Student Journey Christmas message

A festive message from your Dean of Students and Student Journey Directorate 

This Christmas we are reminded to never forget our inner child. Why, you might ask, is remembering our inner child important? It is important because of what it represents – the cherishing of impermanent and precarious flickers in a seemingly permanent and dark world.

What of me and my inner child memory? Were I to be able to remember the look on my parents' horrified faces, my answer would surely be accompanying my two brothers down the stairs late on Christmas Eve in 1984 with a revised Christmas list in hand that bared no resemblance to the ones we submitted to my parents some 4 weeks earlier. Instead, we roll forward to 1990 where I am lay in my bed with my brother as I uselessly try to count sheep jumping fences (1… 2… what was I doing again?) wishing to feel the weight of a stocking tightening the duvet signalling that the day has begun. My brother, two years my senior at 12, is outlining why not getting a Super Soaker will (with some finality) confirm that the slow drip of fate does indeed drown us all. Thus, propelled by sense of duty, empathy, and a desire to unstick our sweaty intertwined legs, I venture downstairs to check. As I descend the stairs comforted with the knowledge that I found my very own unwrapped Super Soaker in my dad’s wardrobe a week earlier, I find my parents flickering in the kitchen drinking wine and laughing.

“Did you get Tom a Super Soaker as he really really wants one?”

My dad only smiles, puts his arm around me, and leads me back to bed where I fall into a long deep sleep until 3.00am and a tightened duvet.

That Christmas Day, in near arctic temperatures with a storm gathering and aided by a revolutionary manually pressurised air mechanism, Tom and I chased one another around the garden for hours drenching each other as if the fate of the world depended upon it. My dad looked on in disbelief… laughing… flickering.

Time is such that once passed it is never retrieved… treasured moments that in the present do not make themselves known to us, lost to a relentless life reaching forward whilst simultaneously letting go in an irrevocable instant. It is a human affliction we all share – the realisation that we will never fully know the moments to treasure until they exist merely in history and context, only to wish them back or to have to begin the search again. It is therefore such a rarity that we’re afforded the knowledge that we are existing in a moment to be treasured – I am one of those lucky few as I know that I am living in a moment of privilege and pride to work with you all - surrounded by your talent, passion, and sense of mission and community.  

I thank you sincerely and deeply for all of your amazing work this year and for that which is yet to come. I truly hope that what you want and what you need is what you get over the festive season.

This Christmas my inner child and adult self only wants to give my dad a hug – as it ever was and ever will be.

Thank you and Merry Christmas!

Daniel Kidd, Dean of Students