It's not a nostalgia thing, but it makes me think about my own university days, about how much I actually miss an academic environment. University is such a significant time in the lives of most undergraduates. For me it was about being away from home, taking responsibility for myself. Learning some lessons about self-discipline and motivation. I was a fairly independently minded teenager, so some of those things were not as big a step for me as for others. In fact the truth is that I looked for a college that was far enough away to make weekend visits home or from home a bit of an expedition. And when the opportunity to stay at college over a holiday period like Christmas or Easter came my way I looked forward to it. Being independent suited me just fine.
Today, so I am told, more and more students go to university locally and live at home for the duration. That seems a little sad to me. I get the impression that this is more an economic choice than anything else.
Still, things change and thirty years ago a wireless hotspot was probably something generated by the microwave experiments in the physics department. I remember one experiment in the field of radio and microwave technology that took all day to complete, large parts of which were spent trying to figure out where radio 4 was coming from!
In the 70's computers were big, room-filling machines that were far from under-friendly. My one and only use of a computer at college was to experiment with a computer model for controlling a pest population on a fruit farm (I did a very varied first degree!)
Of course the other thing about university was meeting Anne. It wasn't exactly the most romantic of first meetings. We were, as I recall, dissecting earthworms as part of the biology course unit. Anne was not at her best taking small animals and the like apart, me on the other hand, I rather enjoyed the whole thing. At school a fellow biologist and I were standing in line for lunch one day and noticed that people just in front of us kept leaving the queue for some reason. To this day I don't know why, but I have wondered if it had anything to do with our conversation about the stomach contents of the dog fish we were dissecting that morning (the dog fish, if you didn't know, is a member of the shark family and quite a fascinating fish to dissect on account of this).
Anyway, Caffe Nero is filling up with mums and babies out for morning coffee and I need to turn my attention to next Sunday and my talk on Esther.
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