A noble lineage

I have never been much of a one for adopting a sense of institutional identity or institutional pride. My magnificent indifference to the competitive fortunes of my 'house' inspired a spiteful incomprehension in my housemaster throughout my school years. And although I mostly enjoyed my time at school and am grateful for the education I got there, I never felt the remotest sentimental attachment to the place: I have scarcely given it a second thought since I left, and I find the obsessive nostalgia of "old boys" associations quite baffling.

However, the devil is in the exceptions, as they say.

I do feel rather different about my old Oxford college, Corpus Christi. I don't have any love for it as an academic institution: I didn't like my tutors, was bored out of my wits by the work they gave me, and did almost nothing to advance my education while I was there - in that regard, it was four years of utmost misery. I never felt any sense of connectedness to the centuries of scholarship that had preceded me: some people get all dewy-eyed and mystically inspired about that sort of thing, but not me.

No, my sentiment for Corpus derives from the people I knew there, and the sense of 'home' that grew up around it. Far more than any of the other colleges at Oxford or Cambridge, I think, Corpus has a real feeling of community, even of 'family' about it. It's still one of the smallest colleges, if not the smallest. It's expanded quite a bit in the last couple of decades, but back in my day I think there were fewer than 200 undergraduates altogether, and about two-thirds of them lived in the main college buildings. So, everybody knew everybody. And I mean everybody. It was a little too claustrophobic for me, to be honest; most of my social activities were based on other colleges or university-wide organisations. But most of the friends I made elsewhere were people I'd met through friends in Corpus. And just about all of my very closest friends were from Corpus. It could scarcely be otherwise.

There was a 'band of brothers' bonding process in coming through those fraught few years together; so much shared suffering, and shared joy (all those parties!); going through the business of growing up together, emotionally as much as intellectually. The friends I made then are especially close to my heart, and I am still in regular touch with most of them twenty years on; they are about the only people whose doors are always open to me when I make my occasional trips back to the UK.

And so, I think, it is not so much with Corpus that I identify as with Corpuscles (as we quaintly term ourselves). Though my more distant predecessors are, for me, lost in a fog of historical irrelevance, the generations immediately before me, and those that have come after, I do feel a certain sense of kinship with, a recognition that we have shared a really exceptional, perhaps unique experience of university life.

I was therefore very gratified to learn earlier this week that my alma mater had just won the annual grand final of the long-running TV quiz show University Challenge. Coincidentally enough, the screening of their victory over Manchester University (and hence the public confirmation of their title as champions) happened on the very same day as my own recent bout of quiz recidivism. It seems to have been a particularly hard-fought encounter. We were behind for most of the match, at times quite badly behind; but we relentlessly reeled Manchester in, finally overhauled them near the end, and finished with quite a comfortable lead - having scored over 100 points on the bounce in the last five minutes or so. Jia you, Corpus!

The decisive factor in our victory, I gather, was our captain, a young lady called Gail Trimble - like me, a Classicist, although a considerably more earnest one, I think. It is being suggested that she is one of the most formidable competitors ever to appear on the show (in recent years, at least....): she consistently contributed at least twice as many points as her three team mates combined in each of the five rounds of the competition, and was extremely quick-on-the-draw for the crucial buzzer questions. Under that kind of pressure, almost anyone will have their mind go completely blank once in a while, or will at least occasionally pause or stumble over an answer (hesitations which, on the buzzer questions, can be ruthlessly penalised by the intimidating quizmaster, Jeremy Paxman); but in all the clips I've watched this week, Ms Trimble never seems to miss a beat - quite remarkable.

I am, of course, filled with a renewed sense of my own inadequacy in competitions of this sort, and am doubting whether I will ever dare to take part in a quiz again. Quizzers everywhere - British quizzers, anyway - are probably feeling the same.