Coming up

[j4]

[Part 3 of the Oxford Story, because I think the guilt of not having written it is stopping me writing anything interesting. I did write this before the midnight deadline, but when I hit 'post' it turned out that our net connection had gone down again!]

Comments

[bopeepsheep]

I got through Middlemarch in a day and a half, and loathed it as a result
Well, you know what I think of Middlemarch.

The thing that struck me as most annoying about my Cambridge interview, in retrospect, was that one of the interviewers - I've long forgotten who he was - heaped scorn on me for admitting to reading Hard Times on the way to the interview. "Getting through the whole book in about an hour and a half" was pronounced to be utterly impossible* and I was (literally! the outrage!) told I was lying. This wrong-footed me considerably, because I had, and I think I spluttered quite a lot at him in return but didn't seem to convince him that I had. 12 months later, everyone was reading hefty-and-dull classics in as little time as possible, and it struck me that either he was extremely out of touch with actual undergraduate practice or had been winding me up something chronic.

* Bilge. I've done it several times since. It's not even one of the longer Dickenseseses.

[triskellian]

These bunches of wildflowers are fascinating; thank you for writing them. My recollections of applying to, and arriving at, Oxford (Maths and Phil, from a bog-standard sixth-form college) are nothing like as clear as yours, but memories are flooding back reading your accounts.

[juggzy]

It's very interesting!

When I've been ambling on about something, sometimes even only to myself, I've found that the act of writing things down gets things into focus while simultaneously places them firmly in the past; that was then. Do you feel that this is part of what is going on here?