"'So, are you registering for journalism or drama, hey?'

He is an elfin-faced boy with pale-blue eyes and long ginger hair that verges on dreadlocks. I disapprove of dreadlocks on white boys — it's a style thing — even at eighteen years old, and even though I'm a self-proclaimed hippie and lover of reggae and dub. 

​

He looks like the joker in a pack of New Age cards. He's wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt with purplish streaks, and no shoes. He's hopping lightly from foot to foot — the midday pavement is pretty hot, and I can feel its warmth through my thin-soled Chinese slippers. 

​

'Howzit, I'm Sean,' he says. 'I'm doing drama; jislaaik it's hot.' 

'I'm Bridget. I'm going for journalism. It feels kind of relevant.' 

Of course, I've forgotten to put on sunblock. My mother would be so pissed off. The sun is beating down on the line of students registering for their chosen subjects, in this case journalism and drama. Through some fabulous trick of university planning, the two faculties share the same building and the queue is carnivalesque. A straggly line of chatty, animated people dressed in astonishingly bad clothes. Ill-fitting jeans, loud jackets, even louder scarves, beanies, Panamas, berets, floppy garden hats and worker's caps, and here and there an unruly sprouting of facial hair. 

​

I feel completely at home.  

​

In front of Sean, whose hopping intensifies as the pavement warms, are two drama students — I see them holding hands, overhear them chatting — his name is Martin, a blond hunk with a charming face, she, Pid, a pixie-faced, fine-boned fairy child. They have a dog named Galadriel which causes a small commotion when it lifts its leg against one of the registration tables. 

​

With a bank loan and a flourish of my signature, I become a journalism student at Rhodes University."