I’m no television executive, but if I were, I’d be on the phone to David Attenborough twice daily just to get him to do a series on Freshers week. I mean, that stuff would sell. You can almost hear Sir David’s avuncular, pipe-and-slipper tones begin: “Observe, here, the pairing ritual of the Fresher male when he sees a potential mate” – all over a clip of some absolutely wasted midlander with hands busier than a tourettic mime artist. We are something of a new species during the first few weeks of university; a kind of homo freshian. Because, what else can we be? We are surrounded by newness, and there’s no pitch of normality yet with which to align.
Of course, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy the last few weeks. I did, and it would be a pretty insular individual indeed who says that there’s no point in a week devoted purely to mingling – because, after all, you’re not just exchanging pleasantries for nothing. Amongst the intimidating-looking crowd, most probably anyway, are the friends of your adulthood, a pretty daunting thought considering you haven’t even found someone to go to lunch with yet. But it’s fair to say that the shock of being around a group of complete strangers does unlock something vestigial in us all. Deprived of any familiarity in which to wield our tried-and-tested manoeuvres, we resort to almost instinctive behaviour. If we’re not out parading our own brand of ‘uniqueness’ with a kind of peacockish strut, then we have out our self-defence antlers, poised and ready. And don’t think that I’m exempting myself from all of this – for the past fortnight I’ve been telling anyone that passes that I’m a guitar playing northerner.
But by a long way, the weirdest behaviour, in any anthropological sense, takes place about a week before Freshers even begins. It’s the ritualistic division of couples who are attending separate universities – an apparently painless romantic massacre that occurs every year. Perhaps it’s my doe-eyed faith in poetry, but I can’t help but find the thought of this relationship genocide extremely unsettling. Perhaps greeting card shareholders should consider assigning it a status as a national holiday, ‘University Heartache Wednesday’ or something, just to really cash in on all this unchecked sadness. Because, of course, the implication of the desire to break up isn’t personal problems, or an admission that the individuals don’t care for each other anymore – it’s basically: “While I haven’t met anyone else in whom I have found a greater affinity or emotional connection, they will at least have the altogether more important quality of contiguity.” And wouldn’t that be so much easier to convey on handy card, complete with a joke?
But isn’t it all just a little bit shallow? In another three years, will all those same people, with the same phlegmatic coolness, divide again, in order to be single for their first day at the office? Doesn’t this sort of behaviour concede a reliance on physicality? Of course, I’m being highly unfair on these people – their argument may even be valid. Are adolescent relationships just not watertight enough to survive long-distance? Are the grounds on which teenagers define their affection for each other simply too tentative to sustain feeling over, as Auden puts it, “the still and lucky miles”? Perhaps, as the breaker-uppers might argue, that kind of intense relationship is best left to the adults.
The long-distancers are usually easy to spot. They’re probably texting avidly, or using any opportunity to hamfistedly mention their significant other: “it’s funny you say that, my boyfriend went to the moon only last year”, or “ah, my girlfriend is also a communist”. But be fair, what else can they do? To not mention your partner would be tantamount to some sort of deception. If they were stood right next to you, after all, you’d be expected to introduce them to your new friends, so why should their absence change anything?
Or perhaps it’s just genuine loneliness. It’s no doubt a strange feeling to be apart, one that renders a relationship less like a celebration of mutual affection and respect, and more like an albatross around the neck. It’s hard to be sanguine, but the truth is, if the long-distancers think they’ve got it tough now, at least the next month or so will be tolerable. What won’t be, I reckon, is the first holiday, and that first reunion, where all these star-crossed lovers run into each others arms and find someone else. For in this new person is blent an alien outlook; a new set of in-jokes and memories. It’s not that they’ve changed completely – in fact they may be as kind and sweet as they ever were – but the metaphorical carpet of shared experience, which sustains most flimsy teenage relationships, has been pulled away, leaving the individuals to share stories that the other one neither understands nor cares about. There’s the mention of names and places that might as well be characters from a film as far as the other is concerned. Ultimately, it’s not the affection or love that’s unsustainable – it’s the people themselves. And without adequate contact during term, that affection is lagging behind almost, like the overweight, asthmatic kid during cross-country. These long-distance runners can only hope he catches up sooner or later.
There’s that famous film, about the lion that remembers its two owners again after 35 years in the wild. And it’s overwhelmingly emotional – the footage has usually been dubbed with “I Will Always Love You” or something, and lion and human hug and wrestle and weep like the end scene from ‘It’s a Wonderful life’, only furrier. But I always like to think of the bits they didn’t film, perhaps about 15 minutes after, with all three of them stood awkwardly around, without anything to say, the silence being eventually ended by the lion who says: “well, I best be going. But perhaps we should go for a drink sometime?”
Or maybe I’m just being miserable about it all.
God, I miss Hannah.
