Egg throwing not celebration enough
The proposed post-exam conduct code, which boils down to not throwing foodstuffs at each other as a means of 'celebrating' the end of exams, is more attractive for what it symbolises than what it will necessarily achieve in the short term.
Voluntary codes of behaviour rarely work and the University doesn't have the manpower to enforce this one. Yet the symbolism runs deeper and is ultimately more effective: enough people have now realised that chucking large quantities of food around is not cool.
There are better ways to celebrate.
Completing my final exam in 1993 permitted two great acts which I remember with some glee: lighting up a foot-long cigar I had carefully stored since Mods, and illicitly cycling back to LMH across University Parks on my 1940s BSA bicycle nicknamed Blackmamba (for those of you who haven't yet seen Kill Bill Vol. 2, the significance of this is reduced). I must confess I enjoyed the former of these two activities less than the latter, not because cycling in the parks led to the death of several delicate orchids basking in the shade of the lilac tree, but because the cigar was bone dry, needed hundreds of matches to light and wouldn't draw correctly.
The plan I had carefully orchestrated for two years went awry, but the cycling incident, which was a spontaneous gesture commensurate with what I felt at the time, is the more satisfying memory a decade later.
Before you pelt me with the eggs and flour of youth, I would therefore want to point out that this activitity is today as boring and premeditated as the faux spontaneity of a Jacobean court masque.
Tradition, in this sense, is an aberration, and those who hide beneath its dull canopy are the true losers.
Except that it's not even a time hallowed tradition, a point that the Guardian got completely wrong last week. The longer-lived dons at Corpus Christi College tell me that until the end of the 1960s students retired to the pub for a pint with friends, showing sufficient reserves of sang froid along the way to be jocular but not stupidly flour-and-eggy.
The turbulent 1970s saw a partial disintegration of that progressive code, and by the time Scargill was at Maggie Thatcher's throat and the BBC featured daily footage of miners' pickets throwing stuff at the scabs, it started to be normal to emulate these actions after emerging from Schools in a sort of derisorily faint mimicry of what was going on Up North.
By the 1990s it had become de rigeur and even started to infect Mods and Prelims candidates, and in the first four years of the new century it became crap-shoot boring, especially to those who had to watch.
Escalation was the last gasp of innovation, to the point last summer when Merton Street was paved in rotting substances and stank until September.
Code, what code? I'm sure you're all trembling in your knickers at the thought of being apprehended by a supersymmetric quantum physicist, the first female member of the clergy to hold the office of Proctor (in the history of the world) or an expert in mobile processes (but not egg throwing).
Hardly anyone will end up in the Proctors' Court, rustication has virtually disappeared and the boozing will simply migrate from Merton to Magpie Lane.
So go ahead you cool dudes and throw that stuff. But go ahead knowing that it's no longer a spontaneous gesture commensurate with the real achievement of finishing finals, a sensation that is truly worth waiting for and which demands - I suggest - a much grander celebration than a food war.
Go ahead knowing that you enact a tedious, pre-ordained ritual, that you've already planned for it by wearing a charity shop suit that doesn't fit and having sat through the last three sweat-drenched hours of exam wondering who pre-deceased you in that very suit of crumpled, ill-fitting moth-ball wool, knowing that the grand moment is drawing nearer when your best friends will turn you into a pathetic spectacle for the tourists and your cigar will be ruined for ever.
Go ahead knowing that you're not at the head of a grand tradition but the last gasp of a shallow one, and that furthermore you've become a source of pity for those who've seen it year after year for too long, going to ever increased lengths for ever reduced effect. Go ahead.
Oxford is unrivalled as a homing device for eccentrics, so prove it this year and be different.
29th Apr 2004