Last week, two esteemed lists hit the Oxford scene. Since the publication of The OxStu and Cherwell’s BNOC lists, there has been an overwhelming uproar. The OxStu’s list (famed for the plethora of poor spelling, grammar, and an inherent inability to use Photoshop) and Cherwell’s (accurate and excellently presented) list have induced mass bitterness and smugness. But as the Bard once said, what is past is prologue. And no one ever reads the prologue. To appease, I have collected together some advice, so that by this time next year you will be able to revel in the luxurious ease of being a BNOC.

Firstly, in order to become a BNOC, you’re going to need to understand the term. BNOC stands for ‘Big Name On Campus’. This seems simple, but The OxStu seemed to have misunderstood it, literally lengthening Annie Teriba’s name by an extra letter. This is not what it means. You are a big name, because people know of you. Students have stalked you on Facebook. They’ve seen your trout pout from 2010. They know which club nights you go to. It is not creepy in any way whatsoever. BNOCs are like accessible celebrities. The celebrity is taken off its ledge, and placed in the same reality as you. You have mutual friends with them. You walk past them on Cornmarket. “What, then, is the difference between me and them?” I hear you mutter under your breath. Stop muttering. The difference: they’re at least pretending to do something with their life.

Whether on stage, dwelling in the murky realms of the Union, picking L-G-B-Q-T out of their alphabet spaghetti, holding a placard, burning a boat, or wearing an OUSU polo shirt. They’re doing something. But the thing is, what they do remains irrelevant. All that remains imprinted in people’s brains are their faces and names. Which thankfully makes everything far more simple. All you need to do is implant. Your name and face need to be familiar. Write your name in library books. Try “I 

Get a friend to stand in the middle of Cornmarket. It’s best to try and execute this exercise on a Saturday, when Cornmarket is most strongly representative of a locust infestation. Walk down from one end. Instruct your friend so that as soon as you are in view they shout, “OH MY GOD IT’S [insert your name]”. They should then run over and ask to take a selfie with you, which you kindly accept, before continuing to very slowly amble on. Your friend should then hyperventilate and walk from circle to circle of people, pointing at you and exclaiming how cool you are. With this basis, you now only need to maintain your resting bitch face for the next year, and make sure to join Cuntry Living. In a year’s time you will be wearing a shiny gilded badge of glory.

But a warning: as I have broached before, Oxford is not actually real. Your BNOC badge will expire as soon as you graduate. Hard luck.

We smile sheepishly as someone wishes us luck. Despite the subfusc, we are not about to make the trek to Exam Schools on this particular morning. The clue is perhaps in our choice of practical and, crucially, comfortable footwear, our rucksacks, and our conspicuous lack of carnations. In fact, we are preparing to embark on a kind of urban DofE, one that almost requires endurance levels worthy of a finalist. 

It all started in Wagamama, halfway through Hilary Term. Grabbing a napkin, we wrote a bucket list of 50 things we wanted to do in Oxford before we leave. Aware that Emily was going on her year abroad we were determined that we should make the most of our time left at Oxford together. We quickly realised that we wanted to see all of the colleges, and so the seeds of madness were sown. After all, if we wanted to see all of them, why not do that in one day… in full subfusc… with a mascot bunny also in subfusc?

The first thing to decide was the criteria by which to select the colleges – we were a little alarmed to learn that there were 44! We settled on visiting all the undergraduate colleges, starting at St Hilda’s and ending at St Hugh’s. This left us with 30 colleges… Surely this was easily walkable in a day? With the methodical determination usually reserved for finding an obscure book in the Bodleian, we chose an order, highlighted our map like in the good old days of bronze DofE and were ready to start.

Having spent half an hour in St Hilda’s, we very quickly realised that our plan of spending ten minutes looking around each college may have been a little ambitious. As Brasenostrils, we are used to getting from one side of the college to the other in no time at all. We were not going to be finished by 4pm for afternoon tea as originally planned. Part of the delay was due to the need to convince the porters at St Hilda’s of our perfectly harmless intentions. For some reason, they were worried we might look out of place and felt the need to give us visitor passes. As we got our evidence sheet signed and stamped by the porters, one of them told us merrily, “You must be mad… No wait, you can’t be mad, you study at Oxford!” And then he drew a smiley face.

