Last week an overseas student invited me over to her flat for dinner. As soon as I walked through the door I noticed a very meaningful atmosphere. Instead of dining t?te-? -t?te, she hand-fed me from a bowl as I lay on the sofa, putting her warm greasy fingers deep into my mouth. It was not unpleasant, but I didn't want to put her to all that trouble and offered to use a knife and fork instead. "Relax. Is my culture," she insisted. She made no small talk. She was wholly absorbed with the process of transferring the food from her bowl into my stomach. If I took a sip from my wine glass, she took a bottle from the fridge and topped it up immediately.
When the bowl was empty, she disappeared into her room, then reappeared, wearing her national costume, and performed a suggestive dance in front of my face. As I reclined there, wondering whether I was hallucinating, it dawned on me that all I was expected to do to reciprocate was to make the smallest gesture of encouragement, like making a bid at a fine art auction, and I could have the full business for the rest of the night.
I'm trying to join the middle classes. I was a dustman, but after a few years the joke wore off. It reached the point where I not only knew where every dustbin in the neighbourhood was, and what it looked like, but I could also predict what would be inside a lot of them; whether to expect ashes, disposable nappies, gin bottles, company reports or maggots. It got boring. I found myself retracing my own footsteps so exactly each week that in places the grass was worn away, resembling one of those visual aids for learning the foxtrot. There must be more to life than this, I thought. So at 34 I jacked in the bins, did two A-levels at the local tech, and a year later joined the throng of new barbarians surging through the breached defences of our once exclusive universities.
The term "mature student" suggests, among other things, that age will have lent assurance and poise to those choosing to go back to school later in life. Whatever they may lack in gaiety or quickness they will make up with stability and composure. In my case, I was so bewildered and upset by the post-modernist dogmas of some of the writers on the reading lists that I felt like bursting into tears and running home to Mummy.
Apparently there are no longer any universal absolutes such as truth, beauty or justice. It's all relative now, your honour. And the books were full of words I couldn't quite understand, such as "structure," "reification" and "trajectory," arranged in the most obfuscatory circumlocution imaginable. Grammar was treated as either redundant or an insidious form of fascism. Another word which I hadn't come across before was the ubiquitous "paradigm." When I looked it up in the dictionary and found that it means pattern or list, I thought it a confidence trick. I did get used to reading academese, however, and must admit to using the word "paradigm" once, in an essay at the end of my third year.
In our African history class, I sat next to Geoff, a retired bank official in his late 70s who had been in Africa for much of his life, ("It was wonderful, dear boy; just thousands of miles of fuck-all.") While the rest of us were having lively class debates about, for example, whether it is necessary to allude to the size of the San people's buttocks in the context of an African history lesson, Geoff would be fast asleep, mouth open, head forward, snoring gently, his blue biro still poised over his student jotter. Once, the unusual catatonic angle of his drooping head seemed to defy gravity and the lecturer joined the rest of the class in silent, fascinated contemplation of his sleeping form.
Having someone of Geoff's age around was a tonic. When I compared myself with the crowds of supple, arrogant youths thronging the place, I felt old and depressed: whenever I bumped into Geoff, I felt instantly invigorated.
Geoff's love of the ladies hadn't been dimmed in the slightest by his advancing years. I had always imagined that one of the benefits of growing old-perhaps the only benefit-was to be released at last from lust's iron grip; but Geoff put me straight about that one. "The older one gets, the prettier they become, I'm afraid," he said sadly-and kept falling hopelessly in love, like a doting mallard. All we male mature students did likewise.
The college attracted a large proportion of international students and the range of female beauty assailing the senses all day long was staggering. Henry, a disabled Mancunian, went off his grub for weeks after a blond Russian girl smiled at him in the coffee bar; and George spoke for us all when he complained that by about four o'clock in the afternoon he'd had about as much of it as he could possibly take, and had to look at the ground after that.
The blokes I went to football with were agog, imagining that I ought to be spending my time springing from woman to woman like a mountain goat. Unfortunately, I was probably the first person in post-war Britain to spend three years at a university and remain chaste. They eventually gave up asking me brightly whether I had "got hold of anything yet." Disillusionment turned to disaffection. "You need help," they said, disgusted. n
Jeremy Clarke
Modern manners
November 20, 1995
