I have a confession to make: I go to my hometown university.
The decision to stay in Oxford is one I often feel I have to justify. When people learn that my parents live a 30 minute walk from my college, I get an ‘Oh, cool’. It’s in that tone that I imagine might also be prompted by someone telling you, while wearing flares and flashing trainers, that they maintain a shrine to Peter Andre.
I am, evidently, thoroughly lacking in a sense of adventure. Unimaginative and insufficiently independent, I am bound to be missing out on the full ‘university experience’.
And I am missing out on some things. There are no surprises at the end of cobbled streets. No getting lost on the way back from clubs in freshers’ week. No chance to leave my adolescence behind – on every visit to one of Oxford’s historic pubs, I think not of how Bill Clinton ‘didn’t inhale’ or that Tolkien and the Inklings used to meet here, but of that time my school friends and I got kicked out, aged 16, for adding Vodka to our Cokes from an Evian bottle.
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