It’s Fresher’s week here at Bristol University and I just took a stroll in the Indian summer sunshine among the sea of new students milling around the campus. Actually, Bristol University doesn’t have a campus, but with over 23,000 students, the streets of Redland have been taken over, so it feels like one big urban student sprawl.
The average age of this part of Bristol has just dropped below 25 years and this makes me feel strangely young and old at the same time. Young because I don’t feel any older inside and want to go partying with this army of youth but then, very old as I become acutely aware that they look at me as an old man. One youngster just called me “sir” and while I appreciate the deferential address that is so rare these days, I hate to be thought of as a teacher.
I don’t care what others say. I find growing old very difficult and I am not even considered that old by many (thankfully I have been blessed with youth genes – and I don’t mean Levi’s). Most of my friends from my own student days graduated decades ago and are now captains of industry or languishing in some unfulfilled career. I have been immensely lucky to become an academic – to have a career studying and researching what I find fascinating. But the university environment comes at a cost. Each year I am reminded that my care-free days have passed and that my mortality is limited. And what’s more is that the parents of these students are starting to look young to me- oh the horror of that.
Inside I am still stuck mentally somewhere around my early twenties but my body is now double that age. It’s like the opposite of the IQ – a measure where your mental age divided by chronological gives you the score. So if you are 20 years old, but solve tasks that on average are suitable for 30-year-olds then you have an IQ of 150. By that reckoning, I think I have an IQ of around 50, which technically makes me a moron and not suitable for university.
