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26 The Founder | Wednesday 23 February 2011 Features Handling Homesickness Felicty King When I was growing up, the idea of going to university always seemed so far away. It was this huge grown up thing that tall clever people did, and it was nothing with which to concern my naïve, Disneyed little mind. It came as quite a shock to me, therefore, when all of a sudden I found myself here at Royal Holloway. All of a sudden, I found myself saying, when people asked what I was doing with my life, that I was at university, and that’s when it really hit me. I’m at university. I am officially THAT old. Now, I always assumed that by the time I got to university, I would have grown out of my weird fears and habits. I would have become a sophisticated and civilised woman who would handle university easily, and who would not lock herself out six times in two weeks, forget to return library books, or miss home. The problem is, I am not this sophisticated and civilised woman. I’m the same person I’ve always been – we all are. We all are the same nervous six-year olds who don’t like getting on the see-saw with our elder brothers because they always bounce us off. We’re all still scared. It’s just that we’re getting to the tragic stage where it becomes unacceptable to admit it. Well, I don’t care, I’ll admit it. I’m terrified, and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, and I miss home. The bane and the beauty of life is that it doesn’t bother waiting for you. You can have a bad day, or a sleepy day, or a sick day, but you can’t ring up a helpline and claim the next 24 hours back again to enjoy properly. They’re gone. It’s over. It’s like going for a really satisfying walk – you’re daydreaming away in the sunshine when suddenly you check your watch and realise it’s half four in the afternoon and the whole day’s gone. Life’s mean like that – there I was playing with dolls and watching The Wild Thornberrys when all of a sudden I found myself buying tea towels and unique-looking mugs so ‘the other people in my flat at university wouldn’t mistake them for their own mugs’. Excellent advice, there, Mum, but when the hell did I start going to university? I swear I’m still 13 at heart. Like any 13-year old, I still miss home. A lot of us do, and even more of us do but just don’t admit it. It is perfectly natural to miss home, however, and nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it’s a good sign – it means you have a home that is lovely and happy enough for you to miss, and like everything, homesickness will pass. We are incredibly lucky – we have phones, Skype, email, Facebook and a billion and one other ways to keep in contact with the people we love. If you think you’ve got it bad, take a trip back to medieval times when the only forms of communication were carrier pigeons and grunting. ‘ The problem is, I am not this sophisticated and civilised woman. I’m the same person I’ve always been ’– we all are. Even in the last hundred years, letters were the only way of keeping in touch, and yet people survived. Take every opportunity you can to talk to the people you love, but don’t worry if you haven’t got time to do it as much as you feel you should. The amount you do it is not a reflection on how much you love the people you’ve left behind, only on how well you are able to cope on your own. Don’t feel bad if you can only call your parents once a week, but similarly don’t feel bad if you call them every day. They’re your parents – if you can’t obsessively harass them without getting arrested, then who can you? Being at university is brilliant, but I think a lot of us can feel like it’s crept up on us unseen, and that we’ve found ourselves here without any previous experience of living on our own. Keeping in touch with the people at home is an important part of learning to grow up. We all have those nights when we want nothing more than to be in our own beds, or the days when we just want to sit around in our living room and piss off everybody else in the family by watching ‘Friends’ episodes backto-back (because nobody else in my family likes ‘Friends’ – a random but truly shocking bit of domestic information about my famille for you there). The important thing to remember is that although we have found ourselves alone at university for the first time, we are all alone, so if we’re all alone together, we’re not really alone at all. And by now, if you’re all as lucky as me, you’ll have found some truly wonderful and crazy individuals who become another kind of family for you – and this one, I am pleased to say, appreciates ‘Friends’ as much as I do.
