On my first day at university...

I had pretty much the exact reverse. It works both ways.

I don't have a Welsh accent (if I had a pound for every time I was told 'You don't SOUND Welsh though?' I'd have at least paid off my student loans by now) But when I lived in Montreal for a year my accent was apparently problematic when speaking English to French speakers. So I found myself adopting a Canadian twang in order to make myself understood...which unfortunately developed into a semi-permanent Canadian twang that took a good 6 months at home to disappear!

I'll tell you a story aboot my love for Timmies and my collection of vintage Loonies next time I see you eh? 

You'll never get a part in Hinterland!

Let's hope it stays that way!!!!!!!!!

My first day was in 1972 at Royal Holloway (London University.) RHC, although a college of London University, is actually in what used to to be called Stockbroker Surrey in the village of Englefield Green with parts of it fringing Virginia Water. I had never been to a posher place in my life. I come from the Derbyshire/Notts border which is usually called D.H.Lawrence Country. Virtually everyone's dad in my village was a coal-miner and when we went on holiday it was Blackpool, Skegness or Scarborough. The local MP at the time was The Beast of Bolsover, Dennis Skinner and he still is to this day. The village I grew up in won second prize on Radio 5 as having Britain's 2nd shabbiest High Street (can't remember who got 1st!)

As you can imagine it was quite a culture-shock. Nearly everyone was from the Home Counties and they all seemed to have gone to public school. I did a degree in Music and some of the other students would say things like 'Oh for the Summer concert the orchestra played Ravel and Debussy.' At our school concert we played a selection from The Sound of Music. I'd never been abroad at the time,  but they were all going on about visiting Egypt and Kenya etc. I was terrifically impressed by a guy, who actually became good friend, who cooked us  all a meal of meatballs in tomato sauce. He actually went to the local butcher and asked him to mince rump steak for the said balls and then bought a half bottle of beaujolais to cook them in! (Drinking wine was virtually unheard of then, let alone cooking with it.) He would then say 'When I get home my mother's going to cook me jugged hare.' I was happy with liver and onions.

I actually soon became accustomed to it all and really loved it in the end. I've hardly moved out the area since and currently only live about 5 miles away.

Edit: reading this back sounds a bit Monty Python!

The worrying thing is, these people are our future. They'll be making our laws and paying our pensions.

Of course it seems like only yesterday. The older you get, the more your vivid memories seem like much more recent experiences…

After months of excited anticipation, I was dropped off on a Sunday by my parents, who’d taken me in the family car, and in it with us were boxes of things I wanted to take along to make my room feel like home. Nothing was newly purchased- no Primark, Ikea and the like in my day. There were some mugs that were no longer wanted at home, a very small kettle, and some old pots and pans to use in the communal kitchen along the corridor.

I can’t remember what clothes I’d taken or what in, but I don’t think I had many. Just one jacket and maybe two pairs of shoes. An item of clothing I do remember taking along was a unitard as it was listed as a ‘must have’ for the practical drama classes we’d be having. Mine was maroon and I daresay I looked a complete tit in it, although at the time I thought I must be incredibly trendy. The lady in the shop (Freeds) told me I must also buy a “dancer’s belt” to wear under it, which she sold me at some ridiculous cost. This kept everything out there and well contained but God, was it uncomfortable!

I also remember taking a load of rolled up posters which would be drawing-pinned to the huge pin-board in my room; most of them were badly damaged at the corners having been pinned and repinned on different walls of my bedroom at home. I had a rather nice grey and silver one of A Chorus Line, an Evita one with the names Elaine Paige, David Essex and Joss Ackland on it, and the obligatory Jesus Christ Superstar one to remind me of my favourite show which had not long closed at the Palace. The biggest poster I had was of Kate Bush singing Wow.

I decorated the only shelf in the room with the set texts we’d been told to buy, and I thought I was twice as clever as many of my fellow students as I was doing a joint degree. It didn’t seem to bother me that half of them were written in medieval, seventeenth or eighteenth century French and I couldn’t understand a single word of them. Oh the follies of youth!

A record-player was, of course, an essential too. Far more important than the set texts. For our young readers, this was a large plasticky looking piece of equipment with huge speakers. You could play your 33rpm records on it, scratched through overplaying and causing the occasional jump in the song. I had eclectic tastes (I still do) and f*** knows what my new neighbours made of Trail Before Pilate, The Miller’s Son and Julie Covington singing Kurt Weill’s Barbara Song. I balanced this out occasionally with Abba’s Super Trouper.

After getting the room sorted it was time to explore and make new friends. You latched on to anyone really, asking them if they fancied a drink in the Union Bar that evening. Some, I found out, had double-barrelled names and didn’t speak like me at all. I quickly promised myself to learn how to speak posh to fit in. Many had been to schools their parents had had to pay for; all I can remember my parents paying for at my school was a dictionary and a slide-rule. Both severely underused, even by the end of my school career. Quite a few of them were on anti-depressants, which I thought made them seem very grown-up and bohemian.

Some of us went to the University shop to buy provisions. These included the cheapest instant coffee you could get your hands on, powdered milk and rich tea fingers. Tasteless but also very cheap. Someone rather enterprising bought a waxed carton of fresh milk and a packet of sausages (“for breakfast”) but as our rooms came unequipped with a fridge, and anything left in the communal fridge was taken, such people took to hanging their purchases out of their bedroom window in a carrier bag. I thought this was very common…

There were no lectures, tutorials or classes for a week. Freshers’ week gave you an opportunity to become a member of a club for about 50p a term (I liked the sound of the Cheese and Wine Society and thought it would give me ample opportunity to practise my new posh speaking voice.)

I took to university like a duck to water (I don’t ever remember calling it “Uni”; I think we all called it “college”, as it was one of many dotted around London at the time.)

Alas it is no more. It’s now posh flats, and the name of the college has been given to somewhere else in the capital that couldn’t be more unlike its former self. I feel a bit sad that it’s no longer there, where I pitched up all those years ago, but I’ve still got my memories, my closest friends I made there, not to mention all the set texts on bookshelves in my home now. They remind me that I must have been a little bit intelligent once. Oh, and I still have the “dancer’s belt”! It’s one of those things I just can’t throw out…

Yes, once I got used to it I really loved it and have barely moved out of the area. The strange thing is, although I found the public school vibe very alien, I actually thought all universities were like that, because the whole concept of university was so off the radar for someone from a very working class mining village in Derbyshire. No one in my family had ever been to university and no one I knew had either. Luckily I shared a room with a nice guy from Liverpool, but even he seemed a bit posh because his dad was an accountant!

Today was my last first day of uni

I literally met one exception to the rule! Who is still a friend, and was actually doing classics for her degree - that's why it was my barometer, they'd inevitably tell her they'd done classics at school when she told them it was her degree subject.

It does seem to be dying out as a subject in the comprehensive system.