004 — Red carnation

Finishing Finals, feminist fails — and the choices we make.

Welcome back to The Notebooks. If you missed the last, this is where we were.

If you’re coming in fresh, The Notebooks is a piece of long form writing, based on a true story, served in weekly instalments. You can read it yourself or listen to me read it (audio linked above).

Pieces in The Notebooks may have a song-matching, like wine and cheese.

Song-match this piece with: Mumford and Sons, Little Lion Man. You can listen to the extra audio note in the audio recording if you want to know why.

Not your quick-release serotonin fix, The Notebooks are in it for the long haul.

Now re-opening The Notebooks to June 2006….

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

Remember how good it feels sometimes to be really shit-faced?

Just drunk and unshackled and on the cusp of 21 and free of exams and light as Prosecco bubbles, squirted all over you on Merton Street?

Feeling your whole life ahead of you. You can be whatever you want.

Imagining, with incalculable hubris: I am one of the chosen.

Two drunk guys push each other. They spin apart. One of them retreats ten feet and then retreats another twenty feet and yells “motherfucker” at the other, who is also retreating. His retainer or something plastic in his mouth falls out into the street. He walks out in front of a Thames Valley Police car to retrieve it. The cop cruises past uninterested. They’re out in force tonight, like the drunks.

There are flashing blue lights on Magdalen Bridge — someone drunk in the river, still in suit and bowtie, voluntarily, it seems — and there’s a press of people outside the Half Moon at the top of St Clements. Some still in sub-fusc (I’ll get to that in a minute) but bowties hanging loose now and stockings laddered. Cowley is a shit show, packs of roaming lads and half-dressed hags.

The light is that perfect late evening June light where the sun has set but the glow seems to have diffused out and got stuck in the leaves. It refracts dreamily off the Cotswolds stone, oolitic limestone quarried locally since the fourteenth century. The hollow of Oxford lies on a former seabed and all the stones were first laid down as carpets of shells in shallow interglacial seas. They retain a luminous opalescent quality. It’s still oddly bright, but in a purplish way.

The sky is usually low in Oxfordshire, a uniform dull grey under permanent cloud cover, but today the sky was high and blue. You’d never know we’re in the Midlands.

It was a nice day to be finishing Finals.

I’m not sure where more specifically than that we are now. We’ve roamed widely tonight and now we’re somewhere out of the city a bit, out past Jericho, a pub by the river that is done with us and really wants us to leave now.

Kind of like the whole of Oxford, really, come to think of it.