Open Day

Michelle Wards

1999

There is no crueller misfortune in this jet-set world of money, power and glamour than to be born in a dreicher than dreich Scottish village which does not even appear on a map. It is even worse to live in such a place as an awkward bookworm with no interest in standing on street corners drinking and watching boyracers. The pain was lessened only by the prospect of one thing: university. My first glimpse of this beautiful future was Edinburgh University open day, 1999.

I arrived off the train with my mother in tow, clutching my ring binder with a mixture of joy and awe. There was the castle, looming above the city in all its glorious splendour. To my right was Princes Street. A place much maligned by locals but to me it was an absolute treasure trove, a street which had real shops and not just the half-stocked Dorothy Perkins that was the only clothes shop within half an hour of my house. There were people in Princes Street Gardens sitting around relaxing and some of them may quite possibly have been reading actual books.

Our taxi swooped up towards the University. I couldn't believe my eyes. People were sitting outside of cafes. Surely such things only happened in exotic places like Paris? I imagined the intellectual conversation occurring over cappuccinos and had to be restrained from stopping the taxi and joining in. Then we passed the real find of the city, the well-stocked record shop. Could they have the Urusei Yatsura limited edition 7 that I had been looking for? I breathed in the city with all my hillbilly wonder. This might just be the place.

Edinburgh University didn't quite have the same impact. It appeared to be nothing more than a square of gloomy tower blocks. It was grey building after grey building, corridor after corridor, door after door. But then the dour mood was broken by people swarming past: chatting, laughing, smiling. There were probably more people alive there than had ever lived in my village since time began.

Only when we finally found the room that displayed the sign 'English Literature Applicants' did I realise my mistake. Rows of young people were all sitting chatting to each other. I felt like I had been invited to a glamorous dinner party but only after everyone had finished eating. And I had invited my mother. The woman from the University stood up and started talking about the medieval literature that we would study in our first semester. Everyone around me was nodding with enthusiasm. I looked at my mother with horror. She had fallen asleep. I began to feel like those girls at school who sat and stared vacantly out the window all day. The lecturer then asked us how many people were Scottish. I shot my hand in the air with patriotic glee. I was the only one. Eyes turned to look at me as if I was a specimen in a museum. My cheeks didn't so much as turn red but burn themselves into a cinder.

At the end of the mind-tinglingly boring talk I nudged my mother awake. The boy in front of us was wearing a suit and handing out business cards to everyone in the room (except me). I couldn't decide if this was a good or bad thing. We walked outside into the cold of George Square and watched the boy in the suit as he walked off with a gaggle of girls following him.

'Idiot,' my mum muttered.

'Totally,' I replied and we laughed about him all the way back up the road.

In the end I went to Glasgow University for no other reason than I saw a girl there wearing a Mogwai T-shirt. Spying her across the ground of the campus halls was a huge cascade of relief, there were other people like me! I just had to find them, and avoid boys in suits along the way. But Edinburgh was the first city I truly loved, and I still look back on that open day with the faintest tinge of nostalgic wonder at what might have been.