They're here! When I arrived on campus this morning, lines were long outside the dorms. It's quite an operation: you can order your supplies from Bed, Bath and Beyond (or other such providers) to be waiting for you, curbside ... or your parents drive you up and are duly confused by parking officials waving and blowing whistles. Quite amazing, I saw a Penske truck ... do they know how small the dorm rooms are? A colleague's freshman son explained to me quite how tiny the gap between the two beds in his room is.
It's quite a scene, and a far cry from my own arrival in Oxford a million years ago. Indeed, my mother did drive me, from London - she'd passed her test only a couple of years before, and at that time had a very racy, and somewhat unstable Triumph Herald - something like this, but in dark blue.
My pre-college purchases largely consisted of some mugs and some plates from Habitat. We didn't share rooms, at St Anne's (that is, apart from, seemingly, the two 3rd years who shared a room opposite me, and had a quite alarming couple of whips hanging on their wall). My mother subsequently said that she was surprised that I didn't express dismay that my own room (in a Victorian house, overlooking the Woodstock Road) was so very small - I think she underestimated how exciting it was Having A College Room At All. I couldn't wait for her to leave, and put my yellow and orange Indian bedspread on my (tiny) bed, and dig out the blu-tac to mount my posters: Millais' Autumn Leaves (THAT WILL SURPRISE NO ONE):
and Theophile Steinlen's 1899 poster for Motocycles Comiot.
Then I went out, and bought poster # 3, Burne-Jones' The Beguiling of Merlin.
So that was my room decorated. My mother left me with some money - £15, I think - to "go and buy a beanbag cushion," but there quite definitely wouldn't have been room for that on the floor.
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