Despite our college loyalty, every college impressed us. Our highlights were:

Tolkien Table, Merton College

Keble chapel

The garden in New College 

Lincoln front quad

The graveyard in Teddy Hall

And slightly less traditional highlights included:

The bridge in Pembroke

The Wesley Room in Lincoln

The animal carvings in Worcester Chapel

The bell tower in St Catz

The greenhouse in Corpus Christi

The colleges with the best wisteria were: Worcester, Teddy Hall, Univ, New College and LMH. But to our surprise, the best thing about the day was the conversations we had. The porters’ initial reactions ranged from sceptical to bemused to full-blown giggling. In Corpus Christi, having only got as far as mentioning that we were from Brasenose, we were treated to a “Pity that”. Porters appear to be the masters of repartee. Having watched us pose with a cuddly bunny in their front quads, many decided that we were the source of entertainment for the day and were happy to talk to us.

This ranged from a conversation about family history and Victorian literacy rates with a Christ Church ‘custodian’ to the social life of the Hertford cat. At Teddy Hall, we were provided with the amusing anecdote of a wild student who had returned five years later a reformed character in a smart suit, accompanied by his wife and baby. Upon seeing rowdy students outside the lodge, he turned to his wife and exclaimed, “Students these days just don’t know how to behave!” In Worcester the porter, also an electric guitarist, gleefully told us, “I’m the only person in my band without a doctorate – how tragic is that?” In St Catz, we were given an interesting insight into the lives of the porters, “We have 870 students here – it’s a nightmare when the post arrives.” We also had many conversations with students and with people who were not linked to the university. It was striking that wearing subfusc made us more approachable and gave people a reason to talk to us. 

After hunting for St Hugh’s like a drunken student on a mission to find Hassan’s after staggering out of Park End, nearly nine hours after we started, we felt proud of our achievement. We spoke to people we would never normally have spoken to, left everything behind without leaving the city, and appreciated the vastness of the university. We would like to thank all the porters we met; it was lovely to see how proud they are of their colleges. In Somerville the porter leapt out of the lodge to encourage us to explore every corner when he feared we were just seeing the front quad. In Wadham, the porters gave us a prospectus. In Lincoln, they let us see the Wesley Room. They all hunted out their best stamps or gave us their autographs with a flourish.

To end with the heartfelt words of a volunteer in Christ Church Cathedral, “No matter what happens, just remember you’re at Oxford, so you’re already superstars!”

The day begins with an alarm – normally I get through about six of them before dragging myself out of bed and throwing on some warm clothes to cycle to Iffley Road for morning training. In winter months it can be pretty cold and grim, and quite often makes me seriously consider why I got up in the first place. Gloves are essential, and if you forget and try to brave it without them, your hands may as well be icicles by the time you get there. Once, in the middle of the big January freeze, sleep-deprived and stupidly unwilling to make the trip back through College to my room, I decided to use my socks as a substitute. Needless to say, by the time I made it to Iffley, both my fingers and toes had succumbed to third-degree frostbite (or so it felt). 

While diving into a cold pool at 7am may not appeal to everyone, I actually find it quite refreshing and a good way to start the day. Warm-ups are quite short and are pretty self-explanatory, while main sets vary each day – Monday mornings are endurance, Saturdays tend to include sprints, and Tuesdays are kick sets (I avoid going on Tuesdays). After the session we stretch as a group for a bit, and then it’s a cycle back to college for a quick but enormous breakfast before lectures or work for the day. Everything that you’ve heard about swimmers’ appetites is true – I’ve had to get used to living with constant hunger. It’s always a frantic dash to get the right food into my body in that crucial digestive window thirty minutes after a training session.

Evening training is a similar story, although it’s not as cold and I’m not half-asleep at this point so the cycle there isn’t quite so horrific. 

