The laundry of life
I think that I'm going to give up not being a student. I tried. I really did. But when the laundry chute of life repeatedly deposits you back into the washroom of fate, there's only so much you can do. Maybe I didn't wasn't sufficiently washed, my student habits were too obnoxious to society in general, and it was just kinder to everyone if I went back and experimented with being tumble-dried again. At least that might explain the way my hair looks first thing in the morning.
All my friends are students. I still have a pigeon-hole at my college and no-one seems to mind, even though it's six months since I finished my third degree and I don't own a pigeon. They gave me the third degree too, but not the tortuous we-will-extract-a-confession sort. They were satisfied with the tortuous extracting-a-thesis variety. Anyway, it seems time for me to venture out into the serious grown-up world, the one which doesn't allow you to go diving at lunchtime or to spend an hour in the afternoon debating the physics of a tacking sailing ship or to experiment with putting mini-rocket motors on the back of a wooden duck. I want to move on, but I'm still here in Cambridge for the time being and so in the autumn I tried to spread my wings a bit and find some non-students to be friends with. And I discovered the bubble walls for the first time. You don't notice the walls of the bubble when you're in it, but tunnelling properly through this mighty social film can be tough and unrewarding. On my last attempt, I took a fairly exciting running jump, hit the wall and bounced straight back into student-land, where I have remained ever since.
I like it here. I play hockey and squash for college and I row sometimes. I might as well stay put while I'm still in Cambridge, enduring the bemused envy tinged with pity radiated by some of my sensible friends in London with proper jobs and mortgages. I am neither employed nor unemployed, supporting myself as I am with scientific contract work, helping someone with a book they are writing and also teaching, but I don't mind not having a label. And they are actually very useful and productive projects. And my friends are here. When I was asked as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said "I don't want to grow up". And it was the correct answer, even though I didn't know why then. I'm an academic now, officially a lifelong student. It's the closest thing that you can have to a proper job while not "growing up", if growing up means becoming predictable and over-comfortable, and forgetting about the difficulties of the boundaries. It's not a cosy place to be - the highs are higher and the lows are lower, but it's never boring.
So, like the character played by Ronnie Corbett in the Two Ronnies sketch, maybe I'll just stop trying to escape, put on a pinny, roll my sleeves up and get on with the serious business of being a student.
