Letter from the Dreaming Spires
Barely Legal • Saturday, October 30, 2021 Barely Legal has moved to one of the great colleges in the green and pleasant land ... His first encounter with the college toffs ... Important to get the language right
It took two whole weeks for someone to call me a convict. He was gushing about "the chancery side of the court" and it just slipped out:
"But then I suppose you convicts didn't take Lord Eldon with you Down Under, did you?"
A riposte would have been futile. Within minutes, my interlocutor was lamenting the loss of the colonies and telling me his "fervent wish" was to establish an Anglican aristocracy in Spain.
In a way, I was relieved. Tradition is what you pay for at a university like this, and what finer tradition than the insufferable toff?
The toffs don't pullulate anymore, not in the way they did for the Waughs and Forsters of this world. Nowadays, the average student wears Adidas trainers and collars himself with a pair of Bose earphones, for the "street" look.
But if you know what to look for, the toffy tradition is alive and well. It's all a manner of speaking. Some examples:
A normal person "goes" to university; a toff "goes up" – from London, implicitly. A mere mortal "studies" and "takes subjects''; a toff "reads for" his degree and "offers papers".
And to the humbler sort, they're called "cleaners" and "security guards"; to toffs, they're "scouts" and "porters".
For toffs, "college battels". For me, "fees" that nearly put me on welfare.
There are other signs as well. At college dinner, academic gowns are mandatory. Most of us bought the £30 polyester-cotton rag from the university store.
But the nobler sort will wear something sleek, probably a Saville Row original, almost certainly tailored.
The toff is the first to stand when the "high table" – the college warden and the academic fellows – enter in a little procession. And he'll volunteer to read the college grace - in Latin, of course - as often as he can.
It's the proper high church thing to do – but it doesn't hurt that you get a bottle of port if you read it twice in a term.
I was sat next to one of these young Tory types at a welcome dinner. He's here to "read" for a master's degree in history, he told me, and maybe a doctorate after that.
So an academic future, then?
Not at all. Little Lord Fauntleroy is convinced he will be a QC by the time he is 35. He knows nothing about the law and has no obvious skill in public or private speaking.
But why should that deter him from a life in wigs, Chancery Lane chambers and leather-bound volumes? After all, his father knows half the commercial bar.
I told his Lordship I had studied law in Australia. Eyebrow raised, he wondered why on earth I hadn't come to "this place" for my undergraduate degree.
I said something antipodean about bank accounts, and then asked him had he enjoyed being an undergraduate here?
He looked into at his port and mumbled a few words. It turned out his alma mater was the University of York, where I am told both the supply of and demand for degrees work very favourably in an applicant's favour.
Later that evening, when I was trudging back to my room, I overheard him explaining Anglican theology to a hapless German girl.
"Now I'm not the sort who think all acts of intercourse must come with the possibility of procreation."
I've heard worse pick-up lines.
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