The reason for this weekend’s trip to Brighton was to move my stepdaughter into Sussex University. She loaded up all of her stuff into her boyfriend’s car on Saturday lunchtime and they drove down together[1]. We followed on the train and by a sheer fluke managed to arrive just as they had finished the unloading. We then stayed a while and helped her do some of the unpacking. I put her computer together – but wasn’t able to test it as she didn’t have enough power sockets. The information we had received in post said that the rooms should have all had network points by the start of this term, but that work hasn’t finished so she doesn’t currently have an internet connection from her room – which is a bit disappointing.
Later on we had a brief wander around the campus until we found the student union bar and enjoyed some subsidised food and drink. Eventually we wandered off to stay overnight at a friend’s house leaving her to enjoy the first night of freshers week.
The next day we met her in the centre of Brighton for lunch. Brighton this weekend was even more surreal than it usually is. Firstly, everywhere you went there were eighteen year olds buying household goods that they had forgotten to bring with them (the 99p shop was doing a roaring trade) and secondly the Labour Party were in town for the start of their annual conference – which also meant an increased police presence. It was very strange to turn a corner in the Lanes and walk into two policemen carrying machine guns.
In the middle of the afternoon, she went back to the campus and we wandered off to the pier and, later, home.
In many ways it was a very nostalgic weekend for me. It brought back a lot of memories of the weekend that I moved to London to start my degree. At various points over the weekend I started telling stories of my time living in halls of residence to anyone who would listen. I remembered things that I hadn’t thought about for twenty years.
[1] A tip. The capacity of a small Fiat is about the same as the capacity of a room in halls of residence. IF you’ve got too much stuff to go into the car, then chances are you’ve got too much stuff to go into your room.
I’ve just come back from a university room at Oxford and much to my surprise I had to do two runs in my Nissan Almera (with the back seats down) to bring everything home. This was pretty surprising, I didn’t think I had all that much stuff! But then I think the room was probably a bit bigger than my undergrad room in Canterbury.
You found a bar surely – or has Sussex gone radically anti-alchohol since my day :-)
We found the bar in the main students union building (the Falmer Building I think). I assumed that the other bars we saw on the campus were run by the University or the halls of residence rather than by the Students Union.