Inpursuitof

I’ve long since thought that bragging about how much you know is something a person grows out of some time between 6 and 14, as having their head flushed repeatedly down the toilet kicks in and they get wise to the fact no-one like’s a smart arse.

I was rudely disappropriated of this perception at my first tutorial for the Open Degree that I’ve been worming my way through. For the first twenty minutes I thought that the underwhelming feeling of being out of my depth was the result of my taking the same, slightly lax, approach to this as I did to my schoolwork. Not lax like failing, but lax like hit-and-miss attendance to classes and leaving my essays until I’m scraping under the wire like a limboing penguin. Awkwardly and without the benefit of knees but ultimately with great panache, in case you were wondering.

Stares of confusion greeted me from the 5 men inside, all at least 35 years my senior and doubtless wondering if I’d simply got lost from the university creche. It was soon apparent that these chaps are competitive about their learning, that they attend tutorials, post on forums and probably took the whole darn course just to put out their opinions and cling to them aggressively. They reference authors and their works by shorter and shorter acronyms or nicknames to prove their superiority, until I fear they’ll start speaking in barely comprehensible half-noises. In short, these are the men that play a trump card comment, settle back and snort with a derisive chuckle that you haven’t thought of it first. 

This testicle-off was mildly muted by the late arrival of another woman, an apparently staunch Catholic who hissed, actually hissed, at me when i mentioned the Da Vinci Code. I took a quick look around the room and confiscated the unlit pitch-soaked wooden torch in the corner before she could chase me down the corridor.

I think the whole experience can be summarised by the vague quarter-page of notes I have on the topic of “invented traditions” and the half-page of dense scribblings I took on the people present. Well, I guess you win some and you lose some.

1) My nan, for possibly the first non-goodbye cuddle we’ve had in my memory

2) 7p to a busker. Look, it’s just before payday and the man was playing a didgeridoo.

3) A mother with her baby who watched me try to poke my finger up my girlfriend’s nose in a pub.