I returned to Keele with Simon Jacobs on the Thursday, having stayed with him and his family in Pinner the night before. This might have been the only time in my Keele years that I joined the train at Watford Junction rather than Euston.
My 1981 diary suggests I had a little surge of diligence towards my Foundation Year (FY) at the start of my second term. The word “work” or “worked” appears three times in that first proper week of term.
Maybe it’s that New Year resolution thing, although I don’t remember ever embracing that tradition. Actually, on reflection, I am guessing that the FY exam on the Friday after my return made me realise that a little more effort might be in order.
The evidence for this “new found diligence” shows more in the above diary than it does in the FY lecture programme below, where it seems I managed a bare 50% of FY lectures attended that first week, excluding the additional 12:00 lectures which I more or less ignored throughout FY.
In truth, 50% of FY lectures was probably about my maximum. Some of the FY lectures were cracking good, but many were more or less recitations from a set of lecture notes that could be picked up and read with more speed and efficiency than attending a lecture. I especially found it difficult in those days to motivate myself to attend a 9:00 lecture unless it came recommended.
Still, it’s a shame I missed Dr Morgan’s lecture, “The Conquest of Infectious Diseases”. Writing this up forty years later, in January 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I realise that a deeper understanding of infectious diseases can come in handy.
As it happens, post Keele, I have been tangentially involved with Gresham College which is a sort-of perennial FY that has been running since Tudor times. So, if some readers are bemoaning the fact that they too missed the opportunity to learn about infectious diseases from Dr Morgan, I can commend Professor Whitty’s 2018 (pre Covid-19 pandemic) lecture on Epidemics and Pandemics:
In addition, Chris Whitty’s special Gresham lecture on Covid-19 in April 2020, early in the pandemic – which you can click here – is hugely informative and prescient.
But I digress.
It was the topics and sessional courses that really got me going during FY, in terms of “learning how to learn”, which my FY year unquestionably helped me to achieve.
I clearly threw myself into Colin Bonwick’s American Studies topic on the American Revolution. Indeed my references to “work” in the diary seem to relate to the essay I wrote for that topic, the exact details of which are lost in the mists of time.
Writing in January 2021, of course, not only was knowledge of infectious diseases going to come in handy forty years later, but knowledge of the origins of the United States of America and the US Constitution, as covered in that topic, becomes, once again, topical.
Colin Bonwick “wrote the book” about The American Revolution, some years after that topic. It is also possible to obtain his book second hand at a modest price – I have just one-clicked a copy for fun. The fascinating appendix bundle, including the constitution and much skimmable stuff is in the public domain and downloadable free, here. This will enable the reader rapidly to become a pundit on matters such as “can a former president be convicted following impeachment?” and “who is next in the pecking order if something goes awry with the President, Vice-President, etc?”
I realise, of course, that we were awaiting the inauguration of Ronald Reagan on 20 January 1981. Back then, some of us thought Reagan was as dismal as it could get in terms of totemic right-wing showbiz Presidents – we were mistaken.
But it wasn’t all FY lectures, American Studies topic essays and Politics sessional classes.
I went to the union most evenings. Simon Jacobs and I were still playing a traditional game or two of table football over a beer after refectory dinner most days. I was also becoming even more addicted to pinball than I had become over the summer, where I had learnt to play quite well on a Hillel House machine that was rarely used by anyone other than us residents and which could be cajoled into yielding free balls quite easily.
I also went to Mary (Keevil)’s birthday party on the Friday evening and then to a Barnes C Block party on the Saturday. My recollection is that Simon Jacobs lived in D Block and I cannot recall who (if anyone) we knew in C Block. Perhaps they were Roy’s connections rather than Simon’s. Party invitations were not exactly exclusive, coveted things at Keele in those days. But the parties were fun.
An interesting 10 days or so on return to Keele for my second term.