One down, sixty to go

It is strange to look at the first day of a course and realise there are only eight weeks and four days left of it to complete. I spent three years working out the ‘exact ramifications of latent imagery within poetry’ and very little else during university. The idea, therefore, that shorthand, news, features, DTP, media law and goodness knows what else might be conquered in little over two months makes the heart sink, then beat a little faster than it should.

Round the table at the PMA centre, some were shivering due to the caffeine intake, others just from the cold and some even managed to hold off the shakes until we were given the course timetable. Despite my desperate efforts with a red biro, there seemed no way of converting the word ‘shorthand’ into ‘playtime’. Life it seems, as everyone keeps telling us, is only journalism and Sainsbury’s wraps for the next nine weeks.