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Michaelmas
Oct. 5th, 2005 12:52 pmI have internet in my room! Yay, finally! And have just discovered the best thing ever: everyone who has them and knows how shares their iTunes libraries across the college network. I have ten complete libraries of music to work through. My life is complete.
Not before time, either. Connecting to the internet here is a nightmare made real. It’s been made deliberately difficult, because although they seem to know they have to provide it, they don’t want people to actually use it. That’s my theory and it seems sound based on the evidence provided. First of all you have to run a virus/patch CD from the computing people and have your laptop certified clean, which seems fair enough, but then you have to apply for an IP address through an online form which is designed to refresh and re-refresh as you enter your data and then again as you attempt to continue. The only way to break the cycle is to find a one-word link hidden in the thick paragraphs of text. Once you’ve done this, you have to send an additional email to the IT manager, from your Oxford-based email account, which has to be activated separately from a Balliol-based computer, which can’t be logged onto unless you have a username and password, which you can’t get unless you get online from the JCR, not the computers in the computer room.
And if you make it through all this, which I have but not unscathed, you have to get yourself an ethernet cable from the OUCS shop, which is “fifteen minutes from St John’s”, (a pound per metre, so reasonable) and cart it across to your room. I am an idiot and forgot to buy an adaptor, but apparently I was being clever without knowing it as my laptop doesn’t need one.
Of course, as you're reading this, I have solved the problem – hopefully – so a little less on the ridiculous wrangling with the IT people, and more on life in Oxford. I arrived here on Sunday, with my parents helping me unload and unpack. I collected my key from the porters’ lodge and came across to my room.
Which is wonderful. I have someone watching over me – I have, more or less, the best freshers’ room in college. It’s true! To begin with, unlike the vast majority of freshers, who are placed in the new, concrete buildings collectively known as the freshers’ ghetto, I am in the old part of college. This is a plus by itself. But more than that, my room is the attic room. It’s about double the average size, with a slanting casement roof, and I have two windows that look out towards St. Giles. One of these is a large circular porthole-like thing, and so the only window that is recognisable instantly from the ground. Now decorated with my bits and bobs (I have a nice red bedspread and throw, lots of photographs and postcards on the wall and books strewn all over) the room and the view are beautiful.
So is the college. Balliol isn’t known for its beauty among Oxford colleges generally – right in the middle of Broad Street means not much room for the picturesque – but inside the front quad is a circle of serenity. It’s quite manicured there, but the large, green back quad is different, with the famous lack of “Keep off the grass” signs. (Not strictly true – they’re up today because the grass is being sprayed with weedkiller). The buildings all around are draped with ivy and even the ghetto looks acceptable in the right lights.
I’m living closer to the back entrance, but I have to go through the front because although I have a key, it’s not generally used until the first week of Michaelmas, which isn’t until next Monday. This week, which is freshers’ week for freshers and noughth week for everyone else, seems to be a limbo period where nothing is quite as normal.
Not that I know what normal is, yet. I have now been here three days and feel like I’ve either been here forever or no time at all, I’m not sure which. My room feels like home, which is good. It helps that it’s such a lovely room with such unique drawbacks. It has two of these – one is the obvious attic room disadvantage of lots of stairs, and the other is the fact the shower is four floors below. This is a problem. Happily, there is a bath. I have invested in a bucket for purposes of washing my hair. Sigh.
The JCR feels homely, as well. As well as the actual junior common room, “JCR” refers to the community of people who inhabit the place, but at the moment I’m just talking about the place. It is not very fancy, with peeling paint and strewn newspapers, but it’s comfortable and has a student-run pantry. Said pantry is the greasy spoon of greasy spoons, but the food is obscenely cheap – yesterday’s special, toast with jam, eggs and bacon and coffee, came to 85p – and easier than actually cooking. I have to use the ghetto kitchens, and am therefore not cooking.
Below the pantry is the bar. It’s called the Lindsay Bar, and is also student-run (because of it, Balliol JCR has the highest turnover of all colleges by a factor of four). I was there last night for its opening night, which was, um, interesting. It’s also very cheap. The special was a Balliol Blue, which is two shots of vodka in blue WKD. Ewwww. I stuck with Smirnoff and red wine. (Tonight all shots were 75p each. Oh, the pain.)
To be honest, I’m not loving freshers’ week. I’m actually pretty much hating it. I hate being totally aimless – you hang around in the JCR because there’s nothing better to do – and everyone else is obsessed with getting pissed, for some reason. Particularly my subject father, who is shockingly attractive. He’s good company, though – he and my other parent, Sarah are extremely nice. They have fourteen children, as PPE is the most populated undergraduate course at Balliol. Of the original hundred and twenty-five applicants last Christmas, nine (including me) have got in; the other five are deferred entry and international students.