However, this is more than made up for by the gruelling land-based HIIT (high-intensity interval training) workouts we do on poolside before the session, which involve so many core exercises that I’m often unable to sit up for a week afterwards. One that’s particularly tough is a pyramid set of planks, which involves holding the position for increasingly long lengths of time, from thirty seconds up to five minutes, and back down again. 

Following this moderate form of torture we dive in for another two-hour swimming set. The intensity and length of these sets tend to vary according to the time of year – in Michaelmas the long-term focus is preparation for the varsity match so the sets are longer and tougher, while in the immediate run-up to competitions, we ease off (taper) to allow our bodies to rest and recover. We sometimes split into groups, so that some of us can focus on sprints while others swim longer distances. 

Many of the sessions also involve some hypoxic work, which literally means “low oxygen” so involves not breathing for lengths at a time and other breath-holding exercises. However, the lifeguards aren’t so keen on these sets anymore after one of the team fainted in the middle of the pool while doing one.

Following Wednesday evening training we have team socials or crewdates, most likely located at the fine establishment of Temple Lounge and which involve upholding some swim team traditions for the youngest member of the team (Team Junior, or TJ). We then descend upon Vinnie’s as a group for a quick Pinky (a deceptively-strong cocktail) or two, before trekking to Park End to lose completely any benefits of the earlier training session. Thankfully, there’s no training on Thursday mornings…

Overall, life as a Blues swimmer is pretty similar to normal student life – the only real differences are the 10,000 calorie diets, chronically-aching limbs, a propensity to fall asleep in lectures, and the residual smell of chlorine that seems to follow us wherever we go.

I’ve always liked being in control. Whether it’s essays or meticulously-organised fun, I’m used to having everything planned to my liking days in advance. I’d always assumed that this craving for control extended to my sex life. But on this particular occasion, I gave in to the experience of being dominated, and subsequently unearthed my hidden submissive sexual desires. There I sat, in my dingy, lonely Cowley flat, on a cold and depressing January evening. With my flatmates nowhere to be found, and the satisfaction of masturbation rapidly declining, I searched for fulfilment with increasing desperation. I could feel myself ebbing ever closer to an existential crisis of loneliness. 

At school, I had a brief relationship with a girl in the year below, only to find a flirty connection with a friend of her older sister (let’s call her Joan). She was headstrong and confident, in a different sexual league to my 16-year-old self, primarily because she was having sex and I definitely was not. She told me stories of throttling, spanking and threesomes. Our conversation over the subsequent five years became less intense, but remained flirtatious. Excessive Facebook stalking that January evening told me that Joan had moved into close proximity in Oxford, and I decided to try my luck for a demonstration of her self-proclaimed sexual prowess. 

We had drinks. She spoke to me with patronising disdain, as though I were 20 years her junior, rather than eight months. Indeed, several times she referred to me as a ‘little boy’. Rather than being insulted by her attitude, it stirred something inside me that I had never felt before. We joked about her flamboyant stories and my mundane ones. But it added to the sexual dynamic; I knew, even in flirtation, that I was not going to be the one calling the shots that night. What was interesting was that, despite my control freak instincts, how much I liked it. Indeed, quite against the inclinations of my libido, Joan insisted that we finish two bottles of wine before we headed into the bedroom. 

I was in for a surprise. It was not what we did, but the way we did it that surprised me. I was verbally ordered, often with physical encouragement, in every act. Joan instructed me to go down on her, and grasped my head between her legs, calling out comprehensive orders on rhythm. Panting, and thrilled by this turn of events, I was then told to lie on my back while Joan pinned my hands behind my head and completely dominated me. She ordered me to fuck her from behind, and while I did so, she inserted a finger into my bum. Out of surprise rather than pain or pleasure, I tensed up, and received a stern telling off for my pause in gyration. Still reeling from the experience, I came as per her instructions, “Not inside me, for fuck’s sake, and nowhere visible.” 

Never before had I been instructed to push my sexual boundaries in such an explicit and satisfying way. Joan opened the door to the world of BDSM for me, and I’m learning everyday about the exciting possibilities of being a submissive partner.