Glutbusters

Ninety percent of my time is spent amongst a mixture of cheerful northern Englanders, Europeans and down to earth bright-but-unremarkable twenty-somethings with nothing better to do than read about the role of the adverb in renaissance France. Then, every once in a while, Oxford is quintessentially and indefensibly OXFORD.

The viva (verbal defence of thesis) was held in the rooms (study) of a don (lecturer) in Merton College (scary) at two o’clock in the afternoon on Friday (Friday). Being technically an examination I had to wear a white bow tie, a
dark suit (my suit was bought when I was a fifth larger than I am now and Icould probably have smuggled in a knowledgeable dwarf had I had been more organised), a black gown (not a serious Darth-Vader-Music-inspiring sweeping cape you understand, but a little black number with irrelevant dangly bits that barely covers your arse) and a mortar-board hat. This is referred to as 'sub-fusc' which is Latin for ‘below your dignity’. The idea being that by reducing the candidate’s physical confidence and access to oxygen during periods of extreme stress you can really sort the dom perignon from the sparkling white.

My examiners were wearing the same get-up (only with Vader cloaks and suits that fit) and there were two of them, ominously titled the External and Internal Examiners. So, I was standing outside The Door to The Rooms gathering the guts to knock and trying not to imagine what the Internal Examination might involve, when The Door swung open with a long drawn-out ominous creaking noise to reveal the Internal Examiner Himself (to be fair the ominous creaking noises may have been me trying to breathe through fast contracting white bow-tie).

Phillip Waller is a don’s don. He has a book case dedicated to his own publications and another one dedicated to other people’s publications about his publications. He never bothered with a doctorate himself and appears to have
burst from his mother’s womb fully formed, wrapped in tweed and smoking (both in the tobacco-pipe and the satanic sense) straight into the waiting arms of an Oxford fellowship. He is what people in the academic profession refer to in hushed terms as a 'formidable' historian. Every encyclopaedic sentence is punctuated incongruously with the phrase ‘as it were’, which generally presages a question about the role of accents in the fall of Jacobin Andorra, or the influence of real tennis in the rise of the third Reich. I have been having night-mares for months where I am being chased through a forest at night by an unseen creature in a black cape whispering ‘as it were’, ‘as it were’, and clutching a life-size blow-up doll of Buffy the vampire slayer.

Ahem.

Philip introduced me to Professor Gary McCulloch of the University of London who as a non-Oxford academic is of course technically beneath contempt but as the leading figure in the history of education in the country still represents something of a challenge. Gary’s publications are many and ever-present and generally push the line that if Britain hadn’t gotten carried away with the whole egalitarian thing and started educating the masses with money better spent on Eton neck-wear they wouldn’t have ever A), lost the empire, or B) lost the ashes. My thesis, which in essence argues that the English upper classes are nut-cases, lies directly in his field in the same sense that New Orleans lay in the field of Hurricane Katrina.

The room was exactly as you are imagining it. Every surface was covered in books, pipe ash and the rotting thyroids of former candidates. We were arranged in a triangular formation in ancient worn armchairs, arranged in such a way that in order to turn and answer either examiner I had to expose the weakness of my argument to the other one. My own chair was about a foot lower than the other two and wobbled precariously whenever I produced a grammatically incorrect sentence. Gary’s was a sort of upright chaise lounge which gathered around him like giant bat wings and just behind Philip’s head, directly in my line of sight, was a stuffed ibis in a glass case wearing a mortar board. I shit you not.

The questions began immediately and essentially fell under one of three categories ‘why is your thesis irrelevant to all current scholarship’, ‘why didn’t you look at the Manchester tabloids/Soviet archives/relevant Wisdens (Gary)’, and most difficult of all, ‘what was the relevance of the, as it were, Buffy illustrations’. I fumbled my way through the cut and thrust of the debate, addressing myself directly to the ibis, resisting the urge to fall to my knees and declare myself a fraud and generally trying to drown them in a deluge of semi-articulate historical trivia.

The strain was well and truly starting to get to me and I was deeply regretting leaving my knowledgeable dwarf behind when without warning, Philip rose from his chair (not stood up you understand, he fucking levitated), extended his hand and asked if he could be the first to congratulate me, as it were, on succeeding in the viva for my, as it were, doctorate. Gary emerged from his seat (revealing, to my horror, that the batwings were actually A PART OF HIM) and offered to be the second to congratulate and the two of them ushered me, still babbling at the ibis, out of OXFORD and back into Oxford, and the rest of my life.

So to summarise, a small page of corrections and a great sense of disbelief later, and its job done. Now back to the port and snuff or Terence will never invite me up to the manor again.

Congratulations, Christov.