Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel

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СКАЧАТЬ by local bailiffs, so more students turned up and attacked the town magistrates. A complaint by residents was made the next morning, so the students, being young and full of mischief, set fire to the town. At the end of the day’s fighting sixty students and thirty-three people from the town were dead. By this time I presume the landlord had cleaned his barrels and freshened up his beer.

      You might imagine some sort of sanction would have been applied to the students who started this jape, such as a couple of marks knocked off their business studies final paper for every blacksmith they murdered, or something. But the government blamed the people of the town for the incident. So each year the mayor, bailiffs and sixty burgesses of the town had to attend a mass, and pay a silver penny to the university for each dead student. This penance carried on until 1825, when there was probably only the Daily Mail left screaming that if criminals can get away with a 490-year sentence, it’s no wonder the streets aren’t safe.

      Today the rift between university and town ought to be less pronounced than in the days when students were almost exclusively from the nobility, but this is complicated by the fact that in Oxford the students are Oxford students. Some of them, though a smaller percentage even than fifty years ago, may be from working-class backgrounds, but all of them are imbued with a sense of superiority. As you head through the centre of town past the courtyards, the gothic buildings, the boys in black gowns, the quaint bridge that seems designed to tempt you to jump off it into the Thames at two in the morning, the perfect lawns, the entrances behind thick spiky chains, you feel as if you’re at a gig with only a white wristband, but you need a purple one to get past the ropes and the security staff to where people like you aren’t allowed.

      Even so, the town is seductive, with pubs covered in ivy that make you feel as if you should sit at an oak table with a jug of ale being wise, and gentle paths by the river where you have to delicately brush away dangling lengths of weeping willow to walk along them. It’s hard to reconcile yourself to the fact that this is the same Thames that charges through London all full of rage. It seems as if the river must go there to work all day, then commute back home to Oxford and relax by gently rippling past muddy banks on which there ought to be an old man showing his grandson how to whittle.

      So it must seem peculiar to live there if you’re part of the population that has no business with the university. Because Oxford’s college’s aren’t to one side of town, like most work-places that dominate an area, by the docks or on an industrial estate. They’re stood, grandly, peering at you from all angles, reminding you that beyond the gables and the statues are your masters and future masters, and probably a function at which someone’s carrying a tray of tiny sausages to honour a benefactor from the Wellcome Trust.

      This is a world that certainly isn’t dominated by the soulless and the corporate, with no room for individuality. Here they saunter across quadrangles between spires and gargoyles, every delicately designed corner of every building intricately unique.

      A chancellor of Oxford University would be facing controversy, I would imagine, if he suggested that the colleges should be relocated in a huge education park and become part of chains called First for Firsts and Masters-rite.

      Yet there is a town behind these buildings that functions normally. Over the river and past the station are the nail salons and pound shops, the Westgate shopping centre with its Vision Express and Nando’s. It does have a retail park, and a nearby depleted car factory, and a football team that slid out of the League but came back again, and postmen and a Big Yellow Storage Company.

      Occasionally the two worlds collide. Walking across the bridge to the normal part of town, I met a professor. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, in a controlled slur that suggested he’d had practice at trying not to seem drunk. ‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’ He had a tight cravat and a short sheepskin coat, and asked again, ‘Could I, just for a moment?’

      I said, ‘Are you homeless?’ and tried to give him some change.

      ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘No, I’m certainly not homeless. I’m a veterinary surgeon and a professor, and I’m very sorry.’

      ‘Why are you sorry?’ I asked him. ‘Did you sew up the wrong end of a rabbit?’

      ‘Oh, I’ve done that many times,’ he said. I wondered if I’d landed in an Eastern European novel, and the day would end with me whipping a dwarf.

      ‘Are you sorry because you’re meant to be with your wife, and you’re late because you’ve got drunk?’ I asked.

      ‘My dear dear darling wife has come to expect that of me, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘No, I’m sorry because I have to be at a college function and I’m not sure where it is. I don’t suppose you know where it is, do you?’

      I tried to get a clue as to how I could help, but it was always unlikely that I’d be better informed than him about the whereabouts of a function in a college in his city to which he’d been invited.

      We carried on in this surreal fashion for about ten minutes, then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Well, it’s been lovely talking to you. The main reason I wanted to talk to you is that I was a bit lonely, I’m afraid.’

      As he walked off, I concluded two things. Firstly, if I ever have a sick pet I should look him up, as he’d probably be a lot of fun, and even if he was a little shaky with a scalpel, he’d appreciate the company. And secondly, while glorious spires, immaculate lawns and vast gothic wooden doors are inherently more beautiful than smoky putrid power-station cooling towers, I think I prefer Didcot.

       Wilmslow

      Wilmslow, in Cheshire, is ridiculous. It’s known as ‘the Knightsbridge of the North’, but if Harrods tried to set up a branch there it would be refused planning permission as it would lower the tone of the area. When I first arrived to survey the place for one of the radio shows, I was slightly sceptical of its reputation as a haven for the prime of new money – its population couldn’t just be soap stars, ex-criminals and Premier League footballers; there aren’t enough of them to fill a whole town.

      To start with I went to Alderley Edge, where the cream of the area’s over-privileged twattery is said to live, and popped into the post office for a stamp. In the window, just as you might see in any post office, were dozens of little cards, which would normally advertise ‘Pram for sale’ or ‘Carpenter – no job too small’. But in this window the first card I saw said, ‘Ring me if you need a butler.’

      And that seems to be Wilmslow’s essence. As you enter the main street there’s a vast Aston Martin showroom, which boasts that it sells more cars than any other branch in Britain, including the one in Mayfair. I went inside, and it was hard to adjust, because none of the normal car-buying etiquette applies. If you circle the DBS 6.0 Volante model, throwing it the half-interested semi-scowl you’re supposed to adopt when sizing up a car for sale, kicking the tyres and scornfully looking under the bonnet as if to say, ‘You’ll be lucky if anyone takes this off your hands,’ and ask disparagingly, ‘How much you asking, mate?’, you’ll get the reply, ‘One hundred and ninety-one thousand, five hundred pounds sir.’

      The salesmen are so ‘high class’ they don’t even bullshit you. ‘They call this a four-seater, but I don’t know what size of person would fit in those back seats,’ one told me, adding, ‘But one feature we do offer with these models is the option of customising the upholstery to match the colour of your hat.’

      With not a hint of disdain, or that he was thinking ‘Don’t waste my time, serf, you couldn’t afford the fucking wing mirror,’ he demonstrated СКАЧАТЬ