overlap

A historic debt cleared this morning - it's hardly all that exciting as my final university year was only the first year of student loan introduction, but all the same it's nice to have the box ticked and to move on. Of course it would have been paid off years ago if I'd just been able to have the bank put the trifling amount on my overdraft  - the total loan value behind the debt I have been dragging around for many years only equates to a week's gross salary now, and that's certainly not because I'm being paid footballer wages.

Entirely by coincidence, my student days are neatly referenced in my visit last week to the university that I nearly went to - it lost out as my second choice on remarkably non-academic grounds - so revisiting that campus for the first time in a very long time provided for the odd interesting moment. And similarly a few days later I was in the bar of a student union building in the north-west, and not alone in commenting on how much the facilities appeared to have changed.

But whatever the financing mechanism, I'm very glad for the provision of the nearly full grant I benefited from. There would have been very little room in 18+ education for me had the current regime of fees, loans, top up fees and so forth pertained when I was leaving school, and I have every sympathy with anyone looking at that prospect now.

// posted by uber @ 12:01 pm