I’m happy to see the back of Oxford trashing
One of the traditions I never embraced during my time at Oxford was trashing: the post-exams festivities whereby first years and finalists are festooned with booze, food, silly string, shaving foam and – of late – paint and glitter.
When I was an undergraduate, between 1989 and 92, students defended the custom as going back to time immemorial. It did – namely the 1970s, when it meant fizz and flour (as it appears to at the tamer “other place”, Cambridge).
The first summer the prospect loomed over me, an historian at my college had spent all term brewing a bucket of booze, urine, vomit and offal to pour over his best friend. For a grammar-school girl, it smacked too much of The Young Ones’s Footlights College Oxbridge chant: “Rah rah rah, we’re going to smash the oiks”. Besides, as an alcoholic-in-training, pouring champagne over one’s head rather than down one’s throat felt like an egregious waste.
This is the line university authorities are taking in their latest attempts to eradicate the practice. Hitting Generation Z where it hurts, dons have declared trashing an eco-crime. A pained article in the student newspaper, Cherwell, asks: “Who are we really trashing?”
Clearing up costs the university more than £25,000 a year. The optics are less than brilliant at a moment when many have gone short of food. But, most importantly, how would St Greta view it?