"My first year at university" - Angel Coulby aka. Gwenevere on Merlin!

My first year at university

Angel Coulby, actor, tells the Guardian about her first year at Queen Margaret University

• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 August 2011 18.30 BST
• Article history

Angel Coulby: 'Take a good set of kitchen utensils 

and a good pan' Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty Images

My mum took me up to Edinburgh to drop off all my stuff. The halls were in a place called Corstorphine – very suburban and leafy. The only supermarket was a really small Co-op. There was a pub and a fish-and-chip shop. And one bus into town every half-hour. There wasn't a lot happening. I am quite guilty of not reading leaflets properly and I had probably been told, but I thought we were going to be in the centre of town. I remember one night in the union in that first week drinking snakebite and black and thinking, these are the people I am going to spend the next three years with. But it was fine. I was really worried whether I would fit in, but I met my friend Helen Ward McAlpine in the first week – we really, really clicked and we're still friends.

I have always been quite capable with cooking – there was no Pot Noodle in my cupboard – but because the facilities were quite limited, I did snack, and Helen's mum always provided her with lots of ready meals. Thinking about it, maybe there were no Pot Noodles in my cupboard because I was always borrowing them from Helen.

Our first term was pretty terrifying, mainly because our head of year, Lynn Bains, was an incredibly formidable person. I remember looking at the schedule and thinking it had amazing things on it: Alexander Technique, singing, ballroom dancing. And we had a lot of fun. In between lessons, my friend Robert Archibald – who was an amazing pianist and a musical fiend – and I would go into the music room and prance around and sing all the musicals we could think of at the top of our voices.

I was quite lazy at drama school. I would leave things to the last minute or try and wing it. We were reading An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski and for some reason I hadn't read the chapters. We were slowly going round the circle, and I knew I was going to have to make it up. "You know the thing about these chapters..." I started. And then just froze. "...is that I haven't read them." The room went cold. The tutor's eyes just bored into my soul and everyone wondered what she was going to do. "Well, at least you are honest," she said. It was a crushing moment.