A new perspective

So it's now been over two weeks since I came back up to University, and to be honest, the more time I spend here, the more it's beginning to feel like it always has. Last year in Holland there was the double whamey of being in a new place, with new people. But despite that, I settled in there in no time at all, so I guess it stands to reason that seeing how the only new aspect here are the new people (and the fact that library now has a toilet) I should feel right at home. Which I do.

But that doesn't stop me from seeing things a little differently than before. Take the Law Faculty, where I spent a sizeable portion of my afternoon today. There's a fading newspaper article outside my Director of Studies office reporting on the problems with the Faculty when it first opened. Primarily the architect thought it would be a good idea to have the three floors of the library all open to each other with each higher level being like a mezzanine. Not a bad idea in itself, apart from the fact that he went one further and made the whole library one giant mezzanine to the communal entrance area. Hence, all the noise from downstairs resonated up through the library. So new glass walls had to be built to make the library more like a library. But not only that. The whole Faculty has one normal sized entrance door for people to get in and out. There's another door inside to the lecture theatres which is similarly normally sized, and there are giant concrete pillars blocking the entrances to the individual theatres themselves. The door into the men's toilet hits anyone using the urinals. You can hear what's going on in one lecture theatre in the one next door. The swivel chairs will only go down, and not back up, so everyone has to sit with their knees at the same level as their chins. The automatic lights noisily shake their shades every time they come on. The stairs are too shallow to take comfortably one at a time, but slightly too deep to make it two a time all the way up. And the whole place is cold, apart from the lecture theatres which are roasting. In short, I hate it. But the best thing is that it's designed by none other than Norman Foster himself. It's enough to make you want to cry that someone so famous can get it so so wrong. People say that from the outside it looks like an airport terminal, but in that case, inside it can't be anything other than the baggage handling hanger at Heathrow.

Selwyn itself is thankfully much better. Although I returned to my room the other day to find the whole staircase decked out in rather institutional signs pointing to all of the rooms. An immediate thought crossed my mind. The College has been without these signs for the past 130 odd years, with apparently no ill effects, so what's happened in the past few days to make them put them up? Although at least there's no danger I'll walk into the kitchen expecting to find the shower in the morning any more.

Unfortunately while I was working in the library (read: analysing it's faults) little did I realise that a certain grouping had taken a liking to my room. The other day I woke up to find a rather large bee in my bedroom - he seemed just as annoyed at the inconvenience as I was. But today nature went one better, and while I was beavering away, a group of ladybirds apparently decided to take up residence behind my curtain rail.


This could well explain why I've been ushering out similar ladybirds for the past few days. Obviously someone's done the ladybird equivalent of posting an invitation to a party in C13 on MySpace or YouTube. I'm just waiting for the music to start.