A daughter in university?

Father of a daughter old enough to be going to university in September and in another country?

Me?!?!?! No way!

Reality settles in: I am really THAT old and am soon to be that much lonelier.

Jessica sent off her application to 5 UK universities last December. The university application process in the UK is nationalised and all done on their online web site. Each applicant can choose up to 5 universities to apply to. Jessica, who is looking to read a dual-major of Politics and Sociology chose : Bristol, Warwick, York, Manchester and Sheffield. All of these are in the top 10 for politics in the UK which certainly did not make her job any easier. She has received replies from 4 of them, 2 refusals (Bristol and Manchester) which she was obviously quite upset about and 2 conditional offers (York and Sheffield) which are asking for some pretty tough conditions (relatively high grades in her Baccalauréat). We are therefore going to England to visit the universities for which she has conditional offers to help her choose and to help us better understand where she may be going next year.

We left relatively early in the morning and drove to Calais, got on the Shuttle, and arrived in England. We drove up through England and eventually stopped off at a garden centre in Bicester where we looked at possible water features for our garden for quite some time. We arrived in Royal Leamington Spa, hugged our family and barely unpacked as we knew we would be leaving tomorrow for the first part of our trip...