The Founder | Wednesday 23 February 2011 Features 27 In defence of Tony Hayward Ashley Coates Under my parents’ front garden in Bristol there is a lead pipe that once provided the main water supply to the house. In 2003, the pipe was capped off and a new water supply via a plastic pipe was installed in its place. The lead pipe lay a foot underground and was entirely forgotten about until June last year, when I went through it with a rotary hammer. Mains pressure water began to flow into the front garden. I decided to use a procedure known as Top Kill, where the lead pipe is repeatedly struck with a mallet until it closes off the leak. With this having failed and more and more water pouring out of the ground, my family began to ask serious questions about my handling of the spill that was endangering their precious front garden. Day 2 and the leak continues. With Top-Kill having failed, I initiate Tap-Kill. Somewhere underground in a 40 by 40 foot area is a tap, or a number of taps, that can be turned off and end the leak. It takes hours of digging to follow the pipe until finally I find a tap. There is great optimism in the household, but it turns out to be a subsidiary tap that cannot turn off the main leak. Things are getting ugly for me, politically. Day 3. My parents call in their own experts to assess the situation. The plumber questions my original estimates for the amount of water being leaked into the front garden, suggesting the spill was much worse than had been originally assumed. He goes on to question the whole way in which I had gone about dealing with the spill, starting with Top Kill: ‘You were doing what with a mallet?’ By Day 4 of the spill my mother was under intense pressure to be seen as being in control of the situation. In a live address to the rest of the family she said: ‘we will make Ashley pay for the damage he has caused to our front garden.’ Earlier that day I had been overheard telling a friend that ‘I want my life back’ and that I ‘would like to spend some time doing something other than digging up the front garden trying to find taps’. This went down very badly in Bristol. Day 7. A week since the rotary hammer had struck the old mains pipe. I had dug a trench, one foot deep and over 20 feet long before I found the stop-cock for the pipe and the leak finally came to an end. Now, I know what you’re thinking. 1) I’ve lost it, or 2) I am, like so many other upstart young journalists, trying to be clever by talking about politics with reference to my own life. In fact, both of these things are true but my experience over the summer genuinely gave me some sympathy for former BP CEO, Tony Hayward. Like me, Tony Hayward was the public face of an environmental disaster, albeit a far larger one than the one in my front garden. In May 2010, a few weeks into the spill, he told a US reporter ‘I want my life back’ – one of the biggest PR mistakes of modern times. The press leapt on it as an insensitive remark coming from the CEO of the company that was officially responsible for the disaster. Two months later, Tony Hayward was photographed on a yacht on the Isle of Wight, prompting anger from those that felt he should be ‘sorting out this mess’. The truth was that Hayward was on the Isle of Wight supporting his son in a boat race. It was the first time he had seen his son in three months. As he said to BBC’s Money Programme recently: ‘If I had a degree in public relations, rather than geology, things might have gone differently for me.’ Another parallel with my summer and Tony Hayward’s summer was that every time I did something that I thought would stop the spill, it failed. When things break, hitting the offending object is just one of those things you do, so bashing the pipe with a mallet was entirely sensible given the circumstances. After this failed, I took the next logical step and tried to push stuff into the pipe that would block it up, stuff like gravel and mud. This was directly inspired by BP. Top Kill, where BP pumped mud and golf balls into the blowout preventer, seemed silly but it might have worked were it not for the force of the oil acting against it. Top Hat, another scheme I imitated on a micro-scale, involved placing a huge ‘hat’ on top of the leaking well and funnelling the oil up onto a barge on the surface. For my Top Hat I used a hose forced onto the hole in the pipe, but alas, nothing could be found that would hold it in place. BP’s ‘hat’ became blocked by oil deposits before it could be placed above the leaking blowout preventer. The devastation that occurred in the Gulf Coast last year affected both marine life and the lives of communities that depend on the region for fishing and tourism. It is right that those responsible are held to account and that procedures are changed, but the media storm that encircled Tony Hayward meant that all the anger that should have been directed at a dangerous industry was in fact directed at someone who was entirely unequipped to deal with what was happening around him. I find it extremely reassuring that BP’s former CEO is a geology graduate with poor PR skills – that is exactly the kind of person I want to be in charge of a major oil and gas firm. The worst thing that could become of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is if the people at the top of these companies are expected to be brilliant communicators as well as, or at the expense of, being professionals in a relevant field.
Page 1 and 2: Nicholas Blazenby Erection Special
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Page 17 and 18: I took this photo on a rather rainy
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