THE QUACK

It was Freshers Week at Oxford University, and the city was packed with eager, hungover eighteen-year-olds who had all arrived with something to say.

I was in Pret when two boys in glasses sat on the table next to me. They seemed to have adopted each other on the first days of their new life. The more dominant one told the other about how his tutor was a ‘legend’ and then listed off all the events ahead of him in a disbelieving tone, “I’ve got my dinner at St John’s, freshers fair tomorrow, and then a night at The Bridge on Friday…”

I never did freshers because I didn’t go to a usual university, I went to film school instead. I had come straight from my small South England catholic school, which moulded me into an Abercrombie and Fitch victim and possessed me to think that 17-year-olds should wear plastic pearl necklaces.

I walked into the film studio on my first day with my Top Shop handbag balancing on my forearm and realised that the rules that had applied for so many years in my preppy pond no longer existed. My peers were hidden in black leather jackets, the girls wore biker boots instead of Uggs, and everybody looked a little cooler than me – especially with their James Dean cigarettes.

I wasn’t sure what to do because, despite a short emo phase in my pre-teens, I knew there was no way I would be able to pull off this look. So I tried other ways of fitting in – like starting a football club. All that happened, though, was that I turned up alone in my short shorts with a ball under my arm and was left facing a line of male students, staring and smoking.

I finally gained some credit after a Halloween party of mine got out of hand, and from there, things got easier, and I managed to survive in my own way – without purchasing any biker boots.

Many tribes amongst us can be identified by their looks; the skaters with their baggy jeans and branded t-shirts, the surfers with their long sun-kissed hair, and the Essex lot with their slightly orange tans.

As for the Oxford freshers, they have come bounding in with their tribal look of glasses, corduroy trousers, wool jumpers, and even the odd walking cane. Like all young people, though, the canes will soon be left behind as the year drags on, and everybody will eventually become themselves.