FRESHERS' WEEK

Everyone says that Freshers' Week is one of those experiences that you'll never forget.

I suppose that this is true, although if you go to all the parties and pub crawls that the second years put on, odds are you'll remember very little of it. My friends and I look back on it in the same sort of way that shell-shocked veterans remember their first week in the trenches. But this is OK, because all of us are still alive, and we at least find it amusing now.

During Freshers' Week, on the positive side, people make quite an effort to thoroughly introduce you to Oxford and give all sorts of helpful advice. On the negative side, this involves a sudden introduction to the more than slightly manic Oxford schedule. There were about two dozen orientation events which we were expected to attend, not including any of the optional events that we might want to participate in. There was clubbing every night, there was ice skating, there was a Space Bop, there was sleep. (And there were essays due next week, incidentally.) Many of us opted for sleep.

Our fondness for naps had something to do with the schedule, but more to do with the fact that we all had Freshers' Flu, which is one of those things that deserves to be written with Capital Letters. Symptoms include total exhaustion (jet lag has nothing on this), losing your voice, an emotional breakdown, and a fervent belief that you're really dying of meningitis. (There were posters all over the college warning about meningitis, nobody mentioned Freshers' Flu.) In my floor, which is almost all Historians, we passed the Flu around as generously as we would later share our library books and our essay crises. The worst thing was losing my voice: carrying on a conversation in a whisper makes you feel like a total idiot.

Speaking of feeling like an idiot, during Freshers' Week I also got my assignments for the first essays of term, due the next week. Somehow it was my task to get research done in between rushing to all these orientation sessions. For Politics I had to answer: "Was there a consensus between the two major British political parties between 1945 and 1979, and if there was, how did it develop?" For History my question was "How did British politics change after the revolution of 1688?" I knew something about the first question, but nothing at all about the second. More importantly, I knew very little about the Oxford libraries. I went out on a grey and drippy day and found the history books I needed in only the third library I tried, the Radcliffe Camera, a reference library which adorns probably a quarter of the postcards sold in Oxford. Sitting there reading about the forced abdication of James II in a building that had been built only 25 years after the event, I tried to at least spend as much time taking notes as I did looking up at the huge dome. The Politics reading room is in a much newer building, but I still felt awestruck "Look at me," I wanted to say, "here I am, in Oxford, actually studying!.... Oh, yes, where was I again?" Somehow I got through most of the required reading.

The undisputed highlight of Freshers' Week is Freshers' Fair, an enormous university-wide event which takes over the whole of the Examination Schools on High Street (where we'll all eventually take our finals). Whatever your interests, there are societies here for you: from Rock to Madrigals, Archery to Pooh sticks, Star Trek to Tolkien, you'll find it here. There were rooms and rooms and people and more people. I kept thinking I'd gone through it all and then there was more; I started writing down my name and address automatically. I even was talked into signing down for the German society despite the fact that I don't speak a word of German and have never been to Germany. I narrowly escaped joining the Korfball society by deploying the convenient excuse that I didn't know what it was. But I did join practically everything else, and I now know that this was a good move. The more societies you join, the more excuses you have not to write your essays! I couldn't wait to go to the first meetings.

Freshers' Week officially ends with Matriculation, the ceremony where we all officially became members of the university. All one hundred of us from St Hilda's paraded into town together, shepherded by the college librarian and looking like slightly bewildered penguins in our black and white academic dress. People along the street were videotaping us; I didn't know whether they were parents or just tourists. Before we went in my friend Phoebe wrote a political slogan on her face with red lipstick, and there was some excitement over whether the university proctors would let her in, but they eventually relented. I sat there in the balcony of the Sheldonian Theatre with Phoebe (having been put there so the vice-chancellor couldn't see her slogan), admiring the amazingly lovely painted ceiling. We heard a short talk on behaving responsibly, which I thought should have been delivered before the pub crawls began, and then it was all over. We were members of the university.

As we all spilled out into the street afterwards, it began to drizzle. Some people went back to the college, and some people went out for a celebratory drink. All the pubs looked too crowded for me, so instead I looked at Blackwell's Bookshops across the street and wondered, how can I have been here for a whole week and not have gone to Blackwell's yet? This is the life, I thought, as I dug into the Politics section, still in my cap and gown.