syndication

[helenic]

Sunday morning: eating muesli with greek style yoghurt, the only way I can stand it. As soon as you start eating yoghurt milk seems too feeble, too runny, as if it were watered down. Besides our fridge is a shared student one, and I can never be sure whether the milk in it can be trusted.

There's a half-drunk glass of amber wine on my floor, abandoned when we were all summoned unexpectedly to a meeting last night to discuss the rooms ballot for next year. I appreciate the JCR want us to have a chance to choose who we live with, but it seems ridiculous that we could make that decision with any sort of confidence nine weeks into our degree. Iain hardly said a word throughout, but the rest of us much preferred to get it over with. The ballot is quite complicated; names are drawn out of a hat and placed in a random numerical order, and this becomes the order in which people are called to choose their rooms. So the higher up the list you are, the more choice you have. If you enter the ballot as a syndicate, all four (or three) of you choose your rooms at the same time, so you can confer and choose rooms next to each other, but if you're at the bottom of the ballot there may well not be four rooms left in the same staircase. The syndicates don't guarantee you'll live near each other, but they raise your chances. Our choices have to be in by Friday.

After the JCR meeting we gathered together everyone who wanted to live in the same sort of group and went back to Ed's room to divide us up. We agreed that all of us would be happy to live with anyone else, so the syndicates were decided by the sort of room prices people were looking for - which saved upsets over friendship groups. I'm with Iain, Quiet Ian, and Malcolm. Iain and I discussed it over dinner last night and realised we would like to live near each other, so long as we give each other space. We're going to try and get into a house rather than live in college next year, and we'll be sharing with six other people, so it won't be like we're living together, but it'll stop occurences like Friday night when I had to run across college barefoot at 5am because my period came and all my stuff was in my room. Lightweight Ian is sharing with Ish, Chloe and Mike, and Ruth is going with Richard and Ed. I'd have liked to have shared with Ruth, but it's not as if we'll stop seeing each other just because we don't live together. If we all get rooms on Lensfield Road we'll be next-door neighbours in any case, and will have living rooms and back gardens and other communal gathering-places.

At least it's decided now, and over, and no friendships have been broken up by it. I'm a little apprehensive about having to make a decision a year in advance, especially if Iain and I break up, but if that happens I'd hope it would be a mutual fading-out and we'd stay friends, because he is practically my best friend here. If not, I could always arrange an emergency swap. After all my trying not to think about the future it's being forced on me, and I don't like it. Of course, the syndicates in no way guarantee you'll live together, it just gives you a higher chance to be with people you already know. We'll choose our rooms a week today, and I'm hoping we'll be high enough up the ballot to live a couple of syndicates together, or at least close by, so that the four of us aren't in complete isolation.

Writing is so hard at the moment. I know this seems forced and I don't like it either, but I have to start again or I'll seal up, and forget how. At least no-one can read this - that's one consolation.