C'mon Baby, just take my hand - we'll be able to fly

Our Director writes:

Diary of a Mature Student: T-2 weeks until kiss kiss, bang bang

... Or not.

It's fun learning new things. This weekend, I have learnt;

- That when the petrol guage on the car pings orange, you have more time than you might think to refill before everything goes wrong. You have no idea how good it was to find this out.

- It takes a surprisingly long time to paint someone's entire head white.

- A corrolary to this; you don't need to paint the entire head white, especially when you're using a hood. Just work out where the hood will land, demarcate it and only paint what you need.

- I have really, really, really good friends, as evidenced by letting me paint their head white.

It was for a good reason. Really. If you're going to make a homage to The Seventh Seal, then you need a Death / Grim Reaper. And, with luck, I will be making a scene in a few weeks that homages - and I know there should be an accent in there somewhere, bút héy - the portayal of Death within the original film.

So I thought it a good idea to get some practice at the whole facepainting thing, having never done it before. And now I know that

- Less is more
- White paint shows up nicely on camera
- A bald cap does make a person look like an advert for condoms
- and Mr Hairdryer Is Not Your Friend.

I am looking forward to going back - and if I keep repeating that, I'll start to believe it more and more, I hope - but it's a little strange. The first taste of returning to higher education was intoxicating, and strange, and amazing, because I was able to use the skills I've spent years obtaining in my job to do something I wanted to do, instead of mollycoddling recalcitrant regulatory staff.

The second year is more real, physically and mentally, because now the marks actually start to matter. In the first year, everyone's having fun because the marks are immaterial. Now, things - and people - matter. This is not a bad thing. It's just... different.

Granted, I remember my second year from my last merry-go-round with something less than fondness, because the transition from Not Having To Give A Shit to Having To Care Muchly was not handled gracefully on my part or the tutor's parts. There is a certain amount of winnowing and horse trading that goes on between year one and two; people drop out, switch courses, switch modules, switch paths etc, in the hope that by year three they know exactly that the hell they want out of the place. So Year Two is just as transitional as any other year - in Year One you transition into education, in Year Two you transition into seriousness, and in Year Three you start to transition out into The Real World.

Which is not a fun place, script kiddies, mark my words...