#i don't think i've ever put this into words beyond disjointed discord messages so uh. here

[ayliffe]

my parents never pressured me or even expected me to go to oxbridge. they met at durham, after all. my mother's parents were farmers, immigrants from poland during ww2, and my father went to durham rather than oxbridge out of a twisted sense of pride -- both his parents and all of his siblings got into either oxford or cambridge (or both) easily, so he never saw getting into either as a particular achievement, he said.

[posh boy oxbridge angst under the cut]

but the spectre always hung over me. at some point, no later than age 13, i decided that i had to go to one or the other. perhaps it was because i was never close with any of my extended family, so i taught myself to idolise (oxford and) cambridge in lieu of any actual connection. perhaps the school i went to drilled it into me. all i know for certain is that by the time i was 14, i was reading oxbridge college student newsletters, enchanted by jokes i'd never truly understand.

it goes without saying, i think, that this isn't normal behaviour, even for the school i went to, a school that prided itself on its oxbridge admissions.

the school i went to essentially ignored me until they learned i intended to apply to oxford -- and suddenly, they decided i mattered. it didn't matter that i never did my homework; it didn't matter that i didn't appear to have any drive for any subject other than the one for which i applied. i remember my biology teacher, someone high up in the school's administration but also extremely aware that i was doing terribly in her subject (i was averaging Ds), saying something along the lines of, "oh, you're going for oxbridge? i'd better write the best reference i can!" -- and she lied in it. i'm sure she did. because there are codes teachers learn when they're writing recommendations for their students, codes that might imply a student's fine, even good, but when read between the lines -- they're shit. don't bother. and my biology teacher would have been completely within her rights to suggest i'd have been a shit student, because i would have been.

but the fact she felt the need to lie; the fact she felt the need to try to get me somewhere good over somewhere, perhaps, i would've been suited. though knowing how i was at the time, i don't know whether i was suited to anywhere at all.

and i'm grateful to her, of course i am. moreso than the teachers in whose subjects i actually excelled, in some ways. i didn't get into oxford, but i do think her reference helped me get to interview, and interview is truly one of my favourite memories. but the fucking... the ritual of it all. say the right things. write the right statement. be argumentative at interview -- but not too argumentative. you want them to like you, after all.

it's not really oxbridge i'm railing against here. or at least it's not just oxbridge i'm railing against. to be honest, i'm not entirely sure what my point is. i suppose i'm projecting my self-inflicted academic anxiety (to this day, i struggle with accepting that a rejection from oxford doesn't make me an idiot) onto my school onto, well, the institutions themselves.

i think mostly i want to know where on earth i got it from. as i say, my parents never gave any indication that's what they expected -- in fact, they actively discouraged me from applying -- and i never saw my father's family enough to absorb any expectations from them. none of my cousins got in, either. i think there's a lot to be said about the hold oxbridge has on british institutions, but i don't have the knowledge or the experience to talk about that. as with so many other things i throw out into the void, i mostly just want to know why the whole thing had such an effect on me.