Fire door keep shut

I have a friend with blond curls who studied in Cambridge. Four winters ago I visited him for the first time. I had fantasised about long corridors where the smartest young people in the world held lively conversations between paintings of dead geniuses. I wondered how I would feel in the excess of the English über-university. Precisely because I had become so attached to the grey concrete of the Woudestein campus, because it allows you to shine so nicely yourself.

The first thing I learned was that my friend studied at a college just outside the centre on a hill, next to other newer, less chic colleges. ‘New’ is relative, because his college was older than our uni. On his campus I saw 1970s architecture that had been refurbished in recent years. Square buildings and stylish lampposts. Does that sound familiar?

During his student years my friend lived at the university. At that time, he shared a kitchen and bathroom with five others. Boys, girls, humanities and sciences all mixed together. I was not used to this, nor to the fluorescent tubes in every corridor. What stood out most was that you could not leave a door open. On every door a round blue sign with ‘Fire door keep shut’.

On that first visit I went with him to a dinner where you could eat three courses for very little, a formal. We bought a bottle of white wine at Sainsbury’s, as drinks were not included. I wore a black silk Marc Jacobs dress. The dress had belonged to my mother. The fabric at the bottom was woven so that in the alternating shine and matte of the silk a black-on-black polka dot pattern appeared. He wore a suit or something, I have long forgotten. The dress code was quite strict. If you were not wearing the correct dinner jacket, as a man you could simply be asked to leave the hall. Sadly this did not mean that everyone looked good. It was easy to look bad while fully within the rules.

The dinner was held at long wooden tables in a hall with wooden panelling. It was a quiet evening; there were no professors at the high table, which stood at right angles on a raised platform. I was a little nervous about the food. Earlier that day at lunch in the buttery I had seen a green slush that is normal for many Britons: mushy peas.

The food was classic, the ‘good piece of meat’ at its centre. Coffee afterwards was served in a cup and saucer with the university’s logo on it. My friend collected this crockery and slipped the saucer into his inside pocket. We quickly left the hall. The door closed behind us: “Fire door keep shut.”