Going back

It was the first tutorial for my Open University course on Saturday. It was at St John’s*, so it was quite bizarre going back there, and I have to admit I felt quite envious of all the posh new buildings that have sprung up in the last few years**. They’ve certainly had an injection of money from somewhere, but perhaps that’s from all the land they’ve sold.

As the group gathers in a small seminar room, I’m trying to work out who the tutor is, as one woman is asking everyone questions on what they’ve done before – it turns out she’s another student, and the tutor is out of the room.

We move on to discussing our first novel, Pride and Prejudice. The tutor starts ‘now, I know people can find the language difficult, and quite dry, did you struggle with it?’
Around the room, the majority of the group are saying that yes, they’d found it hard going and hadn’t enjoyed it. I sit back rather amazed, as P&P is certainly one of my favourite, if not my favourite, novels, and has been since long before Colin Firth dived into a lake. I pipe up ‘I love it’, I don’t add that I don’t find the language difficult at all, what I do find hard is the level of analysis that we have to subject the text to.

Terms I’ve never heard before are being bandied around, and I know I’m finding this difficult to grasp. ‘A’ Level literature was never like this. I have to write 1000 words on a particular piece of the narrative, and as usual, my head is saying I can’t do this, why am I subjecting myself to this for a qualification I don’t need? I’m not sure I actually have an answer to this other than I hate to leave things unfinished. By the end of the session, I think I understand a little more, but it’s still going to be difficult. And I have a lot to get through before we get to the Shakespeare!


*Once, the College of Ripon and York St John, then York St John’s College, and now a university in it’s own right.
** I have so many memories of never having enough space to rehearse for productions, and once having to use the old ‘Wynsors World of Shoes’ shop, still with old shoe racks, as our rehearsal space for one of the final year projects!