I'm not sure if this old man can do both...

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student, week 2.65

Of course, sometimes there are days when everything seems, well, right, somehow.

These are the sorts of days when you drag your mature student ass into university early. You get half an hour's peace on a computer in the library before a bank of young women set up opposite you and talk non-stop, but that's okay, being as if the ipod's on low enough, you won't get yelled at by a library maven, so you can complete your assignment to the strains of Johnny Cash.

The Judge said 'Son, what is your alibi? If you were somewhere else, then you don't have to die'
I said not a word, though it meant my life - I'd been in the arms of my best friend's wife.

So the assignment just seems to fly by, and suddenly there's a second wind allowing you to keep studying, to attempt to simmer down lots of study into a few pages of notes.

Then suddenly it's midday, and then there's lunch, and then an editing class followed by a really good lecture.

I have to be honest.

I've not always been a writer for Eton Crow.

Way back when, I used to write a column on blog.co.uk. Okay, column isn't entirely accurate, but it's not entirely inaccurate, either. I used to write about music, and I used to receive promo records, but I knocked that on the head because it felt dishonest, somehow. So here's the admission nobody in particular's been waiting for; I used to be Stompy Robot, and now when I look back at the column I wrote about advice for new students, I think it's kind of, well... Interesting...

I know, I know, too many ellipses. And yet...

... I find it interesting. Of the students I've met, they all seem to have their own laptops, and the newest mobile phones, and mp3 players and all this newfangled stuff that makes me think, well, how the hell did we manage back in the last century?

I'm serious. I know how old this makes me sound, but when I started my first degree in 1999, I considered myself lucky to have a TV with a video player build in. The nearest computers were in a searing hot (all year round) basement and there were sixteen computers for the approximately 400 students living there.

Not that people used them much, of course, because the internet was boring as shit way back then. Seriously, the most interesting thing I did was play Popex and check my hotmail. Oh, and, occasionally, yes, write essays.

The most sophisticated consoles were the N64 (Oh, for a game of Goldeneye) and the PS1. DVDs weren't massively available. You just had to put up with videos, which meant using the campus video library - not wonderful, but not too bad either - or buying videos at exorbitant rates, which wasn't really an option for a student.

So the next time, young people, that you're torrenting a film or whatever and you think that's difficult, put it this way; would you rather have watched it on a video tape that many, many other students had worn thin over the years with no guarantee it would actually work?

Young people these days, blah, blah, blah. Of course, in ten years' time when we're all watching films on individualised goggles with terabytes of internal memory and accessing alternate realities and locative art, you'll look back on these days and think... Yes, I remember the days when I actually had to click a mouse...