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| I have been staring at this exact spot for the last FIFTEEN HOURS. No exaggeration. |
My particular college in Oxford is a little out of the way, a few minutes 'uptown' so to speak. A brief wander from the town centre. "Central", an estate agent might call it. Yet since the majority of the colleges in this city are unceremoniously dumped in between the shops and the faculties and the ice cream parlours (yes ok, chronologically speaking there were there first and everything else was dumped there afterwards...) if you ever mention my college to a 'city-college' student they will, without fail, react thus: "Wow, that's...far." People seem to think that we're way up north out here, in fact that we are so far north that our climate is slightly chillier then theirs and that actually we have six months of night and then six months of daylight during which time we practise ice fishing and skin elk. Seriously, we are only about ten minutes out of town. But in Oxford standards, my college is a mythical, far away place, one that people have heard tell of in stories of yore, told by crinkly-eyed grandmothers by a crackling fire.
The fact is that if you are able to lie on your side, roll for a couple of minutes downhill and scoot effortlessly through the faculty door into your first lecture everything will of course seem far if not immediately beside you. It is a glorious existence, I admit; if I need to buy bread that involves hitching up my skirt, getting on my on-the-verge-of-death bike and hulking my great mass up or down to the nearest shop while the saddle leaks a suspicious and seemingly never-ending liquid onto my rear. If Jesus students need bread, they reach out of their window into Tesco's and grab a loaf, but not before giving Ray on the bakery counter a disembodied high-five. A lecture for me entails the requisite fifteen minutes of trying to find everything I need for leaving my room (keysmoneyphonekeysmoneyphonekeysmoneyphone), ten minutes to get to the faculty, an hour of dull pontificating from the lecturer, ten minutes of waiting for the hipster in the tweed shorts to get out of the way and let me out of the building, ten minutes of small talk with colleagues and finally ten minutes to cycle the entirely uphill (and always, for some reason, in the wind) route back to college. A lecture for them is a brief interlude in their day of luxury.
I would love to be central, and I yearn for the days when I lived in Friedrichshain and Lidl was so close to my front door that the automatic supermarket doors always caused a faint breeze to tickle my cheek at night. Although I yearn for the Lidl gherkins even more. Soooo knackig...
But the point is that actually, I love being not-central even more. Anyone who has ever had to sit at a desk for more than six hours non-stop will understand why. In Berlin I spent my year marching from school to school, teaching lessons by leaping up and down and pretending to be jungle animals and chasing kids in the guise of an affectionate grandpa, climbing endless flights of stairs in endless apartment blocks and walking from U-Bahn to S-Bahn to Bushaltestelle, strolling through parks and running away from angry chihuahuas. My body has gone from happily sedentary, like a sea-sponge, to hyperactive, like Spongebob Squarepants, and a day of no physical activity makes me twitchy. And I'm not the only one; myriad students here find themselves sitting for such long stretches that when they finally get the chance to do something active they get addicted to rowing and voluntarily wake up at 4.30am to sweat in the rain for three hours. One friend in particular goes on adventure walks that can last an entire evening just to give her muscles something to chew on. You have to do something here, because without just the slightest bit of movement you stagnate.
So living out in the Arsch der Welt has its upsides, because the occasional sprint on the bike is a beautiful moment of movement and freedom that centralites don't get so easy. There is something thrilling about the moment when you pedal so fast that you can then just stand on the pedals and coast around the corner, the sensation of the power in your calves is as satisfying as the feeling immediately after you crack your knuckles. Living in the least convenient place for student existence (apparently) is the best thing to stop you slowly congealing into a solid mass sat on a rickety office chair typing quotes out of a Cambridge Companion.
I'll end this blog post with an appeal, then. People of Oxford, stop eschewing the Far Out Colleges! Stop thinking we're stupid because we were given our college place for being the only ones dumb enough not to look at a map properly! Hike up here for once, it's beautiful! There are new places to see and new types of panini to try! Or hell, why not go south, they have fantastic things down there and they're sick of having to come to you every time you fancy a latte! A ten-minute walk to have a cup of tea with your mate is not a 'massive effort', and if you think it is try living on a remote farm with no driving license and an hourly half-hour bus journey to the nearest dab of civilisation to learn what 'central' really means. It ain't so grim up north and you never know what you might find if you go south for the winter! Give it a try! Move your muscles! You never know - some say you can even see the Aurora Borealis out here.
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