I was in The Victoria with a group of young students from Oxford University. They’d just finished their last exams and were getting drunk in their gowns.
“You know, it’s so depressing getting older because the older you get, the less impressive your achievements are,” said Hadley, a 24-year-old Masters student of classical archaeology. His concern made me smile, and I assured him he still had plenty more years to be impressive.
I grew up around the University, but I’ve never been an academic type, so I kept my distance from that world and the people in it. I was what they call ‘town’.*
Since moving back to Oxford, though, I’ve found myself on the ‘gown’ side of the city, or at least I have my nose up to the fishbowl of it. I’ve attended parties, that I didn’t even know could be parties, like the; ‘submitting your thesis party.’
There’s always a fear of feeling inadequate at these sorts of things, but once they’ve gotten their worries about learning Akkadian off their chests and talked about their organ recitals, then you’re left with some pretty extraordinary yet normal people.
It was whilst I was in Wetherspoons that I was reminded of their normality. It was 1am, and I was with a group of DPhil men who were discussing their yearly long studies of The Old Testament when John the Theologian made a joke, “We do it for the money and the woman.”
I ended up going to Port Meadows with Hadley and his friends to watch them trash** each other. I stood at a safe distance and watched as they sprayed silly string and shaving foam into each other’s faces.\
And it’s traditions like these that make me feel grateful that I’m not a gown.
*Town and Gown – the divide in Oxford between the locals and the academics.
**Trashing- a tradition that has been around since the 1970s; where the students ‘trash each other’ as part of the post-exam summer celebrations.
THE QUACK 