Bretton Hall - a partial recollection

Many years ago I went to University, and I was rubbish at it. It's something I think about a lot. Not least because most people seem to look back at their college lives with wonder and moist-eyed nostalgia. They were all good at college. And so their joy makes me feel inadequate, and so I hate them.

The place I went was amazing. A place called Bretton Hall, in Yorkshire. A sculpture park, set in acres of beautiful countryside, like the set of some gothic romance. It was an environment for artists, poets and dreamers. And, in my case, idiots.

Oh, I was so stupid, back in the early 90s. You might think I'm stupid now, but that's nothing to the ramshackle idiot that presented himself to the English Lit course in September 1990. While just a few years before Bretton Hall had seen the likes of Mark Thomas and The League of Gentlemen - smart, creative people who used their studies as a springboard to works of greatness - now it was host to a man totally unequipped for the act of thinking.

For a start, I was Christian. I mean, really Christian. These days I have a faith that fluctuates and wobbles, in a kind of progressive, evolving response to all the reasons the world gives me to believe and not believe. In those days I was just a zealous dick.

And Bretton was not a place to be Christian. It was achingly right on, erudite and non-conformist. Basically full of hipsters. Everyone there was determined to be a rebel, and they all expressed that rebellion in very similar ways. Three years of non-conformity - an intellectual extension of that faux individualism that teenagers practice.

But at least they were living. And thinking. And accepting new ideas. My particular brand of naïve idealism was rooted in a kind of right wing, zealous evangelicalism. I was not long a Christian, and very caught up in an ideology which cared less about human lives and more about End-of-Days eschatology. It was a way of thinking that closed ideas down. Straightened things out. Crippled the imagination and the personality.

But at least my dress sense was great. 

Now, it wasn't absolutely, 100% awful. I wasn't Carrie's mum or anything. There were sparks of the stuff that I consider my better qualities. I was a bit weird, a bit funny, kind of pleasant company. And I had some good friends who tolerated my Hellfire rhetoric just as I tolerated their deviant lifestyle choices. But the better parts of myself - the parts that should have been unfolding and unspooling into a more mature version of the real me - they were cabined, cribbed and confined by my over-earnest beliefs.

Lots of things about this were annoying, and indeed still annoy me. Mostly, it strangled friendships at birth. Sure, some of the people there were irritating, but we were all irritating. That's kind of the point of being a student. There were some wonderful, creative, fascinating people on my course and I never really got to know them. They were, quite rightly, put off by a man who had come to arts college, yet resisted new ideas in favour of a homophobic reading of a book no-one cared about in the first place.

Secondly, and I must be frank about this, my puritanical childishness definitely closed the door to more than one potential romance. Oh, how I curse the abstinence-minded young jerk who, full of vigour and desire, chose to hammer down his natural instincts instead. It ain't healthy.

Ladies were very interested in this.

And lastly. If I'd not been so zealous, then maybe I could have made a better case for Christianity to the people I knew.

Because, although my Christianity was a thing of great idiocy and thoughtlessness, it was by no means the only dumb ideology in town. The oh-so-rebellious attitude I mentioned earlier was less harmful, but no less ill thought through. It was the kind of iconoclastic preening that dismisses anything conventional straight away, praising itself for its freedom of thought even as it creates its own shackles.

And this kind of thinking had no time for Christianity. Which I found tedious at the time and I find tedious now. Just as religious thinking can elicit total nonsense from otherwise intelligent people, so can opposition to religion. I had tutors, incredibly clever and well read people, who just stopped using reason when concepts of faith entered the discussion. Obviously it was all nonsense, because they were clever, and religious people were stupid, right?

Which, of course, forced me further into my corner. I already thought there was some kind of spiritual battle going on between faith and reason, and my church had a deep mistrust of intellectualism. These people were giving me no reason to believe that smart thinking and religious thinking could occupy the same space. So I suppose I became stupider, and more entrenched.

Some Christians, being popular.

 

 

So when I think of my time doing a degree, I have mixed feelings. There was a lot of good stuff too, of course. And if you went to college with me, you might feel rightly aggrieved that I haven't just written a big long piece about how awesome it was watching Terminator 2 with you and eating cheese on toast every night. And if you were a Christian there, you might remember how much you looked after me and tried to make me less of a dickhead. You did, fellow believers, and I'd have been a better man if I'd tried to be more like you.

And I hope that's kind of who I've become. I've spent more time with Bretton students since I left than I did when I was there. And they are among the most giving, thoughtful, gracious people I could imagine. Creative in deed and in thought, they take the ethos of the college - now long gone - and make it live. Christian or not, they have helped me have an experience of Bretton Hall that stretches beyond my three tumultuous, confusing years of study. And for that I'm very grateful.