Oxford University 2001-2005
Memories of a meltdown
This is the last newsletter before the summer break. Thanks for all your support this year, especially paying subscribers, and see you in mid-September.
The first thing to say is it isn’t romantic. There are moments when the romance of the place apprehends you, like the time I finished an essay and stood near the Bodleian Library at 6AM with nobody around and the early summer light broke on the buildings. In those moments I understood what Yeats meant when he said that the beauty of the place was such he was surprised that people in Oxford didn’t sing the whole time.
It was 20 years ago when I went there; squarely in the Saltburn era, you might say, which despite being a determinedly terrible film, does convey something of the cramped, class-conscious nature of Oxford student life. I didn’t get into my first choice college – I went for a big old posh one, and got sent to a small cash-starved one. This is something you all have to understand, that it’s perfectly possible for people to feel second-class students within Oxford itself, given the internal snobbery of ranking the colleges; a lot of people feel like Oxford rejects at Oxford.
In the first year, we lived inside the college dorms, in my case in a room just above the porter’s quad, where the students got their mail left in their little pigeonholes. I’m told that in the term before we came up, i.e. matriculated, photos of the prospective students had been hung up in the quad and mine had been selected as looking particularly cool. If I remembered the photo I was sprouting long hair and wolfish lambchops; over my first year at Oxford, my hair grew to the lengths of Rapunzel.
The rooms at Oxford have a porter, too – what a life! – namely a person who comes to empty your bins every morning, in possession of their own key. Mine was called Frank and was small, bald and cheery. When he came in and saw me in bed with what must have been my third different girl of my first term, he gave a little exclamation of something like ‘Ooh errr’ as he took my rubbish out.
The tutorials of the first term were in a small building on the road outside, in the room of my tutor Dr Sarah Wood, so my sleeping and fucking room was in reality just a hundred metres or so from where I handed in my essays late.
Punctuality was a problem; after six weeks up to tutorials ten minutes late each time – and that’s a lot of a one hour session – to find Sarah in a seething mood to chastise me about my lateness, ‘and it’s every fucking time!’ Quite right too. She was a good teacher tho, and even let me smoke in class. We sat reading my Derrida essay with plumes of tobacco going up into the air.
Cigarettes – Gauloise, blue or red, Camels, and once in a blue moon Gitanes. When I bought the Gitanes the man in the newsagents told me that they didn’t sell many of those. When you smoked cigarettes, people told you, your heart bled for ten seconds with each one, tho in fairness a lot of people were smoking Marlboro Lights which were surely five-second bleeders at worst. I had a sexless one night stand with a French girl in the first term - Bénédicte, if I recall correctly - and remember in the morning she had a cassette in her stereo which bore on a paper strip only the word ‘déchirure’, tearing.
Across the room from me was a young man, N, who’d had an Indian gap year and was still full of traveller’s tales. He liked dope and we smoked a lot of it; I couldn’t roll – I can never do bloody anything – so I supplied the tunes; Johnny Cash, Public Enemy, Brian Eno, Bob Dylan (you can guess which Bob Dylan track we liked; it starts ‘Blonde on Blonde’). One night, listening to Fela Kuti’s ‘Zombie’, a protest song about the 1970s West African military, me and a couple of other lads got up on the floor of my tiny room and started dancing, big awkward nerd limbs flailing around to the scalding funk. Cultural appropriation, I guess you’d call it these days. Indeed, at that time N informed me of his recent revelation that hip hop was ‘protest music for black people’.
N and I began reading world literature aloud to each other. Around that time, we discovered the porter downstairs had been in Manfred Mann. He copied us a CD of covers of Dylan and The Band’s 'Basement Tapes’, which he and a band had recorded before the songs had got a UK release.
The drugs got too much. One night we ingested marijuana tea and all I could think of was to go fetch B, who lived across the quad and had been in a play with N and I. She was lovely and had survived teenage breast cancer; now her breasts, she informed me, contained small sillicone lumps. We’d talked about kissing in Fresher’s Week and then kissed.
Anyway, N was convinced he was having a heart attack from the tea. B calmed him down and was exasperated at our babyishness and resort to her as a maternal saviour. The next day N posted a note under my door which read simply, ‘James – this is too much drugs.’
There was a bar in the college but beyond the first weeks I never went there. Next to it was a vending machine, and I often went there on one of my all-nighters to get a cold can of Sprite. I worked out that pretty much with one all-nighter a week I could produce an essay. The rest of the time I was smoking and reading, working through the syllabus at a snail's pace. The problem was I kept getting interested in the style of what I read, and how to incorporate it into my own writing.
Drinking wasn’t really my thing. The clubs were a disappointment after Nottingham, and by liking music and having a girlfriend I was already very different than many Oxford students. I went to Warwick to see my girlfriend and she'd baked me small rolls of bread. Back at college, there was croquet on the lawn and other sports; pinned on the large common room one Sunday was an account of a KFC eating contest, won if I remember rightly by ‘Alwyn the Bottomless Pit’. They put a Virtua Soccer machine in that common room for a while, and Ed and I spent a lot of money on it. More on Ed later.
I was stridently left-wing. During the Iraq War, they asked me to stop coming down to the student debates as I was so unrelenting. I dealt in moral absolutes. Seeking to formalize the interest, I went to meetings of a Trotskyite Group called ‘Workers’ Fight’, led by Graham who tried to fill me in on the revolution. I didn’t know much about Marx so just mentioned a fact I did know, that Francis Wheen had written a biography of Marx, which Graham told me comrades had told me wasn’t very good. I last saw Graham at the Edinburgh Fringe, handing out leaflets on his own, making his sheepish pitch for the revolution.