student finance FAIL.

I'm so fucking angry I can barely type.

I applied for funding from student finance on April 2nd, so desperate was I to make sure that I wouldn't end up in the situation I'm in now. However, when my mum's boyfriend moved out on May 26th, it drastically changed the situation I was in financially - it meant that I am now Properly Low Income (fer reals). In spite of the crazy crazy turmoil of that whole kettle of shite, I was literally on the phone to student finance by May 27th, sat outside the door of an A-level revision class, in the hallway, knees to my chest, to make sure I wouldn't end up in the situation I'm in now.

They seem to have lost or misplaced or fucking BURNED about half the information I sent them. When I spoke to an advisor on the phone today, she said they haven't yet received any proof that my mother and I are a single-parent family, when she sent it in JUNE. They're still listing her ex-boyfriend as one of my sponsors! Every time, in the past, that I've phoned them up to deal with this, I've been told that it was fine and sorted and really just a glitch, but no, it appears they actually really have lost a whole bunch of my details. Nice.

The important thing to understand is just how hard it is to get hold of student finance. They've inexplicably 'locked' my account, meaning I can't access any of my information online, and have to spend forty-five minutes or so listening to hold music every time I want a little reassurance. Not that you get it. I have been endlessly fobbed off and lied to and passed over, all because the people on the other end of the phone are too overworked or too fucking lazy to really check anything, until I reached the girl I spoke to today.

But then, why should I believe her over everyone else? Maybe everything's actually fine and she's the one who's incompetent - I wouldn't know. They're just voices on the other end of the phone to me.

Earlier this week, I spent about three days trying to get through to them and finally spoke to Lady One on Tuesday. Lady One told me that:
- they'd registered Liverpool as my new uni just fine
- I was showing up as eligible for the full grant
- all my information had been received a-okay
-I would receive a letter in the post over the next few days, confirming this.

Well, I got the letter this morning. It said nothing whatsoever about a maintenance grant, it said I would only be getting loans - a tuition loan and a standard loan - and that I was apparently going to my old university. In despair, I spent another cheerful half hour holding, listening to some fuckwit computer tell me that "it would be easier to go online at www..." which, no, it fucking wouldn't, because you WON'T LET ME LOG IN. Anyway. Eventually, I was told that:
- actually they know nothing about my new uni. Lady One told me it was fine for literally no visible reason and I need to send in a massive form AGAIN
- they know nothing about what the hell kind of grant I'm eligible for
- they're still listing my ex-stepfather - who left, I repeat, in FUCKING MAY - as one of my sponsors
- even though we sent the forms in months ago
- this deserves several bullet points because it is so fucking stupid
- they haven't received half the information I was told had arrived.

At my wits' end, frankly. She took my contact number and has told me somebody from the "processing department" will call me in a couple of days to confirm what is or isn't missing. I'm not holding out much hope that this will really happen.

it's just not cricket.

With each passing day, it looks less and less likely that I will receive another offer of accommodation from my university. This is understandable: I received one last week, very soon after our A-level results were released, and I turned it down. I do get the impression that this isn't really the done thing. University accommodation is a scramble at the best of times and I expect the fact that I'm going to my insurance choice, to compound matters, rather put me at the back of the queue; it really does seem a situation where you're expected to just lump it.

And ordinarily I would have done. Perhaps I should have done. I like to think I'm not an especially picky person - I just genuinely couldn't face spending a year in catered accommodation.

The accommodation at Liverpool University works thus: as far as I can puzzle out, there are about 1983 rooms in catered blocks and 1564 self-catered rooms. Speaking just in terms of probability, I was always going to get offered a catered room and I should have been prepared for this eventuality, which I wasn't, because I am a silly goose. Nonetheless, I refused an offer of a room in the abundantly leafy (and three-miles-from-campus) Salisbury Court, for the following reasons:

• I just DON'T want to live in catered accommodation. Partly because I'm a vegetarian and meat-free canteen food tends to be deeply unpleasant, partly because I enjoy cooking, partly because being able to budget and cook for yourself is an important skill to learn and partly because of the lack of freedom. Set meal times and the like really just don't appeal. When I have friends like E. and M. to stay, I want us to be able to have a cooking adventure together, as we would now - which we certainly couldn't do in the small and perfunctory kitchen they give you in catered. This all sounds prissy, but it's a massive point for me; I really enjoy food and cooking, and there's nothing when to stave off the occasional bouts of homesickness like being able to whip up a favourite stew or whatever.
  
