DAY 1

The Boys are back in town - well sort of!

6.30am: The Bee Gees pull me from a dreamless void as Staying Alive blasts from the alarm on my phone.

            I shower quickly and curse myself for drinking most of the second bottle of wine opened in haste after dinner. You’d think I’d know better, at my age. A banging head, a dry mouth and persistent sweating as I dry from my shower isn’t the best way to commence my first day at school.

            Well, not exactly school: today I sign on for a full time post-graduate degree at the University of Central Lancashire (UNClan) three months after becoming eligible for my teacher’s pension. There’s a kind of retrograde logic to that, isn’t there? From the ashes of a soul and spirit-crushing career in teaching, rises the phoenix: an MA in Magazine Journalism which I hope will lead to a happy expansion of my fledgling freelancing career – besides which, the one pays for the other.

            The 8.15 train to Manchester Piccadilly is cancelled for no reason. There are three trains an hour from Bramhall and a discernable buzz at the station from frustrated commuters informs me that one is always cancelled. Terrific - Russian roulette at rush hour.

            Thanks to this, I just the miss the connection for the Glasgow train that stops at Preston, reaching platform 14 as the train pulls out. An hour later, I arrive at Preston and take a cab to the Uni. Although it’s relatively inexpensive at £3.50, it takes almost as long as the walk, and so I arrive at room GR270 mercifully just in time to miss the bear throwing name-learning ceremony.

            It’s no great surprise that I’m the oldest person on the course; this was to have been expected. However, I had anticipated that there might have been one or two of my cohort of 25 or so who had been engaged in something other than full-time education since they stopped sucking their thumbs. I get some pretty curious and suspicious looks, but they’ll soon get used to me.

            There’s a little man about my age, nattily dressed in a grey herringbone suit with overly-ostentatious Armani glasses, animatedly telling the class that we’re not students – we’re trainee journalists. A couple of other staff that I haven’t met exude massive amounts of enthusiasm, which bodes well.

            The pervading memory of this first day is wind. It says on the News that we’ve caught the tail end of Hurricane Something-or-other but personally, I think this is normal for Preston.

            After the initial meet and greet, the group separates – there are eleven on the MA in Magazine Journalism, and another twelve or so taking Broadcast Journalism. The key demographic of the entire cohort – other than age - is a strong female bias. I wasn’t sufficiently awake at that point to do a precise head count, but I’d say at least 80% are young women. The broadcast section, as you would expect, is made up of those who spend a lot of time in front of a mirror, and naturally would see the logical extension of this to spend their working lives in front of a camera.

            We then have a break of an hour and a half to find the lecture hall in a building that is a five minute walk away, where we are to be greeted by the Head of School. This, presumably, is not the Head Prefect but some senior academic. It transpires he is ill – and so dull is the presentation that I can’t blame him for this – as his place is taken by an underprepared fluttery woman who adds nothing to what we we already know from our welcome pack, other than there are over 35,000 students in campus.

            After this, we have our photographs taken in case one of us becomes famous and can be used for future promotional activity by the university.

            The afternoon finishes with a talk from Cathy on the current state of the newspaper industry and we have a go at de-constructing a magazine (The Press Gazette) in small groups.

            I’m thankful for the last bit as I’m really struggling to stay awake now. The excitement of the day and the legacy of the red wine conspire to triumph over my best efforts to keep my eyelids apart.

            Unsurprisingly, the journey back is as fractured at the journey there. The 4.46 is delayed, thus becoming an unscheduled 5.01 so that I miss the 4.48 to Bramhall by a minute. I can see how people become obsessed by train timetables - I have acquired an alarming body of knowledge on this already.

            Two train and one circuitous bus trip later, I arrive home exhausted. It is 7.15 – two and a half hours after leaving the Uni.

            London to Stockport takes 40 minutes less.