Scouts, high table and battels for the DB
Yesterday's inelegant filler brings me neatly to my final stop on the Oxford memory lane tour: college life.
The University of Oxford is made up of 38 colleges and 6 Permanent Private Halls, an exotic species of walrus. They're not dormitories, or 'houses', or subject-specific: they're mummy and daddy, school and teacher, home and the pub. There are those - brave, foolhardy souls - who carve out a niche in some aspect of university life, and so escape the clutches of their college social life. But for most, college is where you live, eat, sleep, work and play, and drink fortified wine from cracked mugs at 3pm in communal procrastination.
Colleges are small, with between a hundred and seven hundred students. Some are phenomenally well-endowed (fnar!), allowing students to live in college for their whole degree at ridiculously low rents. Others require students to spend at least one year dealing with such intellectual puzzles as landlords, supermarkets, and negotiating an overdraft. Many provide some proportion of meals as part of a student's rent payment, with posher colleges flying in chefs from top restaurants and requiring students to come to dinner in their graduation gowns. My college, sadly, seemed to believe that providing semi-edible food was somehow bourgeois.
Meals are usually taken in hall, which is a large room dominated by gloomy paintings of pasty dour-faced men (always men) in an amusing variety of wigs, robes, suits of armour, etc. It is common courtesy to provide only dim light, as a means of preserving these paintings and students' appetites. The professors dine at high table, where there is wine and a better class of food, and from whence one can hear snatches of robust intellectual debate, my all-time favourite being "Hah! Oral sex...[unclear] for the French!" This is to teach students that life is not fair.
Students whose parents have encouraged them to focus on intellectual development at the expense of skills such as housekeeping and dressing themselves can rest easy, for every morning, at an undergraduate-unfriendly hour, your room will rendered spick and span by a cleaner known as a scout. For students wishing to sleep in, or to keep their nocturnal activities between participants, it is customary to put your wastepaper bin outside the door as a sort of DO NOT DISTURB-slash-announcement to the student gossip mill at large that you've been having sex. Survival in this kind of environment requires learning how to keep your private life so private that nobody thinks you even have one.
When I say that a portion of rent goes to pay for these things, what I mean is that hall is paid for from battels, which are paid to the Domestic Bursar (DB) on a termly basis (in the terms of Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity). Battels are not to be confused with battlements, which are what they call the odd fortifications with walkways that most older colleges have. Students are periodically implored not to go walking on these, have parties on them, fall to their deaths from them etc, but to little avail. Many a special friendship has begun under the protective stare of the Oxford gargoyles, and rare indeed is the undergrad who has never kept their milk on the battlements in preference to the shared fridge.
As you may have guessed by now, odd terminology abounds, meaning that those of us who haven't come through the public school system are frequently at a loss. Names of things also tend to differ wildly between colleges, further decreasing the likelihood of meaningful communication with someone from Outside. Take for example the head of the college, a person of great importance and multitudinous tassels. There are sixteen principals, eight masters, seven wardens, six presidents, three provosts, two rectors, a dean and a regent, but sadly no partridge in a pear tree. Colleges too: if Magdalen is said "maudlin", why's there a blimmin' "g" in it?
Each college has a blazon, which is like a heraldic shieldy-thing with gules and chevrons and mullets and escallops argent (which I believe are like pork chops), and pelicans with wings endorsed vulning themselves. Each also has a scarf, all in unwearable colours. But by far the most important college mascots are the porters, the chaps who sit out in the lodge (by the front gate) all day and all night making sure the post goes in the right pigeon hole, providing spare keys for students who have drunkenly locked themselves out, and preventing tourists or other riff-raff from pestering students or photographing them when they're running across front quad in their bath robes, stumbling out of somebody else's room and tripping over the wastepaper bin at 4pm. Like the gargoyles, they see all, but they never, never let on.
The University of Oxford is made up of 38 colleges and 6 Permanent Private Halls, an exotic species of walrus. They're not dormitories, or 'houses', or subject-specific: they're mummy and daddy, school and teacher, home and the pub. There are those - brave, foolhardy souls - who carve out a niche in some aspect of university life, and so escape the clutches of their college social life. But for most, college is where you live, eat, sleep, work and play, and drink fortified wine from cracked mugs at 3pm in communal procrastination.
Colleges are small, with between a hundred and seven hundred students. Some are phenomenally well-endowed (fnar!), allowing students to live in college for their whole degree at ridiculously low rents. Others require students to spend at least one year dealing with such intellectual puzzles as landlords, supermarkets, and negotiating an overdraft. Many provide some proportion of meals as part of a student's rent payment, with posher colleges flying in chefs from top restaurants and requiring students to come to dinner in their graduation gowns. My college, sadly, seemed to believe that providing semi-edible food was somehow bourgeois.
Meals are usually taken in hall, which is a large room dominated by gloomy paintings of pasty dour-faced men (always men) in an amusing variety of wigs, robes, suits of armour, etc. It is common courtesy to provide only dim light, as a means of preserving these paintings and students' appetites. The professors dine at high table, where there is wine and a better class of food, and from whence one can hear snatches of robust intellectual debate, my all-time favourite being "Hah! Oral sex...[unclear] for the French!" This is to teach students that life is not fair.
Students whose parents have encouraged them to focus on intellectual development at the expense of skills such as housekeeping and dressing themselves can rest easy, for every morning, at an undergraduate-unfriendly hour, your room will rendered spick and span by a cleaner known as a scout. For students wishing to sleep in, or to keep their nocturnal activities between participants, it is customary to put your wastepaper bin outside the door as a sort of DO NOT DISTURB-slash-announcement to the student gossip mill at large that you've been having sex. Survival in this kind of environment requires learning how to keep your private life so private that nobody thinks you even have one.
When I say that a portion of rent goes to pay for these things, what I mean is that hall is paid for from battels, which are paid to the Domestic Bursar (DB) on a termly basis (in the terms of Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity). Battels are not to be confused with battlements, which are what they call the odd fortifications with walkways that most older colleges have. Students are periodically implored not to go walking on these, have parties on them, fall to their deaths from them etc, but to little avail. Many a special friendship has begun under the protective stare of the Oxford gargoyles, and rare indeed is the undergrad who has never kept their milk on the battlements in preference to the shared fridge.
As you may have guessed by now, odd terminology abounds, meaning that those of us who haven't come through the public school system are frequently at a loss. Names of things also tend to differ wildly between colleges, further decreasing the likelihood of meaningful communication with someone from Outside. Take for example the head of the college, a person of great importance and multitudinous tassels. There are sixteen principals, eight masters, seven wardens, six presidents, three provosts, two rectors, a dean and a regent, but sadly no partridge in a pear tree. Colleges too: if Magdalen is said "maudlin", why's there a blimmin' "g" in it?
Each college has a blazon, which is like a heraldic shieldy-thing with gules and chevrons and mullets and escallops argent (which I believe are like pork chops), and pelicans with wings endorsed vulning themselves. Each also has a scarf, all in unwearable colours. But by far the most important college mascots are the porters, the chaps who sit out in the lodge (by the front gate) all day and all night making sure the post goes in the right pigeon hole, providing spare keys for students who have drunkenly locked themselves out, and preventing tourists or other riff-raff from pestering students or photographing them when they're running across front quad in their bath robes, stumbling out of somebody else's room and tripping over the wastepaper bin at 4pm. Like the gargoyles, they see all, but they never, never let on.