Chapter 2: I May Have Made a Terrible Mistake

I May Have Made a Terrible Mistake

Sunday 6^th October 2013

I have now reached the stage in my university career where I am reasonably certain that somebody in Admissions made a clerical error. I assume this happens to everyone.

If it doesn’t, please don’t tell me. That assumption is the only thing keeping me sane.

The first week was exciting because everything was new. New flat. New people. New campus. New timetable. New subjects. New coffee shops to investigate.

The second week has mostly consisted of people handing me increasingly large quantities of reading and apparently believing I am capable of understanding it.

I’m beginning to question their judgement.

Law is hard.

This will presumably come as astonishing news to absolutely nobody except the eighteen-year-old cellist who voluntarily applied to study it. It isn’t necessarily that the individual things we’re taught are incomprehensible. Most of them aren’t.

At least, I don’t think they are.

It’s the level at which you are immediately expected to engage with them.

At A-level, you could learn something, understand it properly, explain it clearly and usually be rewarded for doing so. Here, understanding something appears merely to qualify you to begin the conversation.

You read a case.

Then you read another case explaining why the first case might not mean what you thought it meant. Then you read an academic article arguing that everybody involved in both cases misunderstood the law. Then you arrive at a seminar, and somebody asks whether the underlying principle is normatively defensible.

At which point you begin seriously considering a career in horticulture or animal husbandry.

I have spent several evenings this week staring at paragraphs I have read three times and wondering whether I have somehow lost the ability to understand English. Then I go into a seminar, and somebody says something extraordinarily intelligent about the same paragraph.

That is not reassuring.

There seem to be people on my course who already know how to speak ‘Law.’ Not legal terminology. We’re all learning that. I mean the actual rhythm of it.

They can take an argument apart, identify the principle underneath it, find the exception, and then question whether the exception undermines the principle.

Meanwhile, part of my brain is still going: Wait. Which judge said that?

Every lecturer speaks as though the principles they are explaining are the natural foundation upon which all human knowledge rests. They introduce a case, mention the judgment, distinguish the ratio from the obiter and move on while I am still writing down the names of the parties.

Then someone raises a hand and asks a question that includes three Latin phrases.

The lecturer replies, “Excellent point.”

I have never hated a stranger more efficiently.

I read the cases before the lecture. I take notes during the lecture. I return to the cases after the lecture and discover that I apparently read completely different ones the first time.

Then I attend a seminar where somebody says, “Obviously, the central issue is—”

Nothing is obvious.

If it were obvious, there would not be forty pages of judgments written by several highly educated people who disagree with one another.

I suppose this is the first time in quite a while that I have genuinely wondered whether I am clever enough to do what I am trying to do.

That is probably healthy, but it does not feel healthy.

I keep comparing my course to an orchestra. Three years ago, I successfully auditioned for the Westmouthshire Youth Orchestra. I was given a seat at Fifth Desk. The following year, I moved up to Third Desk. This time last year, I landed at Second Desk.

Yes, I know someone in the comments is going to remind me I was offered first chair, and I panicked. Shut up. I was happy at Second Desk.

The point is that an orchestra has structure. It’s organised. But Law isn’t like that. It doesn’t have Sections, Desks, and Chairs.

I mean, yes, there are desks and chairs in the lecture theatre, obviously, or we’d all be sitting on the floor. I mean that it isn’t organised. There’s no seating plan that tells you how you’re doing.

This year, more than 200 students are reading Law. We sit together in the same lecture theatre, receiving identical information and presumably taking similar notes. Unlike an orchestra, where the conductor and musical director determine the hierarchy and structure, Law gives us hundreds of pages to read and then forces us to determine our own position in the hierarchy by how much everyone else appears to understand.

At present, I believe I am sitting somewhere near the emergency exit.

Two weeks ago, I was worried about finding the Law building. This now seems charmingly innocent. The Law building is enormous, made of glass and visible from most of the eastern campus. Finding it is easy.

Understanding what happens inside it is proving more difficult.

