I’d rather be a leper than a tab. But seriously, who gives a fuck? Oxford, Cambridge, Cambridge, Oxford.  It’s all the same really. Every time I’ve visited the Other Place, I barely noticed I was away. Oxbridge students all went to the same schools, and we’ll all end up in the same jobs. And when we retire, we’ll still be swapping shit banter about which uni was better. You’ll see.

So better doesn’t matter – but Oxford’s great by any measure. It’s big, boisterous and teeming with what your Mr Griffin would refer to as “ethnics”. I live in a district called Cowley, where I’m sandwiched between a sex shop and a mosque. How’s that for multicultural?

Against this backdrop, student life plays out in Technicolor. Hacks stab each other in the back; dons stab each other in the front, and all the while love, hate and envy swirl among our dreaming spires.

This week, Oxford’s Tory club was rocked with scandal at a party it held to congratulate itself on re-affiliating with the University.

The Oxford University Conservative Association is more Tory than the Tory Party, for the simple reason that they’ve never had to seem electable. So it was no surpise when the University suspended OUCA last summer for telling racist jokes – Google “Why can’t Stevie Wonder read?” if you want a sample of their material. OUCA were put in the naughty corner for a full year, unable to advertise at the Freshers' Fair or use the word "University" in their name. But when their "exile" ended last Sunday, OUCA cracked open the port and started partying like it was 1659.

OUCA must regret inviting outsiders though, because when a female student stood up to give a speech, a King’s College student started shouting her down. The foppish visitor then let rip with comments including, “Shush, you're a woman”, “Get back to the dishes love” and, “Kitchen! Kitchen! Kitchen!”

Embarrassingly, no-one on the OUCA committee tried to stop the heckler, giving him a free platform for several minutes until he was confronted by an ordinary student.

Just in case you come across this guy in the future, the heckler’s name is Vitus van Rij, and he is a pillock. See if you can get Cambridge Feminist Society to book him as a speaker. It won’t be pretty, it might get violent, but it’ll definitely be funny. Ha ha ha!

Although Vitus isn’t an Oxford student, that detail will be lost on many observers. The delicious irony of throwing a bash to proclaim, “Yay, we’re great, we’re not racist anymore” and then having it wrecked by a chauvinist toff is too good a story for nuance.

In other news, exams are being held in the high stress environment of the term in which make or break moment for careers and culmination of blah blah blah etc.

Yes, finals are dull. And for the duration, finalists are dull. So it’s not surprising that when they step blinking out of their last exam, they want to release their pent up tedium and, like, really go wild, y’know? In Oxford it’s called trashing, the throwing/spraying/smearing of assorted fluids on examinees to welcome them back into the real world. So far so sticky.

But while Freud would go nuts debating this rite-of-passage cum rebirthing experience, the University has stuck to its 800 year old tradition of shitting on merriment. The Proctors claimed this term that the annual post-exams clean-up costs over £100,000 and have banned celebrating with anything other than mineral water or something.

Now, £100k is a lot of money. Unless students have been trashing each other with cement, the Uni must have been scrubbing the pavements with Krug to drop that kind of cash. I don’t believe it for a second.

Besides, Oxford students have to wear academic dress to exams, so most of the clean-up costs fall on the victims themselves. I recently saw a student take an Armani suit to our local dry-cleaners. It was coated in a sort of glittery cake mixture, with what looked like moisturiser oozing out of the pockets. The proprietor, a grizzled Palestinian immigrant, laughed at him then burst into tears.

One enterprising lawyer checked the ban’s small print and discovered that Super Soakers are technically allowed, but the trend hasn’t caught on. In general, finalists are forced to duck into alleyways for their traditional trashing, out of sight of the University’s Fun Police.

After your last exam, you’ve probably got enough on your plate with that mindfuck cocktail of alcohol and impending adulthood. You shouldn’t have to worry about getting collared by an angry Proctor. The University should treat trashing like drugs and prostitution. Legalise it, and the problem will go away. For sure.

The View From Oxford will be returning in Michaelmas 2010. Watch this space.

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