Year meme, part 3

[owl]

lilliburlero asked for 2002.

This was a good year. It overlapped my first and second years at university. I had settled in and learned how to cook two or three staple student meals (spaghetti bolonaise, roast vegetables with potato wedges, stir-fried chicken). I was living in the church hostel, in room 3 on the first landing. My friends G. and E. were next door in room 4, notable for having an inflatable three-piece suite and a television that reliably worked. The common-room TV cost about £20 all told and, I suspect, fell off the back of a lorry somewhere. A pink or green cast would come creeping over the picture from one of the top corners. You could temporarily retrieve things by the time-honoured method of thumping the top of the box, but the general impression that you were viewing a blizzard scene remained. This was because the arial was attatched to the wrong chimney, as the committee discovered last year, after five years or so of declaring it to be unfixable.

You can do on very little sleep when you're 19. We would have perhaps three nights of entertainment in a week. The big drinking night was Thursday, unlike most universities, because so many of the students were local and went home to their parents for the weekend. We used to go after CU was over and give coffee and biscuits to those who were the worse for wear. They always asked 'Why are you doing this?' and then we would say it was because we were Chrstians, which boggled most of them. Also, drunk people have very little concept of 'invading personal space'. The bouncers knew us pretty well-or perhaps it was easy to spot the only ones wearing anoraks instead of vests at three degrees above freezing-and used to get coffee from us as well.

We were very close to the Lanyon and the main bulk of the university. I could get out of bed at ten to nine and make it to a lecture in the physics building at nine, if I wasn't washing my hair. I had some Applied Maths modules as well in first year, which meant a slightly longer walk. I often used to have one lecture at nine o'clock and one at eleven, so during the hour in between I would go to the maths library, which mostly contained bound periodicals, and was tucked into a corner of the building, looking out into the Botanic Gardens over a crocus bed, or else to the short-term loan library, the Seamus Heaney, for an hour on the internet, if I could get it. At that time my main fandoms were Star Wars and Harry Potter. I read a lot of fanfiction. I didn't have this LJ until early 2003; I was mostly on FAP and the SugarQuill and the Jedi Council boards.

One module we did that year involved writing a program to simulate finding pi by the Buffon's needle method. I didn't get very good marks because I didn't put in enough comments. But you did get pi to however amny decimal places. We worked in the "fishbowl", a glass-walled computer lab at the top of the stairs in the physics building. I spent quite a lot of time in there discussing fandoms with doyle_sb4.

The autumn was much the same as the spring, with a different set of modules and a different overlap of housemates. I took an astronomy module because it looked easier than most of the others, and thus put myself on course to add "with Astrophysics" onto the end of my degree.



Comment if you want to be given a year to write about.

Comments

[richenda.livejournal.com]

I expect that inflatable furniture was better in 2002 than in 1975 or thereabouts, when mine got punctured by someone dropping a fork.