Bloody students. And I speak as a person who used to be one. Before hate e-mail clogs up my in box, let me say my antipathy is partly based on my jealousy of those cool student types typified by the women who drift out of Trinity College of an evening.
All gypsy skirts and sparkly scarves and books under their arms. That's the kind of student I would have loved to be. But I wasn't very good at being any kind of student. Not in secondary school. And definitely not in college.
Having run screaming with relief out of the school gates, I had zero interest in being part of another academic institution, even if more relaxed rules meant you could forgo lectures to watch Neighbours twice a day. My mother had other ideas. A fan of third-level education, she thought I'd be throwing my life away if I didn't at least give it a chance. After repeating the Leaving Cert and accidentally getting enough points to be accepted on a course, I became a student. It wasn't the life for me.
My refusal to engage fully in the joys of student life meant I cut myself adrift from the crowd from practically the first day at college. It was no skin off my nose. Part of the reason I didn't want to be a student stemmed from not wanting to be part of a crowd. While everyone else was joining societies and swapping gossip on their tutors I was working out how many solitary curry-and-chip dinners my grant would allow. Not for this reluctant academic endless bleary nights drinking warm beer from a plastic glass in the students' union, trying to persuade other students to get off with her. Not that many of them anyway.
As it turned out I spent most of my six months as an arts student in Maynooth perfecting my skills as a medium. There was a certain supernatural symmetry about the fact that most of the acquaintances I made during my short time at college seemed to share my interest in the Ouija board. At least they did in the beginning.
After the spirits refused to supply titbits from beyond the grave, such as the questions for the end-of-term exams or the following week's lottery numbers, most of these fair-weather mystics lost interest. I was left to cut out the letters and have esoteric chats with John Lennon on my own. (John: Is that you moving that glass? Me: Yes.)
Various things conspired against my embracing student life. The digs were a good half-hour walk from college, which clashed with my innate laziness. In fact everything in the college seemed weirdly far away from the next thing you wanted to go to, which didn't suit me at all. Another reason I failed as a student was that if you didn't count the seminarians - and I didn't - there just weren't that many boy students I fancied enough to make me hop out of bed and into the lecture hall. There was only ever one way it would end. As others buckled down to first-year exams I hopped on a flight to London and left the student life behind for good.
You might be surprised to learn, then, that last week I put it all behind me and became a student for the day as part of UCD's 150th-anniversary celebrations. I wanted to see if, almost 15 years later, I was mature enough for academic life. Taking this student lark seriously, we arrived slightly late for our history of art lecture, on the changing sculptural landscape in Dublin, which was surprisingly interesting. Next up was a film-studies lecture on Psycho, which didn't feel like a lecture so much as a slightly highbrow DVD club, which suited us fine. A lecture on linguistics was more challenging, mainly because, while explaining the vagaries of semantics, the lecturer kept making pointed comments about the print media and at one point referred to a column about "a girl who paints the kitchen with her boyfriend or something" at the beginning of a certain newspaper's magazine. The cheek.
We knew that no day as a student would be complete without an inspection of the student- union bar, so we could play pool, bitch about the size of our grants and discuss which of our male lecturers we would be with if they were the last men on earth.
A lot of real students were milling helpfully around. The one I chose to ask for directions was a friendly-looking blonde carrying a white stick. "You know," said my fellow student for the day as we followed her, "I'm guessing not many other people would have asked that particular girl for directions."
I agreed that perhaps it wasn't the most educated decision of my life and blamed the mental wear and tear wrought by our brief intellectual adventure. Maybe I'll never be able for academic life. The bar was closed by the way. Bloody students.
