On Friday Four cans of Heineken and a friend for life
MY best friend sent me four cans of Heineken in the post on Tuesday. Twenty five years ago this week, I knocked on her door in university halls of residence and asked if she’d like one of the four cans my mum had packed me off to start my student life with. She accepted and we’ve been friends ever since.
Like most students, when I started university I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do in my career. My future job prospects were practically irrelevant to my choice of university. I just wanted to have the most fun possible, meet new people, explore a new city and occasionally show my face in a lecture.
I chose Manchester University principally based on its contrast to where I’d grown up. Having lived in Yelverton almost all my life, looking out over the rolling green tors of Dartmoor, I was attracted to the alien industrial urban northernness of Manchester.
I’d chosen to study European Studies and French. I had no particular linguistic skills, nor interest in European politics at the time – just a
notion that I might enjoy a year in France (which I actually never ended up doing).
In my first few weeks of university, I decided I’d chosen the wrong course, poking my head around the door of the faculties of both Psychology and Law before eventually switching to a degree in Combined Studies – a kind of pick and mix of undergraduate courses.
I remember little of what I learned. I picked up a few Spanish phrases in a year of Spanish lectures. I recall reading Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger, On The Road by Jack Kerouac and falling in love with The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway in a course on 1950s literature.
I became utterly fascinated by Latin American politics and history thanks to an inspirational tutor who gave us an insight into the despotic rulers, military juntas and revolutions that had characterised so many south and central American countries. I can barely name a 20th century Latin American leader - other than Fidel Castro - now.
I signed up to every club and society I could find - always keen to make the very most of what was on offer. It became a bit of a running joke as each week I returned to halls from my latest activity - the trampoline club, the Socialist Workers party, the drama club, the Labour party, the hill climbing society, the sports union, salsa dancing, water polo, the tiddlywinks club... Doesn’t everyone join the tiddlywinks club?
I had several jobs, working in bars, in a chicken takeaway and even doing silver service at the old Man City ground in Rusholme but for the first two years at least, I still had no idea what my long term career path might look like.
By the third year, I realised I needed to make some future plans. Lacking career inspiration - I still thought with an arts degree you only had two options: teacher or journalist - I decided that my propensity to leave every piece of coursework until the night before the deadline might be an ideal quality for a reporter.
And so I signed up to write for the student newspaper, penning such gems as the hottest curry in Rusholme, the student egged in Platt Fields Park and the burglary of a petrol station in Fallowfield. Yes, Manchester University sowed the first seeds of my career as a journalist.
But far more than that, university gave me lifelong friendships. That girl to whom I handed a can of
Heineken on my first day now lives in Truro, where she runs a wine business. She remains my closest friend.
By the second year, we’d moved into a house together with a whole group of fabulous girls. Five of us still exchange Whats App messages every week. We share holidays and spa days; we are godparents to each other’s children; we advise on each other’s marriages - and divorces; we tell each other our most embarrassing secrets.
I feel sad for the thousands of students for whom their university experience has been disrupted over the past 18 months. They may well still have learned remotely, but the learning is just a tiny fraction of what student life is about. Twenty five years seems an awfully long time ago, but I’m grateful for all that I got from my university days.
I hope the thousands of students heading to Freshers’ Week this week have the same brilliant experience that I did. And if your mum packs you off with a four pack of lager, make sure you share it with your next door neighbour. You may just make a lifelong friend.
University sowed the seeds of a career in journalism – and gave me lifelong friendships