Yesterday, therefore, involved a lot of running around with the other PPEists and our parents – we had a look round the libraries and faculties and finished it off with a PPEists’ tea-party hosted by the Balliol Organ Scholar. He is a nice guy, a PPEist himself, although I have never met him sober. It wasn’t an actual tea-party, you understand – it mostly involved red wine and diet Coke with everyone draped across the front quad.
Among the fourteen PPEists, there are four girls and four boys called Sam. I have spoken to two of the Sams, who are both nice people, and the girls are convinced we need to stick together. I’m quite sure we do, although most of the boys are charming. One of them patently isn’t – he’s an arrogant bastard – and there’s another one who clearly believes he is the most beautiful creature on the face of the earth. He has the sort of accent that would get him ritually flattened anywhere else. He stands out even among all the people from the south. There are very few people from up north here. I don’t like that because it makes me feel so utterly provincial. I do feel ridiculously out of place, actually. So many people have led such terribly glamorous lives – spent their childhoods travelling with their parents with the UN or gone backpacking across Tibet – or else they’re only the latest in their lineage to come to Balliol, and the international students obviously all have interesting stories to tell. I’m just so boring – boring, boring, only eighteen, went to boring school in boring north, came straight from said boring school, likes sleeping more than clubs, actually looking forward to the work... boring as fuck.
Anyway. I do not like freshers’ week. I want something real to do. And I don’t like going out and not drinking and getting bored while everyone else gets pissed. Tonight, though, I did have fun; someone noticed that the freshers’ male to female ratio this year is seventy : thirty and got scared. Therefore there was an evening of women’s drinks tonight with free drinks, penny sweets and tampons. Seriously. There were people walking around with a glass of rosé in one hand and a box of tampons in the other.
Tonight is formal dinner with the Master in hall. (I actually met him randomly in the quad yesterday; he’s an old, genial little man who asked me my name and what I was reading and if I was enjoying myself, and then just as he was departing mentioned that he was the Master.) I have to dress up a bit and go for drinks with my tutors beforehand. Perhaps washing my hair would be a good idea.
And now, must run. Today has been good fun so far; I asked some people up for coffee and got my computer set up in return for a handful of cookies. Life is far better than it was last night, which is when I wrote most of the above. Once I've settled in, I'm thinking I'll like it here.
Not before time, either. Connecting to the internet here is a nightmare made real. It’s been made deliberately difficult, because although they seem to know they have to provide it, they don’t want people to actually use it. That’s my theory and it seems sound based on the evidence provided. First of all you have to run a virus/patch CD from the computing people and have your laptop certified clean, which seems fair enough, but then you have to apply for an IP address through an online form which is designed to refresh and re-refresh as you enter your data and then again as you attempt to continue. The only way to break the cycle is to find a one-word link hidden in the thick paragraphs of text. Once you’ve done this, you have to send an additional email to the IT manager, from your Oxford-based email account, which has to be activated separately from a Balliol-based computer, which can’t be logged onto unless you have a username and password, which you can’t get unless you get online from the JCR, not the computers in the computer room.
And if you make it through all this, which I have but not unscathed, you have to get yourself an ethernet cable from the OUCS shop, which is “fifteen minutes from St John’s”, (a pound per metre, so reasonable) and cart it across to your room. I am an idiot and forgot to buy an adaptor, but apparently I was being clever without knowing it as my laptop doesn’t need one.
Of course, as you're reading this, I have solved the problem – hopefully – so a little less on the ridiculous wrangling with the IT people, and more on life in Oxford. I arrived here on Sunday, with my parents helping me unload and unpack. I collected my key from the porters’ lodge and came across to my room.
Which is wonderful. I have someone watching over me – I have, more or less, the best freshers’ room in college. It’s true! To begin with, unlike the vast majority of freshers, who are placed in the new, concrete buildings collectively known as the freshers’ ghetto, I am in the old part of college. This is a plus by itself. But more than that, my room is the attic room. It’s about double the average size, with a slanting casement roof, and I have two windows that look out towards St. Giles. One of these is a large circular porthole-like thing, and so the only window that is recognisable instantly from the ground. Now decorated with my bits and bobs (I have a nice red bedspread and throw, lots of photographs and postcards on the wall and books strewn all over) the room and the view are beautiful.
