Cambridge University has written to me inviting me to attend an event called Freshers’ Week.
It is a bit vague about what this might involve. There is some sort of fair, which does not seem to be the sort with dodgem cars and Hook A Duck, but an event akin to the old fashioned Hiring Fairs, where you stood about with a shepherd’s crook or a feather in your cap, depending on what sort of Hiring you fancied. People came along and hired you if they needed a crook or a feather.
I think that at the University fair things happen much along the same lines. I think that all of the university clubs come and hang about with their crooks and you go and join in with the ones that you like the look of.
You will not be surprised to learn that I am unlikely to be going to Freshers’ Week, although I am a little sad about this. Obviously I have got no need whatsoever to join any Cambridge society, however interesting or otherwise worthy, because I live in the Lake District.
Hence it appears that I will be obliged to forgo the pleasures of a weekly meeting of the English Country Dancing Society, or the Moral Sciences Club, or even the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Society.
The list of choices is dazzling, although not entirely comprehensible. I do not know, for instance, what Raja Yoga might be, or what one might do at the Sexpression Club, neither do I think that really I wish to find out. I like the sound of the Whisky Appreciation Society, and was puzzled to notice the Womxn In Engineering Society, presumably it is because engineers are prone to dyslexia and have trouble spelling the word Women.
Wouldn’t you think that somebody would have got the English Department to check it for them first?
The only society that I am heartily sorry not to be joining is the Cambridge Footlights, which, as I am sure you know, is the university’s theatre company, and birthplace of Monty Python. I would very much like to be a part of this, despite my now advanced old age, and regret that it is never going to be possible.
Not to worry. It is nice to know that I would be welcome if I applied.
Certainly they are taking it all surprisingly seriously. I am now linked to the university’s student magazine, which is called Varsity, and looks every bit as interesting as the Daily Telegraph, although its views are possibly a tad to the left of that august publication. I have, as I think have mentioned, been given a student number, been automatically enrolled in the Students’ Union, and given a pass to the library. There is even a great deal of whittering about the purchase of a gown, which students are supposed to wear. My course will be online, and so I think I do not need to worry about that one. My dressing gown will probably do.
It is really quite scary. I had not expected anything quite so formal. I think I told you that they had sent me an email account. I have set this up but failed to link it to any of my computers. I thought I had achieved it all, and then it sent me an explanatory note telling me that I could not register that account because there was a three hour time delay between the introductory registration and the account being opened, so would I please come back in three hours? which of course I never did.
This means that I still have some internal student administration to accomplish before I find out anything new at all. I need to do this in a hurry because it is where all reading lists and timetables will be posted, but it cannot be done on my flat computer in the taxi, and I will have to use the big one in the house. So far I have simply not had five minutes’ leisure for thoughtful sitting down and staring at the screen whilst I ponder how it might be done.
This is not a good start. I am supposed to spend six hundred hours doing this course this year, and am beginning to feel a bit anxious about when I am going to squeeze it in between making jam and pegging washing on the line. Six hundred hours divides out to almost two hours every day.
I do not want to have to try and do it between customers in the taxi. That is not good for unbroken concentration.
Also it would look ridiculous in my dressing gown.
I am going to have to think of something.
I had better hurry up.
