Procrastination for the nation: The Tardis of the Mind and thinking out of the bubble

Imagine yourself lying flat on your back on your bed, staring from the ceiling to the cascade of paper covering your floor, wondering what to do with your life and feeling lost. As you sit thinking about the looming examination season, you try to get that echo of your parents’ voices and the student version of ‘I will survive’ to exit your skull and stop jiggling around in there messing the other stuff up. But what then? What do you do? Procrastination for the nation? After all, its exam season.

Flick back to reality. That fifty-something on the radio is whining about lazy students and their general uselessness to society. What a way to make you feel better about yourself. Back in your dream world, you wonder whether this time wasting, sun worshipping, roof-sitting, fantasy-barbecue strain of the study avoidance plague is an age old problem or a deepening national crisis.

So, now you have a very clear picture firmly fixed in your head of all the things you could or should be doing about now, or worse, should have done last week. The chances are you’re starting to feel the panic rising inside you. So take a minute or so to lengthen this dream. You’ve wasted enough time, what difference will a few moments more make? Take a little trip Dr Who style (if he can do it so can you) back in time, 30 years or so. Picture your flat mate, an eighteen year old James May, pondering his future, dreaming of the Lotus Espirit he saw at the ‘flicks’, and KITT from Night Rider, while elaborately etching his name into the walls of room 97 of the then Pendle College. The little bubble world of campus is a different place. Bucks Fizz are playing on the radio and are still cool. (The Camera Never Lies don’t you know?) Bowland and Lonsdale are like peas in a pod, you can wave or otherwise make rude gestures from one window to another. Cartmel’s now seasoned freshers are plotting new acts of sabotage for County’s tree. Alexandra Park and the advent of the En-suite bedroom are but elements in a far-fetched and distant dream.

If, like James, you had your dream job for which you get to drive, race and generally smash up the best cars of the moment, while meeting all kinds of celebrities and encouraging them to do the same, I’d guess you’d be pretty happy with the career side of your life. But, the stories James tells at dinner parties do not only involve Ellen McArthur and Chris Evans and their adventures on the race-track. Oh no, they stem from the best days of his life in good old Lancaster. In passing, he recalls his time here as a right good laugh, ‘If nothing else, it made for a good pool and darts tournament.’ But who wouldn’t want to hear about his Christmas tree-stealing antics, how he first set his kitchen on fire (and how every other kitchen in the block managed to copy the stunt before the end of the year) or how he walked the length of campus on the roof of the spine without touching the floor?

Put yourself in his shoes, in his house. After several glasses of wine, and usually by the time you reach dessert, you relish being able to listen to your guests ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ with respect as you detail how you jumped the gap between the roof and the shelters in the square. Oh how they wish that they too had experienced the fun and frolics of Lancaster. That’s just the guests who studied elsewhere, more impressed and envious are those who didn’t go to university and missed out on the crazy days of ‘study.’

James is a self-confessed under-achiever, but one day he sat at his desk answering his emails and one stood out. It was an email from a current student at Lancaster, who has aspirations of becoming a journalist. He learns that although his own college has long been flattened, moved and replaced, that this young student is currently camped out in new ‘Cartmel’ because this year it is the turn of Grizedale College (his former rival) to be homeless. For posterity’s sake, he took his own little trip down memory lane, and dutifully regurgitated his tales of colleges, cars, Christmas trees, kitchens, thefts, nights out, and artistic etchings. But there was one other thing he couldn’t resist sharing in that beautifully individual way of his; his advice to anyone wanting to be a journalist: ‘Only do it if you can’t get a proper job!’

With, as he says, Lancaster looking more and more like a ‘landed space station,’ (with which the only fault he can remember is its peculiar smell of brick dust) cut away from the outside world it is very easy to loose sight of where you hope you are going in life. As you while away the hours avoiding study, no-one will notice you in your Tardis of a mind, exploring the lives of the rich and famous that walked where you walked, and wondered as you wondered. Comfort yourself that all is not lost, and that the sun will rise another day as your life emerges, the product of a bit of work and a lot of play. Think of those who lay on that bed before you looking at the ceiling and their mass of paper, and see what they have become. Take a lesson from the students of old, who we are told were ‘simple and unsophisticated’, and forget about the future for a minute or two. Look at what is in front of you, and embrace it with open arms.

Jonathan Starr and Katherine Gledhill