On your first day of college, you stort thinking about all the famous people who've travelled the same route as you . . . like Brian O'Driscoll, writes ROSS O'CARROLL KELLY
WHEN I look back on my college days now, I remember them in a series of, like, snapshots? Hord as it is to imagine, these were the days before camera phones were even invented. Yet when I close my eyes, there are things I can see as clearly as if I was looking at an actual photograph on a computer screen.
Like modelling a black, form-fitting T-shirt during one of the famous UCD fashion shows, while 300 girls stared hungrily up at me on the catwalk and Rosanna Davison – er, a future Miss World? – sat looking at me, her mouth flapping open like a windsock. Oisinn eating cat food out of an old nappy to win the Iron Stomach competition. JP squeezing his scrawny little full-back’s body into a spin-drier in an all-night laundromat in Ocean City, New Jersey, to try to beat the long-standing J1 record of 285 rotations without spitting his lunch.
What I remember most, though, is that very first day driving into the place. You take the slip-road off the Stillorgan Dualler, then turn left through the gates into the actual campus and that's when it automatically hits you – the whole sense of history. You stort thinking about all the famous people who've travelled that exact same route as you're taking now, going way back through time, everyone from Brian O'Driscoll to, I don't know, the Minnie Driver character in Circle of Friends.
It doesn’t matter how confident you are, I discovered, that first day will make you feel, honestly, two feet tall. You might have been top dog in your old school. You might have strutted around like you owned the place, giving ’tude to your teachers and disembowelling first years with their own boxers shorts, while the principal was happy to turn a blind eye as long as you kept kicking the points that brought the school closer and closer to glory. Now, that no longer matters. Suddenly you’re in the real world.
And suddenly you’re mixing with people from, like, all walks of life – Blackrock, Clongowes, Terenure College, even Gonzaga.
We all wore our old school colours that first day and everyone walked around, I suppose, dispensingfilthies to the people from the schools that they hated – which in our case was everyone. The idea was that after a couple of weeks you'd buy a UCD airtex and develop a new allegiance to the actual college. I, though, wore the red and black stripes of Castlerock for the entire year I spent in the place and it's one of the things I'm still remembered for to this day.
I’ll never forget approaching the famous Orts block for the first time. There must have been, like, 500 or 600 girls standing around outside in the sun – all of them beautiful, all of them in pink Ralph Lauren. These were the days before Abercrombie and Fitch became huge, which will tell you how long ago we’re talking. From a hondred yords away, the first year Orts girls looked like a flock of flamingos taking in the sun on the shore of the lake.
Yeah, it was allpink. Then there was the fake tan and the whitened veneers. If you want to know why we were the only college who were allowed to wear shades in lectures, it was because of the glare.
I remember orientation day like it was yesterday. I turned up to collect my two free packets of love zeppelins, a bank account with a Brody Jenner in it and a photograph of my course lecturers so I could recognise them if they ever came into the bor looking for me.
Everywhere, there were people shoving fliers into my hands. One, for some Born Again Christian society, said, “Jesus the carpenter requires joiners”, which I thought was pretty clever when the penny finally dropped five hours and six Heinekens later.
A girl called Keelin asked me to take port in a student protest morch. I asked what they were morching against and she said it hadn’t really been decided yet. And I didn’t push it because she looked like Isla Fischer, even though she was originally from Leitrim. So I went along, ever the romantic. I remember morching just behind her all along Nassau Street and thinking how it was possibly the best-dressed student protest of all time. I think anyone who was in UCD in the early noughties will remember the so-called Dubarry Docksider Revolution and the 500 brave people who morched in the cause of, I don’t know, whatever it was we decided in the end.
Keelin took me back to her little one-room flat at the top of Harcourt Street, where we made sweet love and she shouted her hosannas loud enough for the Gords up the road to send a squad cor to make inquiries. It was the first of a hundred bedsits I woke up in that year.
It was so small that you had to put the two-bar electric heater outside in the hallway if both of you wanted to get out of bed at the same time.
I remember lying under the duvet while she cooked a breakfast of frozen burgers on a grill that was inside the wardrobe at the foot of the bed – coming from Foxrock, you can imagine what a culture shock that was for me – and I set myself the torget of sleeping with a girl from every county in Ireland, however many that was at the time. I can tell you, proudly, that I didn’t fail.
Of course all good things come to an end. By October of the following year, the head of the course I was doing was on my case about me missing lectures. It was news to me that there wereany. I mean, it was, like, a sports scholarship and I presumed it was the same deal as I had in Castlerock – keep kicking like a ninja and no one will ever ask you to learn anything. I was actually out on the pitch practising my penalties when he managed to track me down. He storted banging on about lecture attendance quotas and how I hadn't met them.
I took my usual four steps backwards, then three to the left and put the ball straight between the posts – this from an angle you wouldn’t believe. I went, “You can’t teach that in a lecture hall.”
He tutted, then pressed a letter into my hand, telling me I was no longer a student at the college. But looking back? I wouldn’t change a single thing.
I put the ball straight between the posts – this from an angle you wouldn't believe. I went, "You can't teach thatin a lecture hall"