Canteen Correspondent

The Canteen is packed. Finally, the Canteen is packed. It’s been a long summer without the overpriced sausages and chips, barely passable tea and over-emphasised, yet undercooked, vegetarian “options”; but the Canteen Correspondent is back. It’s good to be in the old stomping ground again, surrounded by familiar faces. But it’s not these old friends and acquaintances I want to discuss…rather, it’s the new blood, the brand new influx of souls into the melting pot of NUI Maynooth.

A new year, a new Canteen Correspondent (same old cack being slopped out to us) and a new collection of Maynooth debutantes: it’s all very exciting, really. As I get older and less wiser, I look around and try to see what you Freshers see…the possibilities ahead of each one of you. As you sit in the thronged Canteen, cast your eyes about you and glance at the people surrounding you. That girl you gave your number to during Freshers’ Fortnight; the guy who offered to buy you a drink at the Burlesque Bar-Ex; the couple, cute as they may be, who hooked up at the start of Freshers’ and will either get married or split up after such a long time that both of them regret not having had a chance to be single in college; the strange guy from the tour during orientation who turns out to be quite funny once you ignore his frequent mentions of “puppies”, “marmalade”, “drowning” and “Star Trek”…all around you are the people who will shape the time you spend here.

Ahead of you are the good times – the drunken adventures after Bar-Exes looking for cooked pizza at four in the morning; the sober adventures on those regretful mornings; the discovery of the Fry in the Rye; finding out that “Jucieee Lucieeee’s” is actually called the Speakeasy, but that someone thought naming it after a hooker from the midlands would be mildly amusing; realising that you can’t escape in such a small college and you’ll have to face up to the fact that you did kiss that guy from the shite support band last “Thursday Night Live”, the one with the honest-to-jaysus moustache – all these experiences and more await you. Each Club or Society you joined, or were harassed/coerced/bribed into joining, on Fairs’ Day opens a new door and a new circle of friends, enemies, lovers and secret admirers.

But no experience, or set of experiences, would be complete without the bad times. The funny weirdo will get less funny and more weird over time. The drunken adventures will sometimes go pear-shaped and leave you quite red-faced as you explain to the Garda exactly why you thought you could find cooked pizza while running down Doctor’s Lane…backwards…in the nude. The bass player with the honest-to-jaysus moustache will talk to HotPress about what a great lay you were when he shaves the ronnie and the band becomes too big to ever play Maynooth again. You will fail at least one exam, essay, or drug test.

But that, my new and old friends, is life. We will inevitably look back at our time here with the rose-tinted glasses of a mother looking back at childbirth and forget the pain and heartache. Welcome home!