• When I attended my subject open day back in December (I think?), the halls we were taken to see were these, or at least some part Carnatic Halls, a long-ish bus ride away from the university campus and catered. I went with a friend who was already in her first year at Leeds University and oh my god we absolutely hated them. HATED them. They were dark, oppressive, they felt like they were from the 1970s, they - it was just bleak, okay. I imagine that when you're actually in them, they're not so bad, and you all rub along together, and I've stayed in some deeply unpleasant Halls in the past without dying of typhoid, but still. On the day I visited this prospective home of mine, it really put me off.
• I'm not going to my first choice university. I've already said this, but it's worth saying again: having been rejected by those heartlessly picky south-western types whose name we shall not speak, in spite of having the same grades a friend got into Cambridge with (AAB), I was feeling pretty down in the mouth. At the time I got the offer, I just couldn't face a year studying at my second choice AND living in the horrible accommodation that had made me feel down in the mouth a half-year previously. Perhaps it was rash to reject the offer, but there we are. I was having a pretty wobbly day, all told.
• I didn't realise at the time, or had forgotten, how likely I would be to simply not receive another offer. I thought that rejecting one was a perfectly valid thing to do and something else would turn up. I may not have been entirely wrong in this, it remains to be seen, but what I can be certain of is that the longer I wait for something to "oh just sort of fall in my lap", the longer the better private sector options drift off into space.

Yes, so that's what I was advised by the very nice, very calm Uni accommodation lady, when I called their helpline some twenty-four hours later in a muddle. I was told to investigate living in the private sector. She gave me a telephone number and an email address for Liverpool Student Housing. I was dubious. When I phoned them up, another very nice and very calm lady gave me a website address for them.

I'd been terribly concerned about not being able to afford private sector living, but it seems to be - not hugely more expensive? About a tenner more, on average, which is enough that you'd notice it but not enough that it would ruin your life, as I'd been imagining. Moreover, my low household income means I should be getting some kind of wonderful bursary as part of Liverpool's intense bursaries/scholarship schemes, so hopefully it won't buckle me completely into the world of Not Being Able to Afford Food. I'd also been worried about having to go and live in a house with a bunch of people who already knew each other, rent the room of a drop-out in a flat full of strangers, I don't know, I'm not sure I really understood what the private sector entailed. But they own and run other sets of Halls, and Liverpool is a city rammed with students, and they are all, as the LSH lady promised me on the phone, much of a muchness.

I'd also been concerned about the social aspect of not living with other University of Liverpool students, but you know what? Not one of my good friends who's currently at uni socialises with or opted to live with the people they met in their Halls. Not one. Certainly not to my knowledge, anyway; all the ones I can think of met people on their course, through societies, through evenings out.

So - basically, this has been a very boring post, but I think it was a roundabout way of saying that I don't think the sky's going to come crashing down if I go through the private sector. I just have to be content with going about things a little differently to the norm, with a little more paperwork and confusion and suchlike. And that's okay.

begin the beguine.

Being a 21st century lady and an all-round modern sort of cat, I got my first blog at the tender age of thirteen, a livejournal, in defiance of a friend who laughed in my face when I told him I was considering it. He said (and I know this, for I have my very first blog entry tabbed as I type; oh, the internet), "What interesting things have you got to say?"

I'm still not sure that I do have anything much to say for myself. But I was never serious about it, and over the years I dabbled, and continually told myself that one day, as an adult, as a real person, I would begin the process in earnest.

That same year, when I was thirteen, I was taken to Normandy on the only residential school trip I ever braved. For the most part I had a slightly miserable time, but we did spend a pleasant morning visiting a rather beautiful and secluded little orchard, the like of which is no doubt very common in northern France. While we were there, we were all given free samples of the orchard's apple juice, which I thought was - beautiful. Was just about the nicest thing I'd ever tasted. I bought a bottle with several of my scrunched up and carefully rationed-out euros, and I brought it home with me.

So enamoured was I with this drink that, in a fit of deferred gratification, I desperately saved it for a special occasion: I wouldn't let myself have any until I was ready, until I had earned it, and by the time that day arrived, I opened the bottle to discover that it had congealed and gone off. It had to be thrown away. My thirteen-year-old self was distraught.

I suppose the moral of the story is that if I put things off forever, eventually they...go...rotten. Rotten, like my soul.

Oh dear, no, that wasn't it at all. And I was sure I had a genuine point to make.

Okay, well, so, anyway. After a long and confusing and fairly drawn-out process, I learned today that I will definitely be spending the next three years in Liverpool, studying English (and some subsidiaries; I think I'll take history?) at the University of Liverpool. I want this blog to be, I don't know, a sort of chronicle of that embarkation; of the trials and the struggles and the excitements that a first generation university student, going up at the beginning of a big old recession, will really encounter. To be some kind of record.

Perhaps somebody will one day find it useful - or, more likely, perhaps I will rediscover it five years from now and laugh and laugh at all the silly things I thought and said. After all, there's no better place to keep a record than the internet. The shallow, eternally-logged thoughts of my thirteen-year-old self, drifiting about forever in cyberspace, are proof of that if they are proof of nothing else. And they really are proof of nothing else. Except perhaps that I spent altogether too much time thinking about chocolate.