BEST BOOKS ON... STUDENTS
LAST week, I was in Cardiff for the first time since 1997. It rained, which I remembered, and there were fine civic buildings and pedestrianised shopping streets I recognised.
But still, I found myself wondering, did I really spend nine months here doing a postgraduate journalism course and never once visit Cardiff Castle or stroll through Bute Park? I did both of those things last week.
My memories of that short, intense staging-post of a year are a blurred bubble. We worked hard, but there was also beer and bonhomie.
Four people from my small cohort met there and later married. I recall watching a lot of Alan Partridge; a housemate who continually played Suede; and that, on the eve of our last exam, Labour won a landslide election. The past is, indeed, a foreign country.
These are the weeks when more young people will be nervously embarking on their student life. The profoundly affecting Normal People by Sally Rooney tenderly skewers the awkward intensity of that time.
Connell and Marianne went to school together in Sligo, where he was sporty, clever and popular and she was the outlier, considered too clever, stand-offish and posh.
Both win a place at Trinity College, Dublin, where he is the gawky, consciously lower-class outsider, while an apparently newly confident Marianne seems to have found her tribe. But nothing is simple in this will-they-won’t-they relationship.
Love Story by Erich Segal was an era-defining student romance. Rich Harvard jock Oliver Barrett IV is brought to heel by the smart, but poor, Jenny Cavilleri. But ‘what can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?’ In the late Eighties, I bunked off sixth-form college to watch it weepily on television, then sent off to Harvard for a prospectus.
The blockbuster student novel of my undergraduate years (at York, old England, not Harvard) was The Secret History by Donna Tartt, about a clique of classics students at an elite Vermont college who take extra-curricular studies too far.
If you have a child starting college this month, best of luck.