Experiments in Living

The college years - part 2

After my French adventure, I returned to Bangor University to complete the final year of my degree. The thing was, it wasn’t the same. Time doesn’t stand still. Just because I was away having this massive experience certainly did not mean that everything was the same when I returned. For a start, most of my friends who had started at uni at the same time I did had already graduated. I also felt like the older generation, which in a way I was, as during the time I was away, there had been some massive changes in the higher education funding system, which were starting to trickle down into social change. Whereas my generation collected our grant cheques after enrolling, the new kids had fees to pay.

I was drinking heavily and smoking yet bizarrely I had this fantastically healthy vegetarian diet. This was the year I had next to no money, as the student loan cheque was miserly for the final year, and even with the money I had saved from my summer jobs (working in a fish factory and then driving a tractor on an arable farm) and working in France, I was still pretty skint. I don’t know what I lived on half the time, but I was the skinniest I’ve been in my whole adult life since. I remember it being a totally mad year, filled with strange people, strange experiences and strange ideas.

Personally, I was into occult and esoteric theories and practices, but my degree work also took a strange turn into the unseen world. One of the courses I studied was about the symbolists and dadaist art and literature. While looking for material on the subject, I found masses of scholarly works on the subject. In between staying up too late and drinking, I would sit for hours in the library poring over anything on the subject, and there was a lot of it. At one point I was particularly interested in Rosicrucianism, and wrote a paper on How to become a Fairy (Comment-on devient fée) by Joseph Péladan. Bangor Uni has an extensive Welsh library collection, not all of it in the Welsh language luckily for me, which is filled with books on the Celts and other pre-Christian cultures. As you have probably guessed, I didn’t own a television back then.

I also got very interested in existentialism and angst, only this time I was looking at it from the outside rather than experiencing it directly. For the first time I was glad that I had experienced such misery during my teens as I could relate to the difficulties in existence as not just being about me, but being universal. Just to impress you (or not) I will name-drop a few authors I read that year, Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, J-P Sartre. To make it all the more interesting was the context of the end of the millennium that I was living through myself. It was all rather surreal.

I hooked up with a random ripped-jeans wearing guy during the time I lived in this subjunctive universe. Not only was he a vegetarian and spoke French, but he also saved up his beer bottles to recycle, which I thought was just fantastic. This was cutting-edge stuff back in 1999.  It was so great to finally meet someone who was totally on my wavelength, who “got” me, that I could be myself with. I spent several months where I was fulfilled with my academic work and was living life to the full outside of the library. Somehow I even managed to make it through my finals and get a 2:1 degree.

Then the letter arrived. I had been accepted to work abroad for a year in Guadeloupe. I had applied months before to go on another language assistant programme and had almost forgotten about it. In any case, I didn’t think I would be selected for one of the overseas posts. It was a rare opportunity, but I felt as if I’d just got my life going. I was enjoying my life, I didn’t want to leave Mr Ripped-Jeans, but if I didn’t take the chance, wouldn’t I always regret it?

Find out what happened next in Part Five.

Tags: France, Guadeloupe, university