none.
“Eliot,” I said, extending my hand to him.
“Jack,” he said, giving it a solid shake. “Nice one.”
Perhaps it’s a shame that I have so readily sought out characters similar to myself. But there are two clear options available to the sniveling statie at an institution like Oxford: locate your compatriots and stick together with a resentful,snotty leer, or do that cringing dance we like to call “The Upward Mobility.” I should know by now that things are far more complicated and nuanced than I allow—go for the particular over the general. But it’s difficult. I’m still uncertain about how I even ended up in a place like this.
Maybe it’s time for some of that Copperfield bullshit: It was my primary-school teacher, via my proud, puffed parents, who first put the grand idea of Oxford into my head. They returned home from the annual parents’ evening at my school, up the lane, all suited-and-tied and whatever it is mums wear to these occasions. I was waiting with the eager need-to-know of a boy accustomed to doing well.
“So, what did she say?”
Dad smiled as he filled the flaky kettle, Mum looking on all goopy and warm.
“Mrs. Parker thinks you’re the kind of kid who could end up at Oxford or Cambridge,” he relayed, with a quick glance to gauge my reaction. This extraordinarily premature news registered with little-to-no referential meaning, yet I could tell it was a fucking good thing.
“Ah,” I proffered in schoolboy wonder. The seed was planted.
We took a fidgety Saturday trip to Oxford not long after, with all the conventional stuffiness and aches of a family day out. You remember the ones: stately homes and landscape gardens; museums and galleries … all those hellholes that were anathema to your sucked thumb and anti-attention span; to your childhood mess and E-number erraticism.
I remember seeing the Radcliffe Camera for the first time, the photogenic library that is the city’s centerpiece, poised in middle of cobbled square like bulbous tit and nipple, suckling the dreamy sky. Beleaguered, I had followedDad around Christ Church College and its capacious dining hall, tripping up over my shoelaces and tonguing the River Thames that oozed from my nostrils. Five centuries of roast dinner blended with fumes of polish and Dettol.
“One day, one day,” Dad kept muttering, with a knowing nod of his head.
Gloomy blokes with comic beards and wooden titles stared down from the oak-paneled walls. I was bored out of my tree. While Dad divulged titbits of some illustrious history from the tourist pamphlet, I staged an imaginary war-to-end-all-wars between my G.I. Joe and a coalition of Boglins, WCW wrestlers, and Transformers, raging amidst the silverware and beneath the long tables, the anthem of my charmed youth. Soldiers fought for their lives in mires of English mustard while associative baddies abseiled down John Locke’s portrait, making mayhem all over high table, splashing sherry and bleeding port in front of his wizened mug.
“One day.”
My primary-school teacher’s prophecy infused my plastic noggin. We used to write stories in her class and she seemed to really dig mine, mainly because they didn’t end “And then I woke up. It was all a dream.” She suggested books—
Cider with Rosie, My Family and Other Animals—
getting me hooked and dependent, frothing angrily at the mouth for my next fix. She told me to read
To Kill a Mockingbird
, but should wait a few years first, cautioning me that its adult themes might be a bit much. Naturally I went straight to the library and ragged it in two days, searching for glorious gang bangs and female things I couldn’t get my mitts on just yet. It was hardly
Naked Lunch
.
Then Mum and Dad began to worry about the big “what next?” They couldn’t afford to send me to private schoolbut gave me the option all the same. Fat chance of that: all my mates were going to the local comprehensive and that was where I was going
“Eliot,” I said, extending my hand to him.
“Jack,” he said, giving it a solid shake. “Nice one.”
Perhaps it’s a shame that I have so readily sought out characters similar to myself. But there are two clear options available to the sniveling statie at an institution like Oxford: locate your compatriots and stick together with a resentful,snotty leer, or do that cringing dance we like to call “The Upward Mobility.” I should know by now that things are far more complicated and nuanced than I allow—go for the particular over the general. But it’s difficult. I’m still uncertain about how I even ended up in a place like this.
Maybe it’s time for some of that Copperfield bullshit: It was my primary-school teacher, via my proud, puffed parents, who first put the grand idea of Oxford into my head. They returned home from the annual parents’ evening at my school, up the lane, all suited-and-tied and whatever it is mums wear to these occasions. I was waiting with the eager need-to-know of a boy accustomed to doing well.
“So, what did she say?”
Dad smiled as he filled the flaky kettle, Mum looking on all goopy and warm.
“Mrs. Parker thinks you’re the kind of kid who could end up at Oxford or Cambridge,” he relayed, with a quick glance to gauge my reaction. This extraordinarily premature news registered with little-to-no referential meaning, yet I could tell it was a fucking good thing.
“Ah,” I proffered in schoolboy wonder. The seed was planted.
We took a fidgety Saturday trip to Oxford not long after, with all the conventional stuffiness and aches of a family day out. You remember the ones: stately homes and landscape gardens; museums and galleries … all those hellholes that were anathema to your sucked thumb and anti-attention span; to your childhood mess and E-number erraticism.
I remember seeing the Radcliffe Camera for the first time, the photogenic library that is the city’s centerpiece, poised in middle of cobbled square like bulbous tit and nipple, suckling the dreamy sky. Beleaguered, I had followedDad around Christ Church College and its capacious dining hall, tripping up over my shoelaces and tonguing the River Thames that oozed from my nostrils. Five centuries of roast dinner blended with fumes of polish and Dettol.
“One day, one day,” Dad kept muttering, with a knowing nod of his head.
Gloomy blokes with comic beards and wooden titles stared down from the oak-paneled walls. I was bored out of my tree. While Dad divulged titbits of some illustrious history from the tourist pamphlet, I staged an imaginary war-to-end-all-wars between my G.I. Joe and a coalition of Boglins, WCW wrestlers, and Transformers, raging amidst the silverware and beneath the long tables, the anthem of my charmed youth. Soldiers fought for their lives in mires of English mustard while associative baddies abseiled down John Locke’s portrait, making mayhem all over high table, splashing sherry and bleeding port in front of his wizened mug.
“One day.”
My primary-school teacher’s prophecy infused my plastic noggin. We used to write stories in her class and she seemed to really dig mine, mainly because they didn’t end “And then I woke up. It was all a dream.” She suggested books—
Cider with Rosie, My Family and Other Animals—
getting me hooked and dependent, frothing angrily at the mouth for my next fix. She told me to read
To Kill a Mockingbird
, but should wait a few years first, cautioning me that its adult themes might be a bit much. Naturally I went straight to the library and ragged it in two days, searching for glorious gang bangs and female things I couldn’t get my mitts on just yet. It was hardly
Naked Lunch
.
Then Mum and Dad began to worry about the big “what next?” They couldn’t afford to send me to private schoolbut gave me the option all the same. Fat chance of that: all my mates were going to the local comprehensive and that was where I was going
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