From Glasgow to Saturn (19)

Delighted to have a wee story (Parched) - very wee, very short - in issue 19 - of From Glasgow To Saturn, Glasgow University's free online literary magazine - wonderfully named after Edwin Morgan's poetry collection (1973). I try not to think that it's thirty years since I went to uni, that would mean I am very, very, very old. I went when I was just sixteen, a couple of months from seventeen. My brothers were the same, we were all pretty much the youngest in our year(s) - at school and uni. We can go to school at four in Scotland. The other day I had hot chocolate from a vending machine and was transported right back to the student union, known as the QM, short for Queen Margaret Union (the other union, the GU, the 'men's union', didn't let women join til 1981). I still remember vividly sitting on the QM steps during Freshers' Week, an unseasonably warm October, in my clogs and skimpy Indian dress, I had a hippy thing going on back then though I hated folk music and listened mostly to David Bowie and Frank Zappa.

I am so glad I didn't know what was ahead, just sitting on those steps, carefree as hell. I got ill in my third year and unlike Helen Fleet I didn't come home from France once, I came home three times, I kept going back 'cos they couldn't find out what was wrong. I still remember trudging up the gangway onto a cross-Channel ferry, knowing that something was dreadfully and completely wrong. And I don't mean my perm - yes, I had a perm! My hair is already crazy hair - and yet I had a perm! Because my cousin had one, I wanted one too.