York Uni - Two night clubs and a fucking massive church
Come and see Balance, 9pm, Pleasance Courtyard, 12th and 13th of August, 9pm
No Dead Time has had to take an enforced break these last couple of months due to illness, injury and changing jobs. Normal service will resume between now and the end of the year. This month’s piece is an extract from a stand up show1 I am doing in Edinburgh this coming Thursday and Friday (August 12th and 13th). It’s called Balance and it’s at the Pleasance Courtyard, Cabaret Bar, 9pm. You can get tickets here. Are you in Edinburgh? Come along! Do you know anyone who lives in or near Edinburgh? WhatsApp them and tell them to come! Use the bit below about York University as evidence.
My life has ended up being quite different to my parent’s because I was lucky enough to go to University. I was really encouraged by my teachers to apply to Oxford - so I did and I went for an interview at Hertford College and really the most interesting part of my time spent at Oxford was when I didn’t get in. It’s a shit Uni, didn’t want to go there anyway.
When I was rejected by Oxford I realised I had a chance to move somewhere less quaint, more lively, less of a “one night-club town” - so I accepted a place to study at York which has got two clubs and a fucking massive church.
It was largely an amazing experience but despite the massive increase in the number of University places that happened under New Labour Unis themselves were, and are, still quite a class divided place - especially ones like York and Durham that accept all of the big, sopping wet, thick boys from every public school in the country that are not clever enough to go to Oxbridge but are so steeped in privilege that they fluke a place at a middling Russell Group University simply by virtue of the fact that they are alive.
I felt the class divide quite keenly but not really because of the ruddy cheeked boat shoe bores. They were definitely there but usually too busy blacking up for freshers events or chanting homophobic slurs on buses. No, I felt the class divide in my interactions with the charming, aloof big-city kids who had done gap years in India. I was beside myself with happiness at living out of the house I had grown up in, at having space to myself and because I was in this ancient city, eating cereal whenever the fuck I wanted.
Obviously all the people in my year from London thought that York was shit and boring and I pretended to agree with them so they didn't think I was a pathetic naive suburbanite, which was tough, because I was. I gravitated to them like a sheltered, small town moth gravitating to a bright, enticing flame that has had ramen before and has opinions about which Talking Heads album was the best.
Inevitably I ended up hopelessly infatuated with a girl from a cool part of North London who rode a vintage racing bike that looked like a prop from a Wes Anderson movie, knew how to make pesto and was startlingly kind and non-judgemental in self-assured way that I didn’t really have a vocabulary for but which I knew, if I could ever stop being neurotic and scared, that I would like to emulate. She'd never get angry at people jumping in queues, she'd louchely just be late to everything and she point-blank refused to eat processed foods. The dream. The nightmare.
It was mainly fine hanging around with people from that world. But there were parts of it that did mean I felt alienated. I wasn’t alienated on purpose because these largely lovely people, usually called Fred, Oscar or Hetty didn’t seek to exclude in the normal ways that proper old money toffs do - they didn’t really flaunt their relative wealth, they inexplicably hated brands and wore mainly clothes from charity shops even though they didn’t have to and their parents weren’t crass enough to take them to Morzine for the winter even though they could of afforded it.
The exclusion happened in weirder ways. A memorable example took place day one of Fresher’s week when I found myself chatting to four people. And it turned out I was the only person in that group who didn’t independently know one of the members of the indie band Bombay Bicycle Club. It wasn’t a way that I had expected to be left out. I think there should be some kind of government scheme to ensure that any people who are the first generation of their family to go to University are instilled with a similar level of cultural capital - maybe not as good as knowing the band Bombay Bicycle Club but they should at least be able to say they went for a drink with one of The Wombats once.
I struggled with the class difference in some ways but I also just struggled with the studying. I’d chosen to do English literature because I had once read the footballer Jimmy Floyd Hasslebaink’s autobiography and quite enjoyed it. I told my teacher that I loved this book and he said “Well you should do English Literature then” and I was like “OK sounds good, thanks Mr Lathem”. Unfortunately it turns out that quite liking the footballer Jimmy Floyd Hasslebaink’s autobiography doesn’t prepare you to read 500 pages of old Norse poetry every week for 3 years.
The seminars were a nightmare. I didn’t even know what a seminar was before I got there - If you don’t know what a seminar is let me explain. It’s basically a weekly group discussion session where 16 teenagers, usually from the Home Counties, all of whom are coming down off of MDMA, pretend to have read one of the classic works of Literature. And there is a world expert in that specific piece of Literature in the room with them but she asks the children what they think about it. It’s truly amazing stuff.
I couldn’t keep up, I couldn’t read enough. So I started coming up with these tactics to get through them. Like I would read the first 40 pages of a book and the last 40 pages of a book and then I would pick an incredibly specific detail from the middle of the book, that only someone who had read the whole book could possibly know about, and I would crowbar that incredibly specific detail in regardless of the discussion that was going on during the seminar. So people would be sat there going “Yeah well the theme of homosexuality in Ulysses is fascinating” and I would blithely interrupt and go “Forget that what about that bit where they are drinking tea at the top of page 261” and then I would stare around accusingly at the blank faces as though to say “Well, well, well. You don’t know what I’m talking about. But you did...read the book didn’t you?”.
You can also find it in the excellent Edinburgh Unlocked Audiobook from Penguin Random House