Yesterday we looked forward to seeing our domestic help who had delayed her session with us from Wednesday to Friday. After catching up news, we visited our favourite cafe but had to dash up the hill to be in time for the carers' late morning call. Then we discovered some fish pie which I had prepared some time ago but made for a very satisfying Friday meal. This morning we were delighted to visit out local (large) Anglican church which is being used for a 'free' concert venue as part of the Bromsgrove festival. We are treated to a pot pourri of organ and piano pieces followed by some welcome tea and biscuits.
Now we come to my early days at Manchester University. I was lodged with three other lads, with two of whom we subsequently shared a flat and I am still in contact with them. The third has moved out of our orbit, so to speak and I believe had a successful career in a Canadian IT firm. Once we had got over the trauma of registration (it took me a week with one thing or another), work started in earnest. There were about 200 of us I think who all studied the same four subjects of Economics, Economic History, Social Anthropology and Politics/Government. I remember quite vividly the various first seminar which I attended which I think was in Social Anthropology and the tutor asked a question of the 8-10 people in the seminar group. There was a pause of several seconds before anyone spoke but several thoughts raced through my mind. This was that I felt I had undergone a struggle to get to university having left school at the age of 16, having had two civil service jobs which I had evidently given up to go to University and then, of course, I had studied for my 'A'-levels completely on my own. So as it is said that your life flashes before your eyes if you are drowning, so I felt that I had done so much to get to university and I was not going to let the opportunity of a University education pass me by. So I started to give my answer to the question and another of the students replied to me after which point the two of us were labelled as 'talkers' and argued with each other throughout the year whilst everything else stayed more or less silent. I must clarify at this point what when I say 'argued' I do not mean in the disputatious sense of the word. But in logic and critical thinking, an argument is a list of statements, one of which is the conclusion and the others are the premises or assumptions of the argument. I was also conscious of the fact from my little 'Teach Yourself Logic' which I studied intensively is that it is possible in Logic and Philosophy that in an argument between two participants it is possible to arrive at knowledge which in a sense is new knowledge for one or both of the parties. And so I carried on in my university career being conscious of the fact that it was quite possible that your own thought processes when articulating a position can be clarified in the course of argument/discussion with others. I have one or two abiding memories of my first year at Manchester. One of these is that the University Economic History department used to think of itself as a world leader in the subject which may have been true thirty years earlier with some distinguished scholars but now I got the impression that they were living out their former glories. So during the course of the year, I think I wrote at least five longish essays in Economic History and we were directed to go straight to the journals in Economic History to get to the heart of particular debates avoiding anything so mundane as a textbook. So when it came to the Economic History examination at the end of the first year which happened to be the first examination in the timetable, I felt reasonably well prepared and confident. To my absolute horror, every single essay that I had written failed to be represented on the Examination paper so I got the horrible feeling which does not happen very often when you read the first question on the paper and say 'No' to oneself before proceeding to read the rest of the paper. I do not think I have ever felt so much like absolutely bursting into tears - I had spent probably half of my first year researching and writing Economic History essays and I felt I could not answer a single question on the paper. When I shared this experience with others on the course, one explained that he was in the tutorial group of the Professor who had actually written the paper so that the contents of it came as no surprise. After this experience, I vowed to myself that I would never let this happen to any students that I might happen to teach in the future and therefore I always gave students an indication of the areas upon which a question was going to be asked so that 'examination question spotting' should not have to be a concern of students. In the event, at the end of the first course of the course, I achieved a Third in Economic History and a Third in Economics (the curse of having achieved an 'A' at A level and assuming I knew it all already) But I achieved a First in Sociology/Social Anthropology and a First in Politics/Government so it was fairly evident where my strengths did and did not lie. Sociology seemed to be the more interesting of these choices then but nowadays I would probably have chosen the Politics/Government option (but it was more like constitutional history rather than Politics as we know it today) The huge intake divided into the specialisms of Economics, Economic History, Politics, Sociology, Social Administration and several more besides. In practice, in the first year when we had mass lectures, one tended to know other students who were part of ones party going set rather than students who were to later follow one pathway or another. But the University Union had a very lively debating society, the debates being an opportunity to offer entertaining and witty contributions. I remember one very talented student of German (who failed his examinations) providing the lead-off debate on the subject of 'Do children enjoy their childhood more than adults enjoy their adultery?') But these debates that started at about 12.30 had to be terminated by 2.00pm when the afternoon lectures resumed.
© Mike Hart [2024]