Sara Sayeed - Goes way back
Now, while the resident goes way back columnist uses historiocity as a convenient excuse to indulge his micro-film fetish, I don’t really equate the library with play-time. So we’ll take a briefer amble down memory lane and skip back two, rather than twenty years. The bygone days of the Fresher epoch, circa 2005: somewhat best recounted by that wayward reveller Dickens as “the best of times, the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief….”
Apart from the permanent troughs under my eyes and an ingrained dose of nourishing cynicism, quite a bit has changed within those seemingly brief twenty-four months. We came, we saw, we faltered (mostly on Micklegate) and life just passed the sozzled ones by. In my day, Ziggy’s was a place where the scantily clad ventured to be appraised by the grope happy, and now on Friday’s it is a “Strip Club”.
Ok, so really only a semantic alteration there, but some progression at least. Even Goodricke wasn’t built in a day. We have seen the demise of the baby-belling. Once upon a time, Freshers could strive towards their aspirations of culinary innovation – it provided a different experimentation outlet for those “late bloomers”. Indeed, in times past gastronomic mountains have been conquered with the baby-belling.
I heard tell of a full Christmas dinner being executed with one – albeit that abandoned Fresher probably had a bit of time on their hands to hone the necessarily skills to achieve that feat, but what are today’s Freshers going to do when heartlessly discarded by mummy and daddy come Christmas holidays? They can’t even go make friends with Fit Duck for some comforting conversation – because he’s dead. Fit Duck’s nesting/resting grounds have also altered. With the removal of the lake fountain, gone are the days when sporadic bursts of pond spew dropped most delightfully in one’s hair and coffee on the way to morning lectures. So there we are - changes. And I didn’t even have to fondle any micro-film.
