I've been reading all these recent Oxbridge topics, along with that Oxford copypasta, with some bemusement. I went to Oxford and did a PPE degree. I have also read a lot of bitter posts about poshness but I did see a grain of truth: that the public school upbringing shielded you from feeling offence. It's true. It's always jarring when I come across a Yea Forums type in real life, one of those fiercely attempting to climb the class ladder through erudition and intellect alone. It is embarrassing on both sides.
On the one hand, this person, so used to being the towering intellect in their Durham-LSE-UCL (oh spare me about English Literature rankings!)-Warwick social circle (Bristol, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews seem to produce only jolly clowns, not these types), is visibly mortified while realising how much the Oxbridge natural brilliance shines through. What's funny is that they are invariably better read than me. Tolstoy's lesser known works and so on. But they are still visibly insecure, in many cases shaking. Sometimes I use my 3-to-1 tutorial hewn bullshitting technique to pretend that I have read as much as them but I always reveal that I am joking and this terrifies them, as if realising I have been boxing with both hands behind my back. Please, you guys, DON'T come across so try hard.
I now float in and out of fashionable South Kensington, Russel Square, and, when I feel like knobbing that hipsterish girl you cooed over in your 30 person English tutorials as a Chinese teaching assistant failed to draw ANY original thoughts from the class, Camden mileus on these autumnal and winter Friday and Saturday nights. It's quite funny really, my friends and I were academically brilliant, on many occasions being invited for individual wine sessions with multiple tutors from Economics, Law, and English Literature, and being begged to continue on with further study- on one occasion my tutor postponed his meeting with the Presidents of the World Bank and IMF where he would advise them of the Venezuela situation, in order to plead with me to develop a Hegelian line of attack on the similarities of English common law and Constantinople law that I had mentioned in a throwaway comment- and yet, in these fashionable parties, the most easily brilliant and witty people were the Oxbridge colleagues among us who had done so academically badly. Lowly Atillas, lazy Desmonds, narcoleptic Douglases: who knew they were so brilliant? But I guess that's Oxbridge for you!
