Happy Thursday everybody. Apart from the pedantic man who beat me at croquet last week. If I’m being frank, I haven’t quite got over it.
I should elaborate.
I’d never played croquet before. Nevertheless, I’m a pretty open-minded person. So, when my WhatsApp pinged with a message asking me to join ‘Croquet Cuppers’ because the team was down a player, I thought why not. I’ll do it. Huzzah!
How hard could it be? I’d seen people playing croquet in quads across Oxford and none of them were breaking a sweat. In fact, isn’t it the sort of game that’s best played with a glass of Pimm’s in hand? My biggest concern, I confess, was the dress code. What on earth does one wear for a croquet match? My to-do list for that day included, ‘finish writing chapter two of dissertation’, ‘meeting 11.30am’, and ‘learn croquet rules’.
When I read the list back, I found it quite ticklesome. Was this my vernacular now? Since when was it normal to be scrolling through the Croquet England website on a random Wednesday in May? Most concerningly, had I become an Oxford stereotype? Despite the mild existentialism, this brings me nicely to what I had planned to write about this week: Conversations in Oxford.
From my experiences talking to friends who don’t go here, I sometimes get the gist that there’s a general assumption of Oxford as being other-worldly and slightly inaccessible. Maybe the fact that I’ve just unflinchingly written ‘the pedantic man who beat me at croquet last week’ exemplifies their point. Oxford is its own bubble. And like any bubble, it has an accompanying lingo.
This is why, standing in the rain last Wednesday afternoon, when said pedantic man shouted to his long-suffering teammate, ‘Can you do a split roll?’, it didn’t really come as much of a shock (I have subsequently looked up a split roll and apparently it’s an ‘advanced stroke’ that’s got something to do with sending two balls in opposite directions). In case you’re invested, his teammate could not, to his chagrin, do a split roll.
For those of you who know little about the rules of croquet, I will do my best to explain. Essentially, you’re given a slightly cumbersome mallet with which you must hit some balls through some tiny metal hoops. But you can make your turn longer (quite narcissistically?) by hitting other people’s balls, which I believe is called the croquet shot. And then there’s something else called the continuation shot. What this all fundamentally means is that if you’ve never played before and don’t really understand how it works and find yourself up against a pedantic man who takes it oh so seriously, you might discover that your turn ends up being three seconds long whilst he takes seven minutes discussing split rolls. It was all quite frustrating, and the more earnestly he took it, the more I started to feel the most toxic levels of competitiveness with zero amount of chance. Worst of all, there was not a glass of Pimm’s in sight. Hopes and dreams were veritably crushed. Alas, we lost.
But I’ve got distracted. The croquet was just an introduction to my main topic, which is about the types of conversation you tend to overhear in Oxford (but can you do a split roll?). This topic has been waiting in the wings for a while. In the first week of Michaelmas, my peers and I received some instructions from a professor who told us where to go for the following week’s seminar. He wanted us to meet by some green sofas. What he said was this: ‘the room is characterised by green sofas, and that is where I would like us to convene’. I’ve remembered the phrase verbatim. I think his particular penchant for a polysyllable felt so Oxford to me that it left a lasting impression.
Having been here for almost three terms now, such polysyllables wash straight over me. Intellectual lingo has, in fact, become quite normal. I was only just at dinner when I overheard someone say, ‘but, of course, you’ll know about Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar’. Last week, at a formal, we spent ten minutes discussing why there might be more numbers between zero and one than there are between zero and ten (I still don’t understand – apparently it has something to do with numbers moving diagonally?). And during a conversation recently which happened to bring up deserts, I overheard someone quite genuinely ask, ‘do you prefer Dromedary or Bactrian camels?’
It’s quite nice really. A good summary is that Oxford is the sort of place where you can name your bike Virginia and rather than getting funny looks, people will instead just ask if you study modern literature. My friend, correspondingly, has a bike named Hilda (Doolittle, of course).
But I think my favourite anecdote about Oxford intelligentsia comes from one particular man who I had the strange pleasure of meeting and doubt I’ll ever come across again. He was, however, totally inimitable and left such an impression that I found myself scribbling his words down like a desperate schoolgirl before the teacher clears the whiteboard at the end of a lesson. One of my favourite moments included when he was talking about Regency courtship: ‘Austen is saying beware these dangerous flirts!’ When we asked him if our friend showed any qualities of being such a dangerous flirt, he told us he couldn’t possibly comment because, ‘I haven’t done a full physiognomic analysis’. But best of all, he admitted, quite sincerely, ‘I am constantly trying to structure my friendship group based on Darwinian selection principles’.
It is here, however, that I come to the true reflection of this week’s column – the volta, if you will – that the majority of conversations in Oxford are markedly not like this. I had this realisation during Christmas formal last year, where the main debate of the evening was, ‘If you had to give up kissing or sauce for the rest of your life, which would you choose?’ It’s actually a rather fecund question, and I would recommend it for any dinner party conversation that’s in need of a zhush.
My theory is that our degrees are academic and intense, so we often crave a conversation that’s the complete opposite. We’ve recently spent a long time, for example, discussing pasta shapes. This is an equally fecund topic because you can debate the sort of energy each shape would have in human form, and will lead to phrases like ‘I just know I’ll marry a shell’ or ‘I think tagliatelle might break your heart’. We’ve also gone through what songs we’d walk down the aisle to (Elvis Costello, obviously), the social status of vegetables (which led to the wonderful statement that ‘Tenderstem is definitely a gentrified broccoli’), and discovered a new game where we have to summarise our thesis research but only using words of one syllable (this is remarkably fun after wine).
So, I suppose what I would actually like to emphasise for this week’s ‘Second Draft’ reflection is to not be put off by a polysyllable. Most people want to talk about rigatoni some of the time. At least in my opinion. Or maybe I’m just not structuring my friendship group on Darwinian selection principles.