Ready to order, sir?

Yes, I'll take a BA, with an MA to follow.

On graduation day, college was offering copies of the new prospectus. 'Take one for your younger brother or sister', the Head Porter said...

Now I think about it, there's something odd about that. It's like taking a restaurant's card as you leave. Thank you, please come again. Consider us for all your second-born's educational needs. This kind of consumerist tendency is probably prevalent in a lot of places, but seems incongruous in Cambridge. I'm not worried though; I suspect that those who took prospectuses took them as mementos, especially as they contained a lot of pictures of people we knew. I'd already acquired one, for that reason. I expect College knew this too. Nevertheless it underlines something I felt also when leaving school, that what are for each of us our formative years, exceptional years that shape ourselves and our lives, are just ordinary years in the existence of an institution, be it a school or a college. In their frame of reference, each of us is come and gone in an instant, replaced by someone else just the same. Almost as insignificant as stars to the universe, are students to their college. But surely not quite. I wonder where the difference lies.