Davies’ Diaries

So it’s a new year then. Once more into the breach, crying God for KalTay, Yorkshire, Saint Tommy Fong and all that. Do forgive me the contrived Henry V references, Freshers – you’re a university student now; pretentious drivel of this nature is our cup of tea, meat and two veg, and most importantly, up our proverbial street. Of course this doesn’t apply if you’re here to study a BSC, although I never really have understood you Bunsen burner jockeys all that much.

When I came to this University over a year ago my head was pumped full of dreams. Dreams mostly induced from having watched all four seasons of Greek and Animal House over five times. If you’ve come here believing that your experience will echo a traditional American college movie, the good news is you’ll only be half disappointed, slightly less so if you join the Rugby team.

But despite this initial disappointment, it still felt as if I was in a movie, if not the one I’d hoped for. I was in Stand By Me with slightly more smoking, and that’s really what I want to talk to you about today, the spirit of new beginnings. The crowning moment of my first term was sat on Vanbrugh Paradise at Freshers’ Fair, overlooking Central Hall, hundreds of miles away from where I had spent all my life, with the girl who would later go on to become my girlfriend for the majority of that year as the URY outdoor radio set up blasted out some hopeful pop tune across the lake.

This, my GCSE Media Studies B-grade senses told me, would be the end of the first episode, were this an American college sitcom. The episode would end with a pan out of the steps as the music played and I said, ‘It’s going to be a good year’, and a good year it was. I suppose this little story is all well and good if you’re a first year, but for the more seasoned veterans like me, and the third years, who in fairness probably aren’t reading this, as most of them are currently vomiting in waste paper baskets at the prospect of the endless academic toil that awaits them, I say, there’s no reason to feel jaded.

After all, university is by it’s very nature transient. Every year we lose a third of our faces, and a fresh third arrive, positions change hands, new societies emerge and others fade away. Even if you’ve been here before, at the start of an academic year at this university, it’s still a new beginning of sorts, and that feeling of a new beginning is possibly the most euphoric sensation on God’s green earth.

So it’s with this that I invoke the spirit of the late, great Mr. Bill Hicks when I tell you to buy the ticket, take the ride, and end my very own freshman column as I began: with the words of another great leader, Professor Albus Dumbledore, saying “To our newcomers, welcome! And to our old hands, welcome back!”