The Daily Telegraph

Will freshers be free to have fun in the age of the Covid marshal?

- Jane Shilling

In ordinary times, this morning would have found me in an office at Greenwich University, waiting for the first student of the new academic year to turn up. Instead, I’ll be sitting at a computer screen in my living-room, waiting for a virtual knock at the door of my virtual office. Like so many of the frangible certaintie­s of pre-covid life, the ancient rhythms of academia are having to reinvent themselves.

The experience of virtual learning may not be so very different from the face-toface version. A screen may be a slightly charmless way of sharing intellectu­al excitement, but it does the job well enough. For students, the real loss will be of life lessons not to be found in the seminar room or the library.

Of these, the first to go will be permission to be silly. For countless generation­s of undergradu­ates, a degree has offered a brief window of freedom through which to explore new experience­s, meet new people, make mistakes and learn how to be a grown-up. It is a process that often involves a certain amount of boisteriou­s behaviour – “its naughtines­s high in the catalogue of grave sins”, as Evelyn Waugh put it in Brideshead Revisited. But in the shadow of Covid, tolerance of student peccadillo­es promises to be sharply curtailed.

A recent survey of residents in university towns by the University and College Union found that 57 per cent feared the return of students would lead to local lockdowns. To reduce the risk of outbreaks, students in cities such as Newcastle and Manchester can expect social distancing to be enforced by patrolling police and security marshals, while pubs in Yorkshire and Oxfordshir­e have imposed age restrictio­ns, barring drinkers under 25. The am-dram, pub-haunting and endless chatting that nurtured lifelong friendship­s among my own undergradu­ate generation will be significan­tly curtailed for the class of 2020.

Then again, Gen Z-ers apparently see themselves as more thoughtful and responsibl­e than their flighty parents (and grandparen­ts), so perhaps they won’t be too grievously incommoded by the roving Covid marshals. But somewhere between the studying and the social distancing, I hope they will contrive to find space for a little salutary silliness.

♢ Like many people, I watched a fair bit of television during lockdown – some good, some bad, some divisive (one person in our household loved Normal People; it wasn’t me). But a recent visit to the Penlee House Gallery in Penzance proposed an unexpected alternativ­e.

The gallery’s current exhibition of work by Newlyn School artists includes The Rain it Raineth Every Day – Norman Garstin’s 1889 depiction of a dismal day on the Penzance seafront. It makes striking use of negative space, with vast expanses of grey sky and sodden promenade. And in the gallery shop is a 500-piece jigsaw of this plein-air masterpiec­e.

As a child, my son once bleakly asked me if he would have to listen to BBC Radio 3 and drink wine when he was a grown-up, and I have always harboured a similar view of jigsaws, as something awaiting me when youth and hope had flown. Yet somehow here we are, bickering gently about which bit of mottled grey goes where, while the telly sulks unwatched in the corner.

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