“When’s this inauguration then?” Dad asked.
“Graduation, Dad.” And then for the third time, I told him the date.
“Saturday 27th May.”
“And this makes you a doctor…?”
“No.” I sighed. “It’s only a Masters.”
Dad had exaggerated my course from the beginning. When I first got accepted, there was an onslaught of texts from his friends congratulating me for getting into The University of Oxford. Even my brother Joe sent me a surprised voice note. “There’s my little sister getting into the best university in the world.” I spent a good morning replying to all the messages, putting them right. I was going to Oxford Brookes, not Oxford University.
Academia has never been our family’s ‘thing.’ That’s not to say my parents didn’t care for education, but we were never pressured to reach for high marks or to be able to spell difficult words out loud. The pressure was more on the business stuff, like ‘Did you email back Alistair?’, ‘You should get a LinkedIn page’, ‘Come to this dinner, it would be good for networking.’ – More The Apprentice than University Challenge.
So, out of my three siblings, I was the one to rebel and go for the degree, (but even then, that was in film production, so, not really a degree-degree).
Unfortunately, there was no photo proof of this degree ever happening.
As it was film school it wasn’t a traditional graduation, but a cinema screening of our graduation films. (I made a documentary on women in the media where I followed around a glamour model for the night, but that’s another blog).
I didn’t have the robe and the mortarboard, and the only photo proof that the event happened was the one my Mum took. We were asked to gather in a group so the parents could take a photo of us. Mum, who doesn’t like to get in the way of a snail in her garden, was quietly reaching and burrowing between the bodies of other parents with her iPhone.
The result: my face as if I was on a high-speed train.
This graduation was going to be different. I booked to have a professional photo and paid extra for teeth whitening in the post-production (because with writing comes a black coffee addiction).
The 27th May arrived, and I met my parents in a restaurant called Quod on the High Street. Mum with her mint tea, and Dad with two small pints because ‘this place doesn’t serve proper pints.”
“So how long will this thing take?” Dad asked.
“If you refer to the itinerary I sent in the Mary’s Graduation WhatsApp group, you will see it will only be an hour.”
“Great.” He finished one beer, then the other.
The ceremony was typical for graduation. We stood as the Platform Party marched into the hall to the sound of a trumpet. There were some speeches, and then each student went up on stage and shook hands with the Vice-Chancellor, who was dressed up in his sparkly best robe.
I don’t know what Dad had in mind because when I met my parents after the ceremony, he had a few questions.
“Why did we have to stand for those people?”
“What’s with the stick she was holding?”
“What the hell is a Law in Law degree? Of course, law is in law!”
“What happens now?”
I was already walking away when I said, “Now I get my photo taken, but I can meet you in the pub.” I glanced at Mum as if to say, please take him to the pub. They didn’t take my suggestion. Instead, they followed me up the stairs.
I went into the photo room with Dad still behind me. He stood in the corner of the room as the photographer adjusted my gown and put a plastic scroll in my hand. She told me to put my chin up and down, and up a bit and down more, to say yes, to smile on go, to not smile on go.… Behind her, Dad was pulling faces and doing a dance.
My brother joined us for dinner and came with a card that had a drawing of a cartoon pair of pants with fluffy yellow hair, holding a scroll. It said, ‘Congratulations Smarty Pants, You Graduated!’
“Does this make you a doctor?” he asked.
“NO!” I snapped and took a roll of bread and stuffed it in my mouth.
It was around the time Dad put too much tabasco on his oysters that I received the photo proofs in my inbox.
“Here they are! The proof that one of your kids went to university!” I announced gleefully and opened the link. I scrolled through the photos, and at each one, my heart sank further.
There I was with the cloudy background in the official pose, wearing the robe and mortarboard. However, on my face wasn’t the expression of a woman who had just graduated, but a woman who was having to watch her dad dance in public.
THE QUACK 