DREAMING SPIRES AND FIZZY POP

I’m in Oxford today feeling typically beleaguered and inadequate. It doesn’t help that the town is currently teeming with teenagers.

What is Oxford University playing at? Are they letting twelve year-olds in? I just passed a gaggle of them spilling onto the high street as though looking for fizzy pop and monster munch. Students used to wear scarves and pretend to be intellectuals. Or they’d bounce around in tutus rattling a RAG week tin. You don’t see that any more, do you? They were grown-ups weren’t they? Where are the berets and the philosophers? Come to think of it, where’s the tweed and brogues? This is the city of Dreaming Spires after all! No, what Oxford has, it seems, is a massive youth club.

It’s a nice enough day out there. Summer clouds and a warm blue sky. The trees are typically Autumnal now, and the sun hangs just a little too low and gleams white rather than warm yellow. The shadows are long too, falling in stripes across the pavement of bikes and teenagers.

So why ‘beleaguered’? I just feel a bit overwhelmed with everything at the moment. In lots of ways I’m skimming life, just about surviving my way between crises. It is exhausting - like being surrounded on all sides by potential problems but only having enough strength to fight them one at a time. I don’t dare consider how many of them there are.

And why ‘inadequate’? Maybe it’s these students just beginning the journey of their lives. Can you imagine only having lived for less than two decades? What must that be like? And to still have six or seven ahead? In this agonising world! I don’t envy them. And yet, perhaps I do. Or worse, perhaps I envy myself, similarly green, similarly young, floating my way through university, with unknowable energy and potential. And looking like I was twelve, no doubt.