Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies

I couldn’t face a night in the Jervis Terrace shit-hole so Ade gave Lee and I a lift to Lee's residence halls where I spent last night. I’m sick of the squalour of my living conditions, the peeling wall-paper, the damp, the dirty walls and floors, the eternally filthy kitchen . . . I’m moving into a hotel next term if I can’t get anywhere else to live.

I didn’t get to sleep until four, but woke up today early and in a bright mood to match the day. The clatter and noise of engineers, industrial designers and mathematicians subsided at about nine-fifteen and we emerged to empty staircases and deserted kitchens; Lee tells me that this routine is followed by the residents each week with scarcely a variation in the pattern. Up at eight-thirty every weekday, work at the Poly until five, watch TV, go up to the local pub and in bed by eleven-thirty. Saturdays are for getting pissed and wandering about being loud and obnoxious, Sundays for cooking large meals and nursing sore heads. Their lives seem preordained.

I went into University at twelve-thirty, and at about twenty past four I met Susie and Lindsey in the library coffee bar. Susie was in another one of her flutters of indecision, playing with her hair absent-mindedly and teasing great strands out with her fingers. I again felt myself dry up in front of Lindsey. I bought a book—Volume five of the New Penguin Encyclopedia of English Literature: From Blake to Byron. Lee turned up around seven and he and I hitched home.

It was bitterly cold by the time it got dark, the earth crusty and white from frost, my hands and ears in agony. I’m looking forward to hitching back to Easterby at Xmas; it will be a good laugh.

The long-overdue letter from Mum and Dad awaited when I got back; the first part from Mum, in her large rounded hand: “This is a difficult letter to write. I know you must be very anxious about everything . . I don’t see how we can fund you to the tune of £800 on top of your grant. We can manage £100-£200 extra, but not any more as we have to think about one of us falling ill. We don’t get any younger.”

She also says that if I tried for a post-grad course in Journalism they would finance me if I sought exemption from the year abroad. Dad picks up on this theme, saying he thinks I could “walk it” going by the evidence he’s seeing in The Echo. I will think about it carefully as he asks, but I expect I’m going to disappoint them both severely. This isn’t my idea of how I want to spend the next five years. What is my vision of the next few years?

I’d like to travel, but no doubt I shall end up in the UK: I love this country too much to desert its shores forever.

I need to do something drastic to change the recent state of my entries in this diary. I’m sick of my limp, colourless writing, hackneyed expressions, and inexpert, careless structures that don’t read well and abound with errors. The lines on the page enforce a rigid 200-220 words per page; this seems to have something to do with it. I want this to be less a series of chronological events, more an ideas book . . . Lee says that Ian wants to take his girlfriend down into the crypt to fuck her on top of one of the sarcophagi.

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”

-Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale."