I have a few U25 friends in Oxford from when I was a tour guide. Occasionally, we’ll meet for a drink or lunch, or in this case, Anna’s 24th birthday dinner.
I guess there is always a worry when you hang out with younger people that your presence is unwanted. “Who ordered the babysitter?” “Don’t you have a husband to play with?”, “Why don’t you go watch another episode of Friends?”
And I suppose it was that worry that prevented me from committing until the morning of the birthday dinner, but Saturday morning came, and I still didn’t have a husband and couldn’t bring myself to watch Friends (RIP Matthew Perry), so I joined Gen Z for a curry in Jericho.
Anna’s friends were made up of a training barrister, a biologist who had the Cheshire Cat painted on her jeans, a 21-year-old chorister who knew 15 languages (currently studying Russian and German), a man nicknamed ‘The Lion Man’ because he’s doing his PhD in lions (and even had lion-patterned socks on), and the founder of the Oxford University’s Oscar Wilde Society.
By the time they had spoken about studying humping lions in Africa, to their Fringe festival play, and translating Russian whilst on placement as an accountant in Kazakhstan…I no longer felt old but maybe a little mediocre.
It was whilst we were eating our curries that a tonne of young Oxford students started piling past our table to the private dining room behind us. The girls were drinking from bottles of champagne and had their cold midriffs on display. The boys wore excessively loose ties and sloppy red velvet caps that would look absurd in any other city. It was all very Evelyn Waugh.
I’ve seen these young types around town recently; they walk around like they have the world at their feet, and I suppose they do. It’s the end of the first term, and they have made their friends for life, decided on what job they would like in the cabinet, dyed their hair and lost their virginities. It’s a good time to be alive.
I remember a similar feeling in the first term at film school. Life was a ball of colourful play dough, ready to be shaped into whatever I wanted it to be. It was one of my happiest times. Sure, there have been plenty of ‘happiest’ times since, and more to come, but you can’t replace that blissful innocence and intact confidence. It was hard not to feel bitter in my, I must get- my- tax- returns- done- and- I- should- use- serum- now -state.
The private dining room was now stuffed full of these Bright Young Things. None of them could hear a goddamn thing the other was saying because they were shouting over each other.
“Sounds horrendous,” I commented.
“It sounds joyous,” the founder of the Oscar Wilde Society debated, highlighting my dinosaur state.
The eighteen-year-olds began playing sconcing, which is basically like the ‘I have never’ drinking game, but with plummy voices. You say what you’ve done, and the rest will drink if they have done the same. (Hopefully, you have done something revolving around sex and other taboo subjects).
One at a time the students stood up and confessed a wild accomplishment, and the table erupted with laughter whilst a handful of them took a swig. It wasn’t easy to hear exactly what was being said, but one boy had a particularly loud, boozed-up voice. He stood in front of his peers with a bottle of red wine by the neck.
“I pooped myself the first time I had sex.” He took a gulp.
His peers didn’t join him in drinking, rather they sat there in a state of repulsion.
And I no longer felt bitter about being my old mediocre self.
THE QUACK 