Farewell Student Loan Company

As I write I am sat at a party with screaming children and poor music. Shoes have been flung at my feet in an eager fit to bounce and run. Today I also received confirmation that my student loan and I have parted company. We have divorced and gone our separate ways. Over a decade after I left, I have finally finished paying for St Mary's college breakfasts and crabstick stir frys. It made me a tad thoughtful about the 'me' that had travelled through that academic world and the version of me that is travelling through this one. We are very different yet are undoubtedly the same person. I picked Durham University when I was 12. I found a brochure in my Latin teacher's office and I instantly fell in love with the picture of the cathedral on the front. That was where I wanted to go and I never though about going anywhere else. I had no idea where Durham was or what I would study yet I would go to university and I would go to Durham.

Those brief three years had a huge impact on my life. I discovered direct action and social justice, I tested my beliefs and challenged established thought, I moved hundreds of miles away from home to a place where it was truly cold in the winter. Yet, academically, it was really playing. It was not until I became a post graduate that I appreciated how insignificant my under graduate thoughts were. I thought I could change the world view on something but no peer reviewed journal came seeking out my assignment on 'The identity of the Teacher in the Qumran Community'. Fundamentally, I was saying little that was new. Instead I was learning how to craft an argument, how to navigate a library, how to write without plagiarising someone else's work. I learnt then that I loved writing. I discovered how I preferred to do it, the various states of mind I would pass through and how I could judge the standard of my own work. 

Then, in a matter of moments, I graduated and left. 

Yet I chose to live close to the cobbled streets I loved and would often see the 90's styled Scouse man wandering near to King's Gate. I love the fact that I have developed a new relationship with Durham and that it was the city I wanted to get married in. Yet the end of my SLC relationship is the final tie to a way of life that was. I am never going to climb onto the theatre roof and throw water bombs at Hatfield students again. Never again will I sit in 25 Church Street. Never will I find ingenious ways to keep contraband items, such as a kettle, from Susan my cleaner. I won't watch friends in plays or drink in subterranean college bars. That world exists only in my mind. We all grew up.

I grew up to be sitting in a sports hall hearing children scream. I grew up to be frantically wrapping presents after debating the ethics of how many cards to buy twin boys (I plumped on two cards and two presents somehow managing to over rule my miserly normal self), I grew up to have a mortgage and a job. This growing up has been mirrored in my academic writing too. I re-read assignments I was proud of from the Durham years and cringed at their simplicity and length. I saw them as lacking in personality; lacking in experience. At 18 I hadn't lived. I had grown up comfortably off, attended a good school and lived a safe and sheltered life. University was the start of an education that continues to this very day. I write differently now because I have lived differently. I have witnessed pain and suffering. I have experienced intense joy. I have been scarred and I have inflicted wounds on others. I have realised that academia changes the world less than it should; that people with life changing ideas are only read by a Holy Huddle of those who subscribe to that specific journal. The chances of those ideas breaking loose into the wider world are slim although it is possible. I am different. Yet I am the same.  Back in Durham I had a multitude of possible roads to travel and a multitude of possible versions of myself. Maybe, somewhere, I did stay on to do the MA in early Judaism I was offered. 

So, thank you Durham. I am glad we are more than friends on social media. Fancy a coffee soon?