The Sophomore's Desserts

One of the more enjoyable things about being in Oxford for one's second year is the smug satisfaction of watching the new people arriving at Oxford for their first year go through everything that you went through yourself the previous year, comfortably distanced and ensconced in one's own little world. It's amazing the difference that a year can make, and I've no doubt that those who have been here for even longer, especially those who have already achieved their degrees, are watching my second year travails with a similar, and far more acutely defined, sense of superiority.

I would say, however, that the most difficult thing to come to terms with when one first is at Oxford is being in Oxford in the first place. This sounds tautological, I realise, but I rewrote that sentence several times and could find no better way of expressing the sentiment. After the glamour of ancient stone, pretty lawns, and fabled names in whose footsteps you tread all dulls with repetition and familiarity, you're left with what, on its worst days, can seem nothing more than a creaky old university held together with twine from discarded teabags and a drab little town with some very bad fashion, full of people who are intelligent enough to be earnest but not intelligent or unintelligent enough to be amusing.

But it was here, too, that I found myself in the company of cooks and scholars whose obsession with food surpasses mine to the point of unreason at the Oxford Symposium for Food and Cookery; it was almost by chance that I had the privilege of working with the brilliant, eccentric, aristocratic ethnographic filmmaker Michael Yorke, at a documentary filmmaking workshop. The fodder for the intellect that Oxford metes out it does so grudgingly, over time, and sometimes must be chased and pinned down.

Yet I have begun to find that the best moments that Oxford affords one are the ones in which nothing happens: those long winter nights that I spend in the company of my records (a continually growing collection that is threatening to take over my room; but that's another story) and losing oneself in the music of previously unknown composers, dipping into books for work and books for pleasure, with which I am surrounded, along with sheets of paper on which I scribble my notes (my time-honoured way of working, despite my predilection for leather-bound notebooks), photocopied journal articles, and library books (which I sneakily annotate with a UV pen, which I thought was a rather clever idea until I used the black light and found other users' notes on several of the books). And, somewhat to my embarrassment, I have succumbed to the cliche of working fuelled by mugs of milky tea, though the day when you find me using teabags is one that will, one hopes, never come to pass.

The mind goes down its own secret alleyways, personal labyrinths of ideas, or obsessions that take possession of one's imagination and which one worries as a dog does gristle on a bone while sitting out in the cold and waiting for the bus to trundle along. This mental clearing, the space for ideas to 'do their thing' within one's head, is, I find infinitely rewarding and infinitely fragile, and perhaps it is born only of this particular short-lived time in my own Oxford trajectory. But as I cast my eye around at the first year students milling about with their quest to get their Bodleian cards activated or computers connected, clutching their Argos catalogues while forming an orderly queue at the HSBC on Cornmarket, I find this infinite place for the mind to wander an unexpected, probably short-lived, but just reward for my travails a year ago. Except that no one had told me about Argos.