When I left Oxford for my year out at the end of my second year, I headed for Scotland thinking that I was going to dominate Oxford on my return. My flatmate and I were planning to create a cult of mystery around ourselves, appearing only seldom on college premises to do fascinating and mysterious things, but never looking like we were trying. We were going to set up a sort of fraternity, consisting of ourselves and a collection of malleable fresher girls, attracted to our air of continental sophistication, as expressed through a love of Gauloises and real coffee. Although no berets were included in this vision of fourth-year bliss, we were certainly going to be living a Left Bank lifestyle dripping with Sartre and easy irony. That’s essentially how I envisaged my fourth year and how I imagined myself in it: too cool for Oxford and sitting at the top of the food chain, enjoying familiar pleasures with a new-found worldliness.
Unfortunately, it almost worked. Sitting on the Oxford Tube at the start of October, I realised I was left with a horrible dilemma: on the one hand, I didn’t want to be that guy who thinks he’s too cool for school and only talks about how much better things are elsewhere but, on the other, I did feel too cool for Oxford and couldn’t help thinking I’d rather be back in Berlin. I’d moved on. I think we all had. I don’t know about those who decided to study abroad, but those of use who worked and even those who spent a year asking French schoolchildren, "And what did you do on your ‘grandes vacances’, petit Pierre?" tasted the sweet air of freedom. It was particularly the financial freedom that brought me such joy. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to ask my parents for money, I didn’t have to fill in those ridiculous student loan forms, I wasn’t scrounging from anybody. The big difference between money you earn and money you get for free is that people aren’t giving it to you because they like you (your parents) or to with the long term aim of supporting the economy (the government), but because they want something from you. Immediately, you become an equal partner in the power relationship, because you are independent and can work or not work as you choose. If you decide not to work and then lose your job, you lose your money, but not your self-respect because you don’t owe anybody anything. If you decide to take every penny you have and blow it on a four-day rave in a Serbian castle, there is an added satisfaction in not wondering how many hours your parents had to work for it.
But, perhaps more important than this is that last year was not just an interlude with no result but a few anecdotes about bratwurst, it was a year of my real life and a lot happened in it: my first love left me; so did my second; I turned to nicotine; stopped again; started again; I got my first ever job, and my second; I went on holiday to a militarised zone and expanded my mind in a German sex club; I changed my hairstyle; I stopped wearing pink shirts; I grew up and moved on and all that shit and all the while, Oxford stayed exactly the same.
Of course, some things are different now: most of my friends have graduated and college is no longer full of familiar, if boring, faces, but nothing essential has changed. The student newspapers are writing articles I read in the first year: promiscuity, drinking, state versus private, rent rises and so on ad nauseam. My predictions for Trinity: there will be banter in the Rad Cam, some random Union hack will fuck someone and there will be a feature every week about the fascinating link between sunshine and libraries. This year, as every year, everyone will read the Isis and agree it’s pretentious, no-one will read the Owl and come to the same conclusion. Oh Oxford! Even this article has been written many times before. I particularly recommend "The Lot of the Linguist" from the Cherwell archives. Does it matter? Probably not, given that it seems clear that the university experience will remain similar from year to year, but the lot of the linguist is to hang around like an old ghost and watch a new generation rehash the same old tripe that seemed so important to us at the time.
This is the horror for a returning linguist: that everything is marked by a stale familiarity and, as we know, familiarity breeds contempt. The issues and the conversations are the same as they always were, but they have lost the vitality that comes of being bound up in the fabric of university life. The news that Keith Barber is on a sex-crazed rampage is, I’m sure, fascinating to friends of Keith, but I don’t have the foggiest who the man is and all the information I’m left with is that people go on sex-crazed rampages, something I remember well from long forgotten members of college, the names of whom mean nothing to the first years I bore with their stories. And what is more, three years from now, Keith Barber will be forgotten as others were before him and and only briefly remembered by a sixth-year medic at Harris Manchester. Nothing leaves a mark. The legendary Somerville cuppers victory of 2005 is now nothing more than an entry in the records and it is sheer vanity to suggest that anything we do at Oxford will ever be more than that. You could come top of the year, captain every sports team, edit every paper, preside over the union (heaven forbid!) and still, this insitution, which has chewed over so many generations of ambitious young undergrads, would stay completely untouched for another thousand years. It is as if our time here as stretched on into a lifeless no-man’s-land We live in a limbo between our continetal sophistication and graduation.
However, this is not to say that nothing has changed. Some things seem to be shifting slowly and gradually. Now, it seems that the ladies with the scarves and Ugg boots pout to pendulum instead of hip-hop (but still think they’re street) and the smoking ban has made Filth even more disgusting (I assume). Also, the bureaufascists in charge of most colleges seem to be using the forces of darkness to expand their evil empires and impress upon us all: you are stupid little children and if you disagree, we will tell you to grow up. Perhaps more worringly, the union seems to have become even more vacuous. I notice that in this year’s term card, three officers (bureaufascists in the making) have chosen pictures of themselves drinking. Obviously there’s nothing like the ability to get pissed to get people to vote for you. And it is exactly this that seems most depressing about Oxford: the arrogance and the vapidity of so many people here, who don’t realise that, to the outside world, studying here doesn’t make you special, it doesn’t even make you clever, it just makes you a twat. Similarly disgusting is the snobbery and the belief that wealth is a virtue, to be paraded and envied. And what is worse: it makes me realise how completely I fell into all these traps and how foolish I must have seemed.
But we are clever, and it is the persistent anti-intellectualism of Oxford that is most depressing. It is the waste of talent, and of time, that perhaps characterises best the way I see my years at Oxford. For all those weeks I spent sitting about chatting about Vogue and chain-smoking, I could have finished my first novel or actually gone to something I signed up for. In fact, I could have even done my work properly instead of spending years handing in second rate nonsense that I’d cobbled together the night before. But perhaps that is the charm of Oxford life: there is such an abundance of riches that one doesn’t bat an eyelid at throwing it all away. Indeed, it does seem that true luxury necessitates waste and if time is the most valuable commodity we have, I must consider the first two years at Oxford the richest of my life.
