More than a Muggle...

Oxford. Week three. General chaos, and huge feelings of what-the-actual-fuck-am-I-doing, alongside generally drowning in the mile-long reading list. So far, I’ve learned a few key things about myself.

    1- Looking after one person is decidedly difficult when you’ve spent your entire life to date looking out for everyone else. Juggling a thousand jobs with pinpoint precision? No bother. Batch cooking dinners and figuring out childcare spreadsheets of destiny? A walk in the park. Ish. Food shopping at Tesco for one without automatically picking up the industrial sized everything? Major challenge.

     2- I have Unrealistic Expectation Syndrome. I’m not sure if it’s an actual thing, but if it isn’t it should be. I have been blessed (or cursed, depending how you look at it) with the ability to retain information fairly quickly and with decent understanding. After my first philosophy of educational research (yes, it’s a thing) lecture, I came out wanting to cry. Despite having spent the entire previous day reading the whole essential and recommended reading list, I still felt like I was treading water on the comprehension front. Because obviously completely novel material delivered by the most prolific two-phd-strong academic in her field should be fully understood after one lecture. Obviously. Unrealistic Expectation Syndrome. An unfortunate affliction of mine.

3-  I come at things from a realist ontological position and a positivist epistemology (maybe I did learn something after all….). This is posh speak for I’m a science girl. I do not like philosophy and woolly imaginings. I like objective facts. And measurable data. And solid answers. I’m slowly learning the value of philosophy, but fuck me that’s one hell of a steep learning curve…

4-  Theatre, pomp and circumstance are everywhere, and I’m not sure how it makes me feel. This week I experienced two particularly weird rituals; on Thursday evening, my good friend Stewart took me to Magdalen College High Table, and on Saturday I matriculated in sub fusc*. Contrary to what it sounds like, matriculation is not, in fact, an odd sexual fetish activity, but a cult initiation ritual into Oxford Uni. It involves dressing up in aforementioned sub fusc, parading inefficiently through the streets of Oxford to the Sheldonian theatre, standing up en masse for the man with the golden sceptre, and being shouted at in Latin for ten minutes before exiting just as inefficiently as when you entered. There’s also the small matter of trying not to die. The theatre is super old and the seating on the balconies is essentially steep bench-shelving; you perch on the edge with someone’s feet wedged under your arse, and you apologise to the person below you as you wedge your feet under their arse. And maybe the person above for crushing their toes. Thankfully no one fell to certain death, and we all managed to escape mostly intact.  

   5-  I am more than comfortable in my skin in any given circumstance, despite rarely being culturally familiar. This is something I couldn’t have said even a couple of years ago. Case in point: High Table. This was the epitome of theatre, pomp and circumstance. It was utterly surreal, like stepping into a parallel (distinctly Harry Potter-esque) dystopian universe for the evening. There was milling about, and champagne, and incredible canapes shoved under your nose every five seconds by the incredibly attentive wait-staff. I felt obliged to keep apologetically thanking them, hoping they picked up on my desperately conveyed undertones of discomfort at the implied hierarchy bullshit. We then processed from the milling-about room across Magdalen College roof (wtaf?) and entered the dinner hall through this awesome Hogwartian door. Another ‘try not to die’ scenario. I had learned from my (comparatively very informal) formal dinner at Kellogg College that you don’t sit down pre-grace, something I smugly remembered on this occasion. More Latin shouting, and we took our seats at the physically higher High Table. Up until that point I thought it was metaphorical. I watched everyone else attentively for cutlery cues, and managed to pull the whole thing off without major incident.

All of this was completely paradoxical. On the one hand, the slightly stale magic of history and tradition was somewhat captivating, and simultaneously I felt abhorrent disdain towards the explicit elitism of it all. Brilliant, sparkling minds, all gathered together and fuelling great conversation with a view to world-change. But the lavish ivory tower they’re immersed in is, from my perspective, a sanitised, Insta-filtered impression of reality; the spread of people round the table a demographically disproportionate reflection of the world beyond the college walls.

My take-home point none-the-less- I connected with all the people I talked to, and I enjoyed it. I contributed to conversation where I could, I mingled, I listened, I learned, and I was honest about not having a fucking clue what they were on about when I couldn’t access the high-brow. And guess what? Everyone in that room was human, and everyone there had a story beyond their academia. It felt good knowing my inherent worth as a human with my fellow humans in the room, and finally realising the genuine contributory value of my experiences, rather than seeing them as shameful constraints.

6-   I do actually love my kids after all. Much as I enjoyed being a stay-at-home parent for so long, having so many kids meant I did it for a really long time. I didn’t have a degree or career before children, so it wasn’t financially viable for me to go back to work or education until much later. If I’m brutally honest, I felt kinda trapped. Kids were hard. Especially four, all so close in age, with one of them being the B-boy (think Taz on crack plus a million appointments all the time). I spent my twenties breastfeeding or pregnant, with zero sleep (I shit you not, I had a demon child that did.not.sleep), minimal support and little outside contact. Thanks to my penchant for Unrealistic Expectation Syndrome, my standards were high and I kept myself accountable to them, even when it meant losing myself a little (a lot?) in the process. More honesty; I thought Oxford would be a chance to just be me, and leave the clutter of kids behind for a while each week. Turns out I think they’re awesome and tell everyone about them at the first opportunity! On the flipside, they also seem to be coping OK without me. Apparently Daddy dinners (all things beige and processed) are the best. Swings and roundabouts right?!

So yeah. Week three. Cheers to getting this far. I’m having to work my arse off and will continue to do so but, I’m treading water. Here’s hoping at some point I learn to swim.  

            

*Sub fusc: a strict academic dress code of exciting monochrome proportions. Black skirt, black tights, black shoes, white shirt, weird black shoelace thing, mortarboard (tassley square hat) and gown. Woe betide if you get any of these elements even slightly wrong; you WILL be sent away and made to come back another day. Because Oxford dah-ling.