I just got back here. Things will not be the same on campus with over half my friends gone: Charlie’s back home, preparing for Ibiza; Emma, Nicky and switch have jobs. I’m sure they understand that, although I won’t constantly mention them here on my blog, they are never far from my thoughts. To be sure, I have no real reason o feel glum: I was sitting in our back garden on Saturday, with dad, worrying about my friends. Suddenly, dad remembered something – he got out the phone, and rang one of his old uni mates: ‘hi [matt forgets name]. glad you’re in…I was just thinking about a trip to Barcelona next march…” I suddenly remembered, every two years, my parents go on a trip with their university friends from Southampton. Cool or what? I suddenly saw that it was by no means goodbye! University, as with school to a slightly lesser extent, forges lifelong friendships.

It thrusts people together. Kids come to university more or less alone, often very frightened. I found the first week of my first year petrifying. But I gradually grew, I made friends, I learned that my disability didn’t matter one jot here. I found I was learning so much and having so much fun that all longing for the comfort of home disappeared. My brothers were far away, but I kind of gained new siblings. I still intend to be in contact with all of them when I’m ninety. Uni, I feel, did me so much good. Whereas school stifled me, both academically and socially, university accelerated me to warp drive. Socially I am more positive, academically I am more critical.

I feel I must now evangelise: I must spread the word of higher education. Many kids with disabilities are told so much piffle about their limits at school stage that they do not push their selves. They tend, I think, to accept menial rolls and second rate educations because they are told, as I once was, that such things are all they are capable of. How disgustingly patronising?

Admittedly, this is problematic: I should not impose my ideas on everyone; many people do not want to go to university, and would rather work. This is fair enough, but it’s hard for me not to want to spread the word when I have got so much out of university. It opens so many doors, leading anywhere to string theory research to concert violin playing to brain surgery to the presidency of the United States. Indeed, even to film studies research. I just feel that something so great, which did so much for me, should be open to everyone.

May I refer back to this entry.