Hitting the wall - no, not the Berlin one this time

Coming soon: Ghostrider, the prequel.

Good grief, I do apologise. Here I was, assuring you that this wouldn't become another one of those blogs that dies out as quickly as applause at the end of a German lecture, and now here we are; staring into the abyss of two weeks without a single post to redeem myself. It's not right, and it won't happen again sir; although if you have been looking for reading material in my absence I have a rather wild essay on Elfriede Jelinek ready that you're welcome to take a look at.

Yes, we are now just over two weeks into term and already everyone seems to have pitched forward head-first into catastrophic, world-consuming busyness. This is one of the characteristics and symptoms of the Oxford Uni system, where you have a brief eight-week term in which to learn an entire bookshelf's worth of crumblingly dry theory, cycle until your thighs catch fire and complete enough extracurricular activities to make you a candidate for a real-life version of Rushmore before suddenly being booted out for six or seven weeks of skulking about somewhere else with nothing to do. This leaves you feeling jellified both inside and out; your legs quiver from the toing-and-froing, your arms ache from hulking books about and your mind aches from the theory of Michel Foucault et al. 

One thing I get asked a lot is whether it is weird to be back here after a year in Berlin. Being back in the UK, with its rubbish trains and lack of Club Mate, was for a while a huge jolt to the system, and I found myself repeatedly saying 'Entschuldigung' to people on the street (the word is German but the ingrained impulse to constantly apologise is an Englishness you will never drive out of me). But being back here, in Oxford, is actually so un-weird Berlin seems like a half-forgotten hallucination sometimes. 

While changing country has a culture-shock element to it and entails the arduous task of picking up where you left off in terms of friendships, hobbies and anything else that doesn't fit in a suitcase, being at college is something so intense and extreme that my body seems to have developed a kind of 'sense-memory' of it and I now just let it mechanically creak from task to task just as I used to while another chunk of my mind thinks about origami and corduroy. Smell the hospital-like funk in the modern languages library and immediately my hand stretches out with a rusty squeak and grabs a book request slip ready to write down my name and the date. The whole ritual is a command chain hard-wired into my motherboard, and all it took was someone to flick the 'switch mode' button to get me to carry it out.

And boy, is it a ritual. I am glad I haven't forgotten it all, because the whole place runs along a series of voodoo rites which an outsider can barely fathom; even an outsider who knows the ropes isn't quite there yet because you will, for a long while, see everything as just, well...stupid. Every morning you must put your bin outside your door for a two-hour window in which time the 'scout', the poor schmoe who has to clean the rooms, can chuck your rubbish away. Every day you check your 'pidge' which is short for 'pigeonhole' and they are guarded by the 'porters' who are grumpy people in jumpers. You must know how or whether to greet each porter in the right way because this can be the difference between a friendly nod, a 45-minute chat, or a soul-freezing glare. In English lectures you clap, in German lectures you don't, and in tutorials you make as many notes as you possibly can to disguise the fact that you don't understand a word. You go to your myriad libraries and for each one do the special dance which lets you get in and use the books; in the Bod you must open your bag when leaving but not before entering, while it used to be the other way around, you must show your university card and swipe it in, and you must sit next to an empty seat so that the elderly man with severe lung disease can sit next to you and cough spectacularly phlegmily for the entire time you are there. In the English Faculty library you can do whatever you like as long as you NEVER come to the issue desk without having first withdrawn your library card from your wallet. In the Modern Languages library, which is divided into two segments, one segment is like a shop where you pick your books off the shelf and another is like Argos, where you fill in a slip and then wait an age for the sweet ladies to scuttle off and get your book for you. Both segments are flights of stairs away from each other and while most of the important books are in one you can only withdraw books at the issue desk in the other one, while the only other chief task of the ladies at the former's issue desk is just to talk and chuckle AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE in this place of peace. 

Like riding a bike, coming back to Oxford is just a case of getting the feet on the pedals and going. Like riding a bike it also involves falling off into huge puddles (this is a true story), keeping a watchful eye in front of and behind you, and occasionally losing your balance. This week I lost my balance. But I'm back on the bike again and with WD40 in my bag I can take on the world.