My friend – we’ll call her Ana, as that’s her name – is going to university at the age of 42. She had her children in her 20s and now that they are more or less off her hands she is packing her bags and setting off for three years of academic adventuring.
I could not be more jealous (I know it’s “envious” really – I did English at university and this is about the only useful piece of information I retain from my whole time there, but only “jealous” ever has the kick you’re after, doesn’t it). Not so much of having children in your 20s, because unlike Ana (a born Earth mother), my youthful irresponsibility and selfishness plus the parlous state of my maternal instinct even unto my 37th year would not have resulted in success for anyone involved. But the going to university? When you are of an age to enjoy, appreciate and wring every ounce of use from it? Let us all say, as I believe the young people do not any more, a fervent HELL YES to that.
To say I was an ignorant, sub-moronic blob when I turned up at university would be to insult ignorant, sub-moronic blobs. I was 19 because I had taken a gap year – to earn money rather than travel – and started my English degree not even aware that people had written books about books. It was a steep learning curve and I fell off it repeatedly.
Because we are all idiots at that age, are we not? Put us all together for three years, with cheap alcohol and access to chlamydia tests and treatment and… well, we’re not going to get too much work done, are we? I was also desperately homesick and bewildered and spent my nights crying down the phone (payphone that is, in the city centre – it cost me a fortune and denied many, though alas not all, a drunken man a place to piss) to my parents. They used to take it in turns to assure me things would get better, until either I or my supply of 10 pence pieces was exhausted.
Things did get better, of course. Happiness did start to creep in. But what did that mean? I just wasted time in a different way and now want to weep again in recollection. Or, when I think of the lecturers and the experts and the books we had on tap and rolled our eyes at the thought of spending time with, scream.
The only advantage we had then compared to young people now, is that at least it was relatively cheap. Grants had long gone but fees had not come in. The idea of graduating with tens of thousands of pounds of debt to testify to how young and stupid I once was chills me to the bone. I know that the cost may slightly curb some excesses, give students more of a customer mentality and a greater drive to extract more value out of their courses perhaps than we did. But whether it can fully compensate for the sheer 18-21ness of them all, I seriously doubt.
How much better it would be to make university a later-in-life thing. Try all kinds of jobs in your 20s, get to know yourself a little and then take a state-sanctioned three-year break to deepen (if you’ve found the job of your dreams and want to go all the way with it, in the non-chlamydia-contracting sense) or broaden (if you’re still seeking that elusive subject that will seize the attention and galvanise the mind) your knowledge.
As we get older, we often start casting about for new things to do with our time, new things to keep us interested in – well, life, really. The curiosity is there. I’ve caught the gardening bug and can be found reading up on how to take cuttings, when and where to plant seeds, and how vengefully I can kill slugs without drawing unwanted attention to myself (I hate them so much. I dream of staking them out individually with cocktail sticks to die slowly in the sun).
Other friends are busy artsing and craftsing, joining choirs and otherwise revealing and cultivating talents I and sometimes they never knew they had. It’s wonderful.
But still, going to university 20 years after the socioculturally accepted norm is several orders of magnitude greater than fannying about with sweet peas and wondering why you’re the only person alive who can’t grow nasturtiums for love nor money. My envy (all right, all right) of Ana is matched only by my admiration of her courage.
I think perhaps I needed the fearlessness of youth – which yes, I suppose is basically a synonym for ignorance – to do it. I think I needed not to know how much I didn’t know in order to learn anything at all.
But just imagine going back, knowing all that you do now – about life, about how rare and precious opportunities are, how wrong it is to squander any one of them. You could set the world on fire. In one of the good ways, I mean. One of the good ways.