UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE

For some reason, we always watch the boat race. My Dad likes Cambridge to win (I think he went there once and enjoyed the architecture) and I'm more of an Oxford man (I almost applied to go to Keble College). With these extremely tenuous connections, we sit down to watch it most years.

I like the way the aerial shots make the boats look like insects - water boatmen or pond skaters propelling themselves across the surface tension. In truth of course, the oars are being pulled through the river by gigantic young men with iron chests and legs the size of tree-trunks. In perfect symphony they stretch and pull, rolling their oars through the water, puffing and spitting while the lactic acid burns through their muscles.

I'd like to go one day and stand on Hammersmith Bridge, or maybe where the river bends round by the old Harrods warehouse. I'd like to see the crowd cheering as the flotilla goes by, spearheaded by those two warring factions - the eight light blues of Cambridge and the eight dark blues of Oxford. I'd like to hear the umpire's megaphone reverberate across the water and the sound of the crowd, I'd like to hear the splash of oars and the cries of the cox as those boats fly past. I'd like to feel the atmosphere, I think, to be a spectator at one of Britain's proudest and oldest rivalries, played out by top athletes representing their noble universities on our greatest waterway. I'd like to be part of that world... which is probably a subconscious admission (as if we needed one) that a great divide exists between Oxbridge and the rest of us.

Not that I'm really complaining. Keble College, Oxford, would have been a nightmare of snooty proportions and every time I've found myself in Cambridge since, I've thanked my lucky stars that I chose Bath as my university. Of course, in Cambridge, you can't go thanking your lucky stars for long before you run the risk of colliding with a bicycle. It's not the place for looking up, it's the place for looking sideways and forwards, which says it all, really.

Oxford won. They stood squarely on the bank, sunglasses and wellingtons, smiles and square jaws, beaming into the cameras. The commentators rambled on about how great it feels to win and how awful it feels to lose. I looked across at my Dad.

He was snoring.