Following another fluky pass of my exams and fluky entrance interview to University, I managed to get the grades needed to be offered one of 20 places onto the best course ever – Earth Sciences. OK, so I did end up going down the Science route I detested as a 3 year old. My dream was to work in the police as a Forensic Scientist and still is, but can’t get everything I want I guess. I settled for the man rather than the career of my dreams. When I win the lottery, perhaps I will re-evaluate?!
So University, what a great time, remember it like it was yesterday; well I remember bits of it anyway! I met my husband during Freshers week, we were in the same halls. He came from Gloucestershire, had a pretty thick accent at the time and my God did he look like a farmer! His jeans had been washed so many times they were almost translucent and the shirts came straight out of the set of Worzel Gummage. From this description it is pretty easy to imagine that there wasn’t an instant attraction taking place. Anyway I became close friends with another girl on my course, she got transferred to the same halls and University life started in full force.
Toward the end of the first month of Uni I was told that I would marry that ‘farmer’. ‘WHAT – are you kidding me, I don’t even know him, what does he think he looks like – not in a million years!!’ Anyway a few weeks later (after getting to know him a little more on a few drunken nights out and an incident with Gin) we started to see each other very casually which then became a bit more of a regular fixture. During this time I had also taken up ten-pin bowling for a bit of a p*** about on a Wednesday afternoon – the only sport I was aware of that meant you could consume alcohol and still have a good game. I met some really nice PhD students, got drunk a lot, made consistent use of the teams ‘chunder truck’ which was as it sounds, got voted to be Ladies Team Captain won some pretty big trophies (they got much bigger by the end of each tournament!) and was surprisingly presented with Club Colours at the Sports Society annual awards ball – how on Earth?! The 1st year of Uni was messy and I could sense was going to get a little messier from there on…
Without going into too much detail, I was a typical 1st year student. I laughed a lot, stayed in bed a lot, liked men a lot (not the greatest of girlfriends at the time), responded to bootie calls, drank too much and loved spending the huge allowance Mummy and Daddy gave me every month - I basically didn’t take Uni very seriously. I figured I got through A-Levels alright and the 1st year of Uni is pretty much repeating that, so I thought I didn’t need to worry too much about it until I found out that it counted for 20% toward the final grade – gulp!! Oh well, life’s too short, I got into Uni didn’t I?!!
The 2nd year
Realising that the bed of roses of the 1st year, and the cushioning of halls wasn’t going to support me any longer, I moved into a lovely flat in the really cheap place in Buckinghamshire where all Uxbridge students slog it in nasty cheap digs, not. I moved to Denham Green! I got a flat with my friend, bought and paid for by our parents, I got a car and decided to try and knuckle down for the first time in my life to show my parents that their hard earned money wasn’t just supporting the local brewery, but was going to get me places. Hmmm.
After having a particularly horrible short lived relationship with what I can only describe as a psychopathic, needy, weird penis man over the holiday period (not the person I married just to get that one straight). I decided I had to get someone more normal and get back on track with that guy from Freshers week who I regrettably referred to as the ‘peasant’ for months due to the look and the letches he hung around with that seemed to have been dragged up, not brought up.
If I see something I want, I will get it. It may take time, it may take heart ache, but I will have it – I have the most immense determination if I really want to achieve something. Despite the farmer look and the unintelligent sounding accent, I could see room for improvement – he had potential, he had a nice arse and he had the body tone, he just needed a bit of pruning!
Final year
The last 2 years of Uni were hard. I wanted to be with my boyfriend and have a great time, I didn’t want to have my head in books. After a slight lapse in the quality of my work I had to pull my socks up. By this point my parents had spent thousands of pounds on me in living costs, mortgage, books, car and mobile (and of course an entertainment allowance!). I wasn’t the rat bag of my childhood any more and I couldn’t let them down. I had found myself a nice man and I had to come out with a 2:1, I owed them that much. If I could avoid pregnancy and arrest I would be onto a winner, I was sure of it!
The 3rd year was tough, I spent most of my weekends back at my parents, not just to get my clothes washed obviously, but to work. I really did work incredibly hard. My boyfriend was doing a placement for the Home Office working on some prison stats or something...zzzzzz. Though actually the main stories I heard were about playing ruler cricket and minesweeper, but he was being paid and having a laugh so I guess that was OK. After all, he had another year to do following the placement whereas I was being released into the wild for the first time in my life! I had no idea where I was going with my future career. After 3 months locked in a science lab glued to a microscope counting and analysing hundreds of f***ing pollen grains from a soil core to establish trends and time periods, I knew that there had to be a role out there that gave me some human interaction…? There was certainly more to life.
