Confessions of a former fresher

It is customary for every student after their first year to have absolute distaste for those over-zealous sentient masses of wristband-riddled flesh that spring up around campus every year, freshers.

But I have a confession to make. I was not always the scarred, cynical veteran of university life that I am now. I was once a chirpy, clueless fresher. I am now owning up and asking for forgiveness for all the obnoxious twat-ish things I did in that distant past.

My first year self was into some truly repulsive activities, such as smiling, making friends and socialising. I was so excited to finally be at university and now the thought of what an optimistic, fun-loving guy I was makes me feel like regurgitating the entire putrid contents of my insides out through my eye sockets.

There is a point in the history of time that I used to think night clubs, like 5th avenue, were actually good, and did so with not even a whiff of irony. I would be on the dance floor gleefully jumping up and down to “killing in the name of” thinking to myself how higher education has really made me appreciate the anti-authoritarian sentiment of the lyrics.

Fresher-me believed life in halls was tough. Maybe I thought that functioning heating and kitchen equipment made life too simple. We even had a cleaner, but I was always too terrified of her giving us grief about messy hobs that I would hide in my room as her vacuum cleaner of Northern malice could be heard in the hallway – sniffing out our pungent undergraduate bodies. Not that it was bad to be stuck in your room, the incredibly fast Internet that meant you never encountered a swirling circle of doom during an iNank.

Here’s some advice to any one hoping to be a good flatmate: do not decide that the best time to defeat the locust scourge in gears of war on the Xbox is four in the morning. Especially when you’ve just stumbled into your room after a night of downing sambuca shots with that person on your course whose name you can never quite remember. However, do at least attempt apologise when the guy in the room next door kindly asks you to stop as the volume is such that their desk is shaking like it’s on an espresso binge.

My appearance was even more dire. I thought it would be cool to paint my fingernails black and allow someone in my halls to pierce my ear with a potato. To fresher-me that was being zany and interesting, to now-me that was being desperately quirky and averagely individual. Worse was I didn’t mind going to lectures the next day with some face paint left on from dressing up the night before. Actually, it was worse that I even dressed up to go out in the first place.

Then there was the obsession with buying the largest and strongest alcohol available for human consumption, frosty jack. A right bargain with 2.5 litres available for around £3.50. A small price to pay for a night you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) remember and a day (sometimes several) of lying in bed sweating, sobbing and desperately pining for death’s sweet embrace to rid you of the pain your body is enduring as it deals with a blood stream now mostly composed of essentially apple flavoured de-icer.

Fortunately most of this is now well documented in the online archives of embarrassing and career-threatening images and information, also know as Facebook. However, perhaps it was by doing all these foolish things that at the end of my first year of university I had learnt one of the greatest lessons of life in academic institutes, to hate freshers.