The Old Bird: Compelled to Write in the Hope of Reaching at Least 1 of the 256 Mature Students on Campus.

You are alone. Yes, don’t be fooled into thinking you will be lucky enough to bump into anyone within a 5-year radius of your age, now that you’ve pushed yourself off the monotonous train of previously chosen attempts at ‘making it’ in life, and onto the First (free) bus to an unknown future.

The first few weeks will be spent as a complete Norman; students of a respectable student age will assume you are in class to ‘observe’ in order to obtain enough information to compile a report on the teaching at York. You will be looked at with confusion and suspicion. But, rest assured, these beautiful youths will not ask you a damn question. You have to force yourself on them without appearing to be a pervert. An easy way to do this is through seminars when you’re split into groups. After a lot of farting about (literally, because you actually lose the control of farting after 30) to set up a group chat on Facebook, you can encourage a meet to break the ice. After promising not to refer to myself as ‘mature’ or ‘old’, I managed only to refer to myself as ‘mature’, ‘old’, ‘past it’, ‘got kids’, ‘no life’, or ‘I don’t resent fresher’s week’ throughout the whole 30 minutes of discussion. It is not okay to suggest anyone is hot, or make sexual references, which at a naturally filthy-minded and somewhat perverted aged, can be a tricky task. Remember, parents only have sex once in order to conceive a child, sometimes again if she has failed to produce a boy. If she has only girls she clearly didn’t try hard enough!

The confidence of the kids is not faked; they are sure of their abilities. You may have managed to run a house, maintain a job, feed and clothe more than one child, as well as obtain enough credits to get into a Russel Group university, but you will still never know how the fuck you did it. These kiddies are far superior and intelligent than you can ever dream of being. The only hope you have of gaining any ground is your ‘life experience’. Oh yes, all the heart break, numerous jobs, production of children, buying houses, losing houses, epically failing on the path of ‘this is my life and I’ll live it how I want’ will eventually be what separates you from them: these darlings only know how to succeed, but you my friend, you know how to fail.

– Emma Ayre