Growing Up…

The good thing about blogging is that you can find out what people have searched for in order to arrive at your site. For me this causes much merriment as at the moment I am receiving hits from people searching for “bobcats for sale” and, perhaps even more bizarrely, “comebacks for innuendos about sausages”. I cannot recall ever having posted about either of those subjects, directly or otherwise. Of course I welcome the readers, but am afraid that having arrived at the ‘Field looking for bobcats you may leave disappointed. Naturally I will tag this post with both ‘bobcats’ and indeed ‘sausages’, meaning that you are more likely to arrive here and read this post and be disappointed than you were before. It’s something of a catch-22.

Anyway, onto the real point of why I wanted to blog today when I’ve found a few spare minutes. I was in the pub last night chatting with a mate about many a thing and we moved onto, roughly, the idea of growing up, and how much we’ve grown up since both the first year of university, and indeed, since we have graduated. For me this is brought home by what I considered important then, and what I think of it now.

Take BULS for example. I hadn’t checked their blog for roughly six months until about a week ago, and aside from the painful new layout, the quality seemed to have tailed off into nothingness. Having checked it again today to see if this had improved, I instead find an appeal from the only current writer it seems asking where the conservative opposition which once lit up the comments on pretty much every article has now gone. I think the point is that the writer isn’t producing enough to keep people caring, nor is the style, written and otherwise, particularly appealing.

However, whereas once upon a time I would have had online debates on any given subject on both this blog, and the BUCF site, now I feel a sense of something else. It is a mixture of sympathy and pity. The trouble is that the stuff they are writing is the same stuff that can be found, articulated much better, on any number of websites, or in any number of newspapers. Thus their writing seems almost pointless. Obviously I remain encouraged that people are engaging with politics, and at university is a good place to develop and stimulate political opinion, however it is their continuing sense of self-importance which makes me feel sorry for them. They are small fry, part of a blogging statistic rather than the significant political player they would like to think they are.

Likewise I now look at the university’s Guild of Students, and think how much time I spent there, as well as the time I’ve spent thinking about how to improve it’s involvement in the university. It’s beginning to seem all a little pointless now though. For all intents and purposes I cannot say, from what I’ve seen, that the Guild as both a building and as an institution has developed significantly since when I first started university, despite all the posturing of the council, the officers and other such folk. The devil, I suppose is the scale of things. Whilst at university these things are the world, they involve everyone and need to be fed by the students in order to live. Once you are outside of this circle though there is this amazing thing called ‘the bigger picture’. You come to realise that your university life, your contribution, was nothing but a pointillist dot on a Seurat canvas.

In the world outside university, it matters not that you contributed to this or that, other than it being a CV filler of course. What matters is the person themself. How university has shaped you is more important than what you did whilst you were there. The lasting effect of ‘you’ is more important than being able to say ‘I wrote for the uni’s paper a couple of years ago’. It was important at the time, but it just isn’t anymore.