How Rude
You would have thought that once everyone had survived the dreaded interviews and secured a place at Oxford, the competition would die down and we would all coexist in harmony, encouraging and nurturing one another’s intellect. Apparently, this is a gross misconception. The bitching, it seems, only gets worse. Take colleges, for example.
Members of the impoverished Teddy Hall and Pembroke receive constant blows to their self esteem from the likes of St Johns and Christ Church, who can shut us up in an instant with the cutting reminder that “we fucking own your college”. Girls at St Hilda’s, meanwhile, hardly get a look-in, practically having to confirm, “I am not a lesbian,” before even introducing themselves, so great is the stigma surrounding a single-sex college.
This brings us on to another type of rudeness which plagues Oxford: that of chauvinistic public school boys, who have been indoctrinated with the idea that they are better than anyone else since they first filed into morning chapel. Never having to take classes with — shock, horror — a girl, a misogynist by nature and often a little on the arrogant side, this upper-class male snoots at his female classmates, paying more attention to their breasts than their insightful conversation.
Then there is the arts/sciences enmity. Anyone who is dazzlingly creative and cultured enough to do a degree in humanities does not deign to bat an eyelid at the geeks from the chemistry lab. They are a different species. The merits of the periodical table simply cannot compare with those of Homer or Baudelaire, arts student proclaim.
In retaliation, a bespectacled physicist may well ask the point of devoting one’s life to the study of a language that has not been spoken for thousands of years. Oxford’s thespians, the artiest of them all, have their own singular type of rudeness. Dashing down Cornmarket Street in a Withnail-esque overcoat, tattered script in hand, Byron in the back pocket and always desperately late for a rehearsal, the self-important thesp is permanently in a rush yet never on time.
He instinctively snoots at anything popular or generic, refusing to comprehend how anyone could prefer Park End to sitting in QI discussing the latest Chekhov adaptation at the National. Finally, there is the more universal town/gown conflict. Being the crème de la crème, Oxford students are obviously a cut above those that merely inhabit the city.
They gather around KFC like flies to a honey pot and impede our access to the libraries, interrupting our endeavours with yobbish behaviour in the small hours. No matter that we rub them up the wrong way by hogging the road on our bikes in a state of drunken malco-ordination or that without their reliable kebab vans we would have starved to death by the end of freshers’ week.
When you send Britain’s biggest brains to one small city, do not expect them to keep their heads down and mind their own business. Who says manners maketh man?
25th May 2006