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He’s wearing his bluecrushed-velvet jacket (collar up), a paisley scarf intricately folded and tucked, some red corduroys, and a pair of blue and white boaters (no socks). Massive hair, baby face, gerbil nose. Before I got to Oxford, a dandy, to me, was just a comic book; but now I’ve learned that it’s an actual kind of person, though the reality of such a type is something I still have problems grasping. Over the years I have applied qualifications: for instance, I don’t see anything wrong with the theorized, aesthetic variation (Oscar Wilde, big fan). But then there’s this subset of dandy with no substance; a kind of upper-class grotesque, more toff than artiste. These chaps move in exclusive clusters throughout Oxford, flawlessly reflecting each other.
    Am I a hypocrite?
    Terrence sees us and smirks, before carrying on to the bar, where he’ll probably purchase a quart of port and crack out his snuff tin.
    Terrence Terrence: first name Terrence, second name Terrence. He’s a ditto; a fellow of incestuous title, one begetting the other, same rubbing against same; a pleonastic preponderance; a tautological tit. He studies English at Hollywell College, unfortunately, like me. He’s one of those kids who have two thousand “friends” on mugshot.com. It’s ludicrous. Just think about it: if he were to bestow each of his “friends” with the most bog standard of birthday gift—I’m talking a fiver in a card—it would cost him ten grand a year … which he could probably afford, but still … He says things like mama and mummy instead of mum, and calls champagne (which he has for breakfast) “pooh.” You know the type: goes for weekends in Rome, Milan, and Paris, just to snort cocaine off a prostitute’s left nipple.
    Well, actually, I emphatically did not know the type before I got to Oxford. They don’t call it a great seat oflearning for nothing. It was at my entrance interview that Terrence made his first cameo (what he’d call his début, or, having been on an extensive gap year, his đëƀûţ) in my life—
    Marching in streets of Oxford, I came to court the fruitful plot of scholarism. Dad dropped me off on Broad Street.
    “Just do your best,” he said, gripping my shoulder and ruffling my stupendous barnet. “There’s nothing more you can do. Good luck, son.” What else could he say? The situation and setting were even more alien to him than they were to me.
    I didn’t have a clue where I was and found myself stumbling onto Radcliffe Square, hemmed in by the Bodleian and All Souls, the spire of St. Mary’s Church rising in the background. The Radcliffe Camera, in all its enlightened splendor and sanctity, pounced monstrously into view. The colossal building receded and protruded, dilating and contracting before my dimming eyes. I stood minuscule at its base, paralyzed by the dimensions and their impossible drift into infinity. I clutched my rucksack, my scarf streaming over my shoulder in the wind like a flapping tongue of dogged bewilderment. The whole building could not be taken in at once, evading my grasp at its very edges; its incomprehensible limits. Gazing upward, the golden structure seemed as if it had been placed against a green-screen sky, leering over me with CGI prodigiousness. But it was all real. I sensed the floor swaying and my body moving away from me as the tip of the dome kissed sulky clouds in strenuous proximity. Then felt I like some watcher of the sky, when his ken is royally fucked: squashed and stretched; handed new coordinates; recalibrated. I eventually managedto drag my sorry self away and went in search of Hollywell College.
    Having blubbered my way through the porter’s lodge (the head porter glaring at me like he wanted me dead, some latent class antagonism animating his inanimate stare—“But I’m with you,” I wanted to plead. “I’m with you”), I was shown to the common room by a group of surprisingly good-looking students with names like