Woooooo, I’m an entirely different proposition: more of a lad; better to know; more fun to be around. I sparkle with earthy witticisms and fizz with mock put-downs and ball-breakers. I share carnal truths with the boys. I walk with a strut (a rhythmic loping sideways bowl). I’m garlicky and rambunctious. I call a spade a fucking spade and don’t take no shit from no one. Ah, the double life of the boy done good; the double life of mind and mouth.
But like I said, besides Ella and Scott (a renegade Etonian who’s crossed over to the dark side), I have tried to surround myself with mirror-image mates. We are Judes who would not be consigned to obscurity. We don’t stand on these benches drunkenly railing the Latin creed at bloated dons and upper-class undergraduates. Nah. We are more likely to chant yob tunes and smack empty pint glasses upside down on our gelled heads. Maybe our attitude to it all is different: everyone goes to university now; you just kind of end up there. (So I guess I should feel extra pride about making it all the way up the ladder to Oxford rather than anywhere else, but I would never shout about it.) It’s one of the defining features of our peculiar epoch,this further-study craze. We expect to go to university, and we’re not even sure why. Generally speaking, intellectual curiosity and aptitude are irrelevant (not at Oxford, mind, but I don’t resent people for going to Oxford, obviously. Why would I? I go there! No, here we just resent all the sex and booze that we assume every other student in the country is enjoying, and strain to replicate them on those rare nights when we don’t have work to do). I know people who practically failed school but still wound up student clones. This is the age of entitlement: it’s our prerogative and ain’t no one gonna take it away from us.
Jack drops a penny in my drink, so I down it, because since time immemorial that’s what you do when someone drops a penny in your drink. I drop the penny in Sanjay’s drink and he downs his. Rules be rules.
Wellingborough. Trinity term lately over, and me and my old schoolmates sitting in the Tin Whistle bar, reconvening for our first university summer vac. Placable August weather. As much drunken carnage in the nighttime streets, as if all water had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a massive munter, forty feet wide or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up to the bar.
Wellingborough. A place of no enterprise. Just a bustle of grim day-to-dayness and littered souls. (I am an Oxonian, but Wellingborough born—Wellingborough, that humdrum town—and go at things as I only know how …)
But it was on that first return, with a year of university under our slightly tighter belts, that I most acutely felt a divergence of experience. The worlds me and my mates now inhabited seemed radically different … or the world
I
inhabited. To make matters even more complicated, Lucy had been accepted into the University of Northampton, our local, coming in around the 100 mark in the university hit-parade, to study Travel and Tourism. She was set to begin that coming September and my paranoid foresight had been burning all vacation like some lust-addled Cassandra: one coloring-in exercise per semester supplemented by extracurricular binge drinking and blowjobs. My home-mates weren’t much help, what with their reports of campus lust-plots and student-union sexcapades.
“I shit you not, mate,” said Rob as he arched his body over the pool table and lined up the shot (staring down the cue, one eye closed, forehead tensed), “I fingered this girl up the bum-hole at the Christmas party in the student union.” I sipped my beer in awe as he banged the red in off the cushion, retrieved his pint from atop the fag machine at the side, and took a contemplative chug. “Simple really. Started on the dance floor with a few drinks in us—quite romantic—and then moved away to
But like I said, besides Ella and Scott (a renegade Etonian who’s crossed over to the dark side), I have tried to surround myself with mirror-image mates. We are Judes who would not be consigned to obscurity. We don’t stand on these benches drunkenly railing the Latin creed at bloated dons and upper-class undergraduates. Nah. We are more likely to chant yob tunes and smack empty pint glasses upside down on our gelled heads. Maybe our attitude to it all is different: everyone goes to university now; you just kind of end up there. (So I guess I should feel extra pride about making it all the way up the ladder to Oxford rather than anywhere else, but I would never shout about it.) It’s one of the defining features of our peculiar epoch,this further-study craze. We expect to go to university, and we’re not even sure why. Generally speaking, intellectual curiosity and aptitude are irrelevant (not at Oxford, mind, but I don’t resent people for going to Oxford, obviously. Why would I? I go there! No, here we just resent all the sex and booze that we assume every other student in the country is enjoying, and strain to replicate them on those rare nights when we don’t have work to do). I know people who practically failed school but still wound up student clones. This is the age of entitlement: it’s our prerogative and ain’t no one gonna take it away from us.
Jack drops a penny in my drink, so I down it, because since time immemorial that’s what you do when someone drops a penny in your drink. I drop the penny in Sanjay’s drink and he downs his. Rules be rules.
Wellingborough. Trinity term lately over, and me and my old schoolmates sitting in the Tin Whistle bar, reconvening for our first university summer vac. Placable August weather. As much drunken carnage in the nighttime streets, as if all water had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a massive munter, forty feet wide or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up to the bar.
Wellingborough. A place of no enterprise. Just a bustle of grim day-to-dayness and littered souls. (I am an Oxonian, but Wellingborough born—Wellingborough, that humdrum town—and go at things as I only know how …)
But it was on that first return, with a year of university under our slightly tighter belts, that I most acutely felt a divergence of experience. The worlds me and my mates now inhabited seemed radically different … or the world
I
inhabited. To make matters even more complicated, Lucy had been accepted into the University of Northampton, our local, coming in around the 100 mark in the university hit-parade, to study Travel and Tourism. She was set to begin that coming September and my paranoid foresight had been burning all vacation like some lust-addled Cassandra: one coloring-in exercise per semester supplemented by extracurricular binge drinking and blowjobs. My home-mates weren’t much help, what with their reports of campus lust-plots and student-union sexcapades.
“I shit you not, mate,” said Rob as he arched his body over the pool table and lined up the shot (staring down the cue, one eye closed, forehead tensed), “I fingered this girl up the bum-hole at the Christmas party in the student union.” I sipped my beer in awe as he banged the red in off the cushion, retrieved his pint from atop the fag machine at the side, and took a contemplative chug. “Simple really. Started on the dance floor with a few drinks in us—quite romantic—and then moved away to
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