I knew university would be difficult. I wanted it to be difficult. There would be little point in spending three years here to learn things I already understand. But knowing that something should be difficult does not prevent difficulty from feeling like personal failure.

That is the part nobody put in the prospectus.

But here’s the thing: I know that everyone else is probably looking around and thinking exactly the same thing I am. I know confidence is not the same as comprehension. I know that the person using Latin may simply have memorised it specifically for that seminar.

Rationally, I know all that. But rationality goes out the window at eleven o’clock at night when you still have forty pages to read for the next morning, keep staring at that same paragraph and are wondering what the hell I’m doing here.

Socially, things are...

Fine?

That sounds much worse than it is.

Lily and I have become good friends very quickly, which has made everything much easier.

We knew each other vaguely at Micester because she was a year above me, but I don’t think we ever had a conversation of more than a few minutes before we ended up in the same flat.

She took a gap year after sixth form and spent most of it travelling and working abroad, which means she has approximately seventeen thousand stories.

Some of them may actually be true.

She is one of those people who enter rooms as if every person in them has been waiting for her. She can walk into a kitchen containing six strangers and somehow know everybody’s life story twenty minutes later. She asks questions, remembers answers and can turn a conversation about washing-up liquid into a plan involving six people and a night out.

I find this baffling.

I enter rooms and assess the available exits.

I am grateful she is here. I am also conscious that she is the only person here I would yet describe as a close friend. We’re on the same course, so we tend to walk to lectures together, eat together and compare notes afterwards to check whether either of us understood what just happened. Sometimes we reach a combined understanding equivalent to one functioning law student.

My other flatmates are mostly pleasant. There is nobody I actively want to murder, which I gather means we are doing considerably better than some first-year households. We talk in the kitchen. We have eaten together. I know who drinks tea, who drinks coffee and who believes a frying pan becomes clean if left in water for long enough.

Those are relationships, but they are not yet friendships. I haven’t really found my people beyond Lily yet.

There are people on my course I sit beside in lectures and speak to before seminars. We compare notes, complain about the reading and promise to send one another links. Then the class ends and we travel in different directions.

Perhaps friendship is simply what happens when those small conversations accumulate. At school, friendships just seemed to happen because you spent years trapped in the same building together. University feels much more deliberate. You have to actually go and find people.

Or perhaps everybody already has a group chat without me.

Both possibilities currently appear equally credible.

Music is helping.

Quite a lot, actually.

I auditioned for the University Orchestra last week. I was nervous beforehand, which was ridiculous considering how many auditions I’ve done over the years, but this felt different. With the youth orchestra, everybody knew me. Even when I auditioned for seating positions, I knew the conductors, I knew the other cellists, I knew the room.

Here I walked in as nobody. Which was strange. Good strange, I think.

Anyway.

I have been placed on Fourth Desk. This is probably the best thing that has happened to me all week. Not because Fourth Desk is a spectacular achievement. It is not. Last year, I was Second Desk, so moving backwards by two desks might appear to be evidence of decline.

But it does not feel like that.

The university orchestra includes students from every year. Some study music. Some attended specialist schools. At least one cellist spent the summer playing with an orchestra whose name I recognised. There are some seriously good musicians here. I listened to part of the violin auditions while waiting and briefly considered leaving the building and pretending I had come in looking for the toilets.

I am a first-year who walked into an established university ensemble carrying an instrument, an audition piece and the private conviction that everyone else would be better.

Fourth Desk is fine.

Fourth Desk is more than fine.

Fourth Desk is somewhere I understand.

Our first rehearsal is this week, and I cannot adequately explain how much I am looking forward to sitting in a cello section again.

Well, I probably could. But after Leipzig, certain people on here lost the privilege of hearing me discuss orchestras emotionally.

You know who you are.

We have been sent the music, a rehearsal schedule, and a warning that the conductor expects us to arrive early enough to be seated and tuned before the advertised starting time.

I approve of him already.

There is comfort in knowing what is expected. I know how to prepare a part. I know what to listen for. I know that Fourth Desk does not mean playing alone; it means becoming part of a section and making sure that the sound which leaves us belongs to all of us.