#readFreshers: BACK TO CAMPUS

Hey guys! Welcome to my stop on the Freshers blog tour. This book is hilarious and so much fun and I'm so excited to have Tom and Lucy on the blog today!

Here's Tom and Lucy's offering for today!

As soon as we started writing FRESHERS, we knew we wanted to go back to York university.  We spent three years there between 2001-2004 (Lucy) and 2002-2005 (Tom), and we knew that if we wanted to write a realistic campus novel, we had to go back to the campus we'd once called home. So, back in February 2016, we did. Here's a photo of Lucy reminiscing outside the big central hall building (which features quite a bit in FRESHERS). 

While we were on campus, we managed to sneak into our old corridors and have a look around, and it was comforting (and horrifying) to find out that students today are still as gross as we were back in 2001/2002. The corridors were sticky and smelly, and the kitchens were basically pasta-sauce-spattered bomb sites. We also spoke to as many genuine freshers as we could to see how they were finding the uni experience so far.  

The biggest change (aside from social media, which was only just breaking as we left uni) was the fees.  Now that it costs SO much more to go to uni, there's less of the who-cares-about-work-let's-party attitude that there was in our day. The freshers we chatted to felt that they couldn't JUST drink and go crazy when there's so much money at stake... Anyway, here are a couple of photos of us from our Freshers terms, looking about as 'Early Noughties' as it's possible to look.

 

In the back of Lucy's picture is a photo montage called the 'Wall of Shame' (i.e. drunken snaps of her and her mates on nights out). This must have been knocking around in Lucy's subconscious somewhere or other, because it came naming the football team's (very grim) social media group in FRESHERS, we went for... 'The Wall of Shame'. And please also note the 'Campus Cliche Trifecta' of Bruce Lee sticker, acoustic guitar and 'Glastonbury 2002' aerial poster in the background of Tom's picture. Great stuff.

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So now it's my turn! Here’s an anecdote from my Freshers week…

It stars my next-door neighbour, Oscar. He moved into our cruddy halls with a twelve bottle crate of Moët and Chandon, which he boastingly told us was his ‘tipple of choice’ (throughout the year I would regularly find bottles of Moët in the veg drawer in our tiny fridge, as they were too big to fit in the door). As Freshers went on I talked to him a little but not a lot – I could tell from the start that we were very different people, and we didn’t have much to talk about, tbh.

My anecdote is from Thursday night of Freshers. I’ll set the scene – I’d slept badly all week, what with a new bed and a whole new uni life and noisy club-loving flatmates, and by Thursday night I’d had just about enough of being woken up at 3am by their return home or their drunken night time antics. I don’t know how they managed to function on such little sleep and so much alcohol, but Freshers does weird things to people, doesn’t it?

So, Thursday night, 1am, I’m woken by Oscar’s bed gently knocking against our shared wall (just great). I somehow managed to ignore this and go back to sleep, only to be woken again at 3am by shouting just outside my door. As I regained consciousness, I realised it was Oscar, shouting. Since he was being so loud in his drunken Moët haze (I don’t know what happened in these two hours as I’d been asleep), a couple of my other sleepy flatmates had crept into his room while he went to the loo and confiscated his Moët!

So I’m angry in my bed because I’ve been woken up again, and Oscar’s getting angrier and angrier in the corridor shouting, “Where’s my Moët?! Where’s my f*cking Moët? My father paid good money for that! I WANT MY F*CKING MOËT!!”. He was getting louder and louder, and my other flatmates were having to wrestle him into his room to calm him down. That was when I lost it: I got out of bed, in my favourite Christmas pajamas (I needed comfort okay) and I wrenched my door open, barged into his room and shouted at the top of my voice, “You want your f*cking Moët?! I WANT MY F*CKING SLEEP!” I stood there menacingly, (all 5”2 of me lol) for a tense second, with Oscar and my other flatmates staring at me like ‘wtf just happened is she for real??’. Then I flounced out the room and slammed my door, got into bed, and didn’t hear a peep from anyone, Oscar included, for the rest of the night. I had won!

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And finally, if you still need convincing, here's my top five reasons for reading FRESHERS:

1. It's hilarious – I laughed out loud SO much and got some weird looks in public for it

2. Girl Power - It has one of the best female friendships I’ve read recently in YA. Phoebe, Frankie, and Negin are my absolute favs. Girl power!

3. Honesty – I was a Fresher only two years ago and this has captured my experience in so many ways - both the bad and the good (I love uni but it really sucks sometimes)

4. It's real - I know so many people at uni who could have walked out of this book, and the experiences that Phoebe and Luke have are spot on 

5. Quidditch - Just believe me, quidditch sounds great 

And there we have it! Thanks for stopping by on the tour today and make sure to check out the other stops! And thanks Nina for my copy!