How do you know if someone went to Oxford? “They tell you.”
It’s a Paul Whitehouse line and it’s true: sooner or later, they tell you. Unsolicited. No real context. They just pop it in the conversation, a tic of vanity, and leave you to be awed – at dinner parties, waiting rooms, funerals, train journeys, wherever.
What are you meant to say? Why do they feel compelled to flaunt this? They seem never to have left those dreaming spires.
There is still an assumption that Oxbridge is the place our “best” pupils should aspire to. So they apply like billyho – 20,000 applications for 3,200 places this year.
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