first place, I worked out where the books I wanted were and set to photocopying the relevant chapters of my highlighted and colour-coded reading list.

Tomorrow I have my official library tour… which this time threatens to last for an hour and a half, so I’m thinking it might be a bit more indepth. And then I meet my new friends to go to the student union, get our NUS cards and join some societies that we’ll never turn up for. And on Thursday I finally have my first lecture. Should I tell them that I ditched “Ulysses” two months ago after losing the will to live?