O tempora...

I was not sure, when I finished this, whether or not to publish it, but I am going to anyway, since no one else that I know seems interested. You may, if you get to the end, think this blog to be nothing more than my vent for frustration, but there needs to be some vent, I suppose. There is not much room for University drop-outs is there? In hindsight, going to University to read Theology is probably one of the worst choices I have ever made. I have landed myself in a Student Finance debt, which I cannot possibly pay off for years to come, and therefore the prospects of my ever getting a respectable career have vanished completely. I don't see why some of them cannot be waived, or refunded by the University to the local council, since I did not in fact come away with a Degree, and I certainly did not benefit from the few lectures I attended.

I have been looking around for another suitable Degree, and I found one which was almost perfect (part-time over four years). But there is always a grotesque catch isn't there? The Degree is indeed suitable, especially pertinent for me, but they say that you can't apply if you're in debt to the Student Finance people. Heaven and earth! Am I to remain in a low-paying, zero respect job for the rest of my adult life? I can put it no better than saying that it feels like there is a great ugly bully holding a degree just over my head, and that I am jumping and jumping, trying to reach it in vain, and that it is just out-of-reach, and that this bully is laughing his socks off. And people? They're simply not interested. My therapist just sits there shaking his head, and going through ''options'' which I am simply not interested in. It's all right for him, though; he has a Masters degree, his wife is also a psychologist, and he has a lovely house in Kent with no financial worries at all. My parents? Their response to my difficulties at University is to simply stop speaking to me, or in my father's case to start bellowing at me about ''contributing'' - and then they wonder why I never tell them anything! Quem patronum rogaturus and all that...

The whole thing is enough to make me crawl into some hole and die, cursing both life and death - especially, and this is what angers me the most, when I see people, thousands of people, going to University and coming away with Degrees (in stupid things like Media Studies and James Bond films!) when they don't, in my estimation, deserve them. I would go back to Tolkien's day, when University was exclusively for the rich and the intelligent.

My father summed it all up the other day. He said: ''Patrick, no one cares if you can read Latin. People do care, however, if you say 'I can read Latin, and I earn £100,000 a year...'''