I remember telling my friends that I was going to row at Oxford. I could picture myself in flattering Magdalen College Boat Club lycra, a rosy glow on my cheeks as I enjoyed boat-based camaraderie with my team mates on a crisp spring morning.
I didn’t even make it to the river. After a week of leaving grimy gyms with sore muscles and a sense of inadequacy, I jumped ship. My only contact with the sport since has been bumping into the rowers on my corridor on the way to the shower, on the rare occasions when I’m up before 10. Back from their 6am appointments with frostbite on the Thames, reached only after a 30 minute bike ride, my friends appear in a new light: disciplined, fit, driven and organised. It’s disturbing.
But on Wednesday I briefly returned to the rowing fold, to sample its less health-enhancing side: crew dates. These are pretty self-explanatory — the ladies’ crew from one college goes out for dinner with the mens’ crew from another. There were more Trinity boys than Magdalen girls, so one of my rower friends invited me along.
Clutching our bottles of Sainsbury’s cheapest white, we headed to Arzoo’s curry house — Oxford’s go-to destination for ‘meals’ where no one intends to touch the food. No sooner had the poppadoms arrived than the drinking games began. ‘Sconcing’ is Oxford’s take on ‘Never Have I Ever’: the method of choice for revealing your team mates’ embarrassing secrets to 15 total strangers. After getting the attention of the table by standing up and rapping on their wine bottle, the sconcer booms something along the lines of ‘I sconce anyone who once got with their first cousin’. Sporting their most bashful expression, the victim stands up and drinks.
A week isn’t sufficiently long even for me to humiliate myself in a sconce-worthy fashion, so I was safe. ‘Pennying’, however, is far more indiscriminate. Succeed in dropping a penny into a glass which your friend is holding and they have to down its contents (or, as happened on my last evening in Arzoos, an entire dish of chicken tikka masala).
I’d been warned that rowers’ chat consisted exclusively of comparisons of ‘erg’ scores, bicep diameters and coaches’ Olympic experience. Although the banter wasn’t too bad, I wasn’t tempted back to the boathouse — I didn’t fancy ending up like the Trinity rower on my right, who had duct tape on his hands to cover the blisters.
I’d be up for another crew date, but rowing just isn’t for me. My only regret is that I didn’t stick with it long enough to get the MCBC lycra.
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