failure of our group. It had always felt to me – and I’m sure growing up in Oxford has something, but not everything, to do with this – that Oxbridge was where you went if you wanted a chance at real success in almost any field except skiing. And glutton for glory though I’ve always been, I’ve never yearned for mastery of the slopes.
As I remember it now, that was an epiphanic moment. It wasn’t, of course. In fact, my parents said, ‘We’re so sorry but, don’t worry, let’s just try and have a nice Christmas,’ and I did my best to suppress the sense of failure by shoving mince pies into my mouth. (This did not, in case you’re worried, result in weight gain. As a teenager I had, in common with most of my friends, a ferociously inefficient metabolism. I was stick-thin and perpetually starving. An hour of solid ingestion would stop me feeling hungry for perhaps twenty minutes. Then the peckishness would start to set in and gradually intensify as I prepared for another massive feed. It was like I had a tapeworm. It was brilliant.)
But the more gradual epiphany which I associate with that moment was realising that I’d had it with academe. From now on, I decided, school work was a means to an end and that end wasn’t ‘coming top in exams’. I would get to Oxbridge somehow – I would exchange all the prep school exam results and thousands of hours of pre-pubescent swotting for that at least – but then I was done with it. I genuinely remember thinking about it like that – as if, after the Oxford failure, I was coming out of academic retirement for one last job: to get three A’s at A-level so that I could reapply with a realistic hope of success. (Not to be rude about ‘all our hard-working youngsters’, as politicians put it, but three A’s at A-level was still quite difficult to get in 1992.)
By all means now imagine a training montage of my buckling down to work. I made my revision plan as if I was studying flaws in the ventilation system of a Swiss bank. The blueprints: A-level past papers. The weapons: a fountain pen, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a ream of A4 and a copy of Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–65 by Norman Gash. The mission: to break into Oxbridge.
- 17 -
I Am Not a Cider Drinker
Two thirds of the way through the park, I pass the public lavatories. Do I need a piss? Yes. Do I need a piss enough to go to the park loos? No. They’re weird and cold. The surfaces are all damp and, while it’s probably condensation, it could be urine. Sometimes it’s definitely going to be urine. And also, aren’t park loos basically for closet gay men to have sex? Or the sort of gay man who isn’t in the closet but is still turned on by the trappings of an illicit act? It would be rather rude of me to be getting in the way of assignations, using my penis for the less glamorous of its two purposes.
And what if I were propositioned? Unlikely, I know, but that would be a moment of such acute embarrassment that it’s worth considerable bladder discomfort to avoid. How do you deal with that, socially? If someone says hello in the loos, you can’t assume they want to have sex – that would be incredibly presumptuous even if it’s what you’d immediately suspect. In order not to be either the kind of person who thinks they’re so desirable that any unsolicited greeting must be a seduction attempt, or the kind who reckons anyone showing civility in a public toilet is on a cottaging expedition, you’d have to behave like you thought it was all innocent friendliness – until the last minute, the awful moment of having to say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong idea,’ while removing their tongue from your face or trousers.
A female friend once told me that this often happened to her with meals out that weren’t definitely dates but probably were. Some male friend or other would suggest dinner in a way that was probably romantically intended but (because it wasn’t specifically expressed as such) there was no opportunity to say, ‘Thank you but I don’t think of you that way,’ without sounding rude. She had to say yes. Then, throughout the meal, the suspected ulterior motive would gradually and agonisingly