Formal Hall Revue
This week, I steeled myself for formal hall at Keble. A handful of Alka-Seltza, half a bottle of gin and several cigarettes later I felt ready, although (surprisingly) I was more than a little aware that my stomach was telling me otherwise. My express desire not to unseat myself as the conquistador of formal wasbrought into issue at this hall, entirely unrectified by a less than judicial sacking of the ethnically diverse element of Keble.
Alone clasping my hands together praying I would not be sat with the seeming ubiquitous Bursar, I was in parachsyms of meditative contemplation while irreverent modern linguists giggled, for a change, to the subtle beautiful sounds of a Latin grace, rather than the coarse sexuality of the Marquis de Sade.
As we sat down once more on the begrimed canteen-style benches, the neurotic, corkscrew haired hall manager, Gerard, bustled at a brisk waddle through the herd of terrible staff, lisping like the spattered spoutings of the retired Don's occasional guest at high table.
The first course, to which I had been treated as a dubiously beneficial right by my host, was a bowl of over-peppered soup, identified only as “Green Soup 3” (apparently) and perhaps consisting only of liquidised corgettes with the alleged inclusion of raw fecund yak’s milk.
Following this, as fast as the staff could trot to the Sergent Major commands of an increasingly irate Gerard, still bedicky- bowed, but hardly dignified, I had been warned that tonight was the quite splendid “Fish Night” and the three place settings were a fair appraisal by the college of the student’s need to hack like a brown bear at a leaping salmon, limb from limb, lost in the expectation of nutritional gratification.
The haddock arrived next with all the flavour and flair of the flaccid member of a tramp. Said tramp had indeed been lying dead in the gutter for two days. I resigned myself to a hungry night, trying to make up for the fish with a large helping of vegetables and potatoes from the communal tray dumped before us. The best thing that could be said about the pudding, was the fact that it ended so soon.
The inexplicable surge of excitement that detonated from the rag-tag bunch of Keble students heralded the arrival of a dry slab of chocolate cake which appeared before me.
hree mouthfuls of the tasteless stodge did at least confirm that it surpassed the rest of the meal in both quality and substance, but my stomach was once more protesting by this point in the evening and the bottle of Keble red was helping none, more suited to sprinkling on a portion of chips than washing down a supposedly formal meal.
To be fair to Keble, it makes up for its short history by formal hall six times a week, and as such there is a certain complacency, which explains, but does not justify, the exceedingly low standards. The conversation was some consolation, although more in eavesdropping on the inanities, bemoaning the wait until the student papers would provide a crossword to keep them occupied, than in pretending to listen to the pseudo-intellectual attempts of the English students sat around me.
Keble may well boast the largest hall in Oxford and its ceiling still gleams with the cleaning, funded, no doubt, from the conferences of armsdealers which displace students twice a year, but the food does not even come near the kebab van I needed on the way home which at least satisfied my stomach if not my palette.
2nd Jun 2005