So is the college. Balliol isn’t known for its beauty among Oxford colleges generally – right in the middle of Broad Street means not much room for the picturesque – but inside the front quad is a circle of serenity. It’s quite manicured there, but the large, green back quad is different, with the famous lack of “Keep off the grass” signs. (Not strictly true – they’re up today because the grass is being sprayed with weedkiller). The buildings all around are draped with ivy and even the ghetto looks acceptable in the right lights.
I’m living closer to the back entrance, but I have to go through the front because although I have a key, it’s not generally used until the first week of Michaelmas, which isn’t until next Monday. This week, which is freshers’ week for freshers and noughth week for everyone else, seems to be a limbo period where nothing is quite as normal.
Not that I know what normal is, yet. I have now been here three days and feel like I’ve either been here forever or no time at all, I’m not sure which. My room feels like home, which is good. It helps that it’s such a lovely room with such unique drawbacks. It has two of these – one is the obvious attic room disadvantage of lots of stairs, and the other is the fact the shower is four floors below. This is a problem. Happily, there is a bath. I have invested in a bucket for purposes of washing my hair. Sigh.
The JCR feels homely, as well. As well as the actual junior common room, “JCR” refers to the community of people who inhabit the place, but at the moment I’m just talking about the place. It is not very fancy, with peeling paint and strewn newspapers, but it’s comfortable and has a student-run pantry. Said pantry is the greasy spoon of greasy spoons, but the food is obscenely cheap – yesterday’s special, toast with jam, eggs and bacon and coffee, came to 85p – and easier than actually cooking. I have to use the ghetto kitchens, and am therefore not cooking.
Below the pantry is the bar. It’s called the Lindsay Bar, and is also student-run (because of it, Balliol JCR has the highest turnover of all colleges by a factor of four). I was there last night for its opening night, which was, um, interesting. It’s also very cheap. The special was a Balliol Blue, which is two shots of vodka in blue WKD. Ewwww. I stuck with Smirnoff and red wine. (Tonight all shots were 75p each. Oh, the pain.)
To be honest, I’m not loving freshers’ week. I’m actually pretty much hating it. I hate being totally aimless – you hang around in the JCR because there’s nothing better to do – and everyone else is obsessed with getting pissed, for some reason. Particularly my subject father, who is shockingly attractive. He’s good company, though – he and my other parent, Sarah are extremely nice. They have fourteen children, as PPE is the most populated undergraduate course at Balliol. Of the original hundred and twenty-five applicants last Christmas, nine (including me) have got in; the other five are deferred entry and international students.
Yesterday, therefore, involved a lot of running around with the other PPEists and our parents – we had a look round the libraries and faculties and finished it off with a PPEists’ tea-party hosted by the Balliol Organ Scholar. He is a nice guy, a PPEist himself, although I have never met him sober. It wasn’t an actual tea-party, you understand – it mostly involved red wine and diet Coke with everyone draped across the front quad.
Among the fourteen PPEists, there are four girls and four boys called Sam. I have spoken to two of the Sams, who are both nice people, and the girls are convinced we need to stick together. I’m quite sure we do, although most of the boys are charming. One of them patently isn’t – he’s an arrogant bastard – and there’s another one who clearly believes he is the most beautiful creature on the face of the earth. He has the sort of accent that would get him ritually flattened anywhere else. He stands out even among all the people from the south. There are very few people from up north here. I don’t like that because it makes me feel so utterly provincial. I do feel ridiculously out of place, actually. So many people have led such terribly glamorous lives – spent their childhoods travelling with their parents with the UN or gone backpacking across Tibet – or else they’re only the latest in their lineage to come to Balliol, and the international students obviously all have interesting stories to tell. I’m just so boring – boring, boring, only eighteen, went to boring school in boring north, came straight from said boring school, likes sleeping more than clubs, actually looking forward to the work... boring as fuck.
Anyway. I do not like freshers’ week. I want something real to do. And I don’t like going out and not drinking and getting bored while everyone else gets pissed. Tonight, though, I did have fun; someone noticed that the freshers’ male to female ratio this year is seventy : thirty and got scared. Therefore there was an evening of women’s drinks tonight with free drinks, penny sweets and tampons. Seriously. There were people walking around with a glass of rosé in one hand and a box of tampons in the other.
Tonight is formal dinner with the Master in hall. (I actually met him randomly in the quad yesterday; he’s an old, genial little man who asked me my name and what I was reading and if I was enjoying myself, and then just as he was departing mentioned that he was the Master.) I have to dress up a bit and go for drinks with my tutors beforehand. Perhaps washing my hair would be a good idea.
And now, must run. Today has been good fun so far; I asked some people up for coffee and got my computer set up in return for a handful of cookies. Life is far better than it was last night, which is when I wrote most of the above. Once I've settled in, I'm thinking I'll like it here.
