Post 5 | 31.01.15
Because Someone said People at Oxford University don’t Watch the Football
Sam
I sit in a naked classroom, and listen. There's no nightlife there, is there? It's all academia. I bet everyone's just really boring. They're the kind of people who…
I want to say: the kind of people who what? The kind of people who play cultural theorist top-trumps? The kind of people who get every question of the University Challenge classical music round correct, and won't talk to people who don't? Who alter the workings of their televisions (if they even have one) so that ITV isn't available? But I don't.
I want to say: What kind of person am I? With my two-car family. With my if-not-champagne-then-elderflower socialism and my railwayman great-grandfather and my South-West-small-town boredom. With an old state-school tie somewhere in the back of my wardrobe and a new state-school anger brewing firmly at the front of my mind. Lodged just between the Homer and The Simpsons. Between Blake and fake IDs; between confusion about Virginia Woolf and confusion about Take Me Out. With my ex-servant's quarters room in my one-time-victorian house and my September-2015 destination of the place where Christopher Wren was eighteen. When I was fourteen, I was told by my friends that Facebook was 'not for essays'. They had been reacting to an anti-X-factor thesis I had posted, late at night. I remember.
I never held the letter - I waited for a text instead. But I know that it was on paper, not parchment, and there was no wax seal. It did not arrive by Owl. Sorry. As I held my phone, two types of me materialised, fashioned from throwaway comments and photographs and anecdotes. Stereotype for sinew and each organ a truth. Their bones the certainties I know to calcify in friends' minds whenever this all comes up.
One: Tall. Strong. Arrogant. Robes cockily draped from his shoulders. He used the First Folio of Shakespeare as a cricket bat.
The other: Bearded. Proud. Furious. A hypocritical wrath wrapped tight around his torso. Encrusted with excessive political button-badges which shone like trophies and shouted like liars.
One swung the Folio, the other ducked and launched into desperate polemic, drowned out by sordid stories of Prince Harry from his opponent. Bludgeoned with a protest placard, that opponent spat blue blood and drew a musket which belonged to Pitt the Younger, soon to be snatched from his hands and broken over his head, sending him spinning to the ground. He was saved because his assailant stopped to explain to Tumblr that the violence was ironic. He rose to his fox-skin-booted feet and whistled for coke-dusted future Prime Ministers, who encircled the other, seemingly undeterred by increasingly hysterical demands that they check their privilege. Luckily, he managed to summon a collection of dreadlocked white people, but they forgot to fight back and recommended some excellent marxist literary criticism instead. The ensuing existential crisis created a forcefield around their leader so strong that it reminded the drinking society that several restaurants were lamentably un-smashed-up, and they left to attend to their duties. In frustration, one of the types of me ran at the other like an aristocratic bull, scattering his petition-wielding bodyguards. He punched him squarely in the face, the leather of his riding gloves slapping against skin as round glasses shattered, and drew blood.
I held the phone, and blinked away these visions, replacing them with fantasies of blank slates; unwritten futures. Because apparently, I have chosen confusion. I have chosen contradiction. I have chosen what I want.
Because my friend had referred to a college there as 'his family's college': 'My family just always go to that one.' The first of my descendants to go to university were my parents.
Because six months earlier, I had sat in an overheated basement room, beneath quads and porter's lodges and adrenaline-laced possibility. Beneath mazes of sunlit cotswold stone. Because the man giving the talk had asked Who's worried about Student Finances and honesty and assumptions of a forest of raised arms had drawn up my hand, because that's what students are worried about, right? Because I had been alone, an island of doubt in a wasteland of comfort.
