Let's start at the very beginning...

I have been dying to do this for ever. What could be more indulgent than delving deep into one's psyche and then hanging it out to dry in front of potentially zillions of fellow egoists? Had this been invented centuries ago the need for Confession would be obsolete. The worry of course is the theory of 'me me me', if there are so many people participating and tap-tapping away, who is actually reading this stuff?

Who cares? And anyhow, I have an excuse. My Lecturer told me to. Oh Captain! My Captain! He will be known from now on as Mr Keating. Mr Keating is a sweetheart, and bears no resemblance at all to Mrs Doubtfire. Mr Keating is my Miss Jean Brodie, without the menace. He is the reason I am reading for a degree, and quite possibly following recent events the only reason I am still hanging by a thread from the ivory towers of a suburban concrete campus. This daily account will log my journey on the Big Dipper of Academe, whooshing through the next three years of study, the highs, the lows, the absurd and the mundane, the profound and the puerile. What larks privileged reader, what larks.

Already deep into our second semester, I found myself relieved to be returning today after a reading week that melted into a blob of procrastination and long lie-ins. I strode across the park, heading for my first lecture, a little spring in my step, 'nil desperandum', my mantra. In my pocket, an email, creased into four. This slip of paper the key to the future of me. Sent to me by the Course Director, its content acutely personal, a loaded weapon or a paper plane. Time for the only Mature Student in The Village to make a decision....