School shopper

Dearie me, I thought that Oliver’s online school shop was an expensive business.

This morning my own school shop sent me an email, with a list of things that I am going to want before my own academic career gets going in September.

I have got to have a gown. I am supposed to own this because of dining in College, I can’t just rent it, which was what Number One Daughter managed to do when she graduated. I have got to have my own, presumably with my name sewn in the collar in case I get intoxicated and leave it lying about.

It has got to be a special sort of gown, with the sleeves inexplicably sewn up so that you have to stick your hands through slits in the sides, wouldn’t you think a university would have worked that one out. This is an actual deliberate design, the university explains, and the student union remarks that the sewn up sleeves make handy storage places for storing packed lunches.

You can’t make your own, even if you think one black dress looks much like another. We have been firmly told that they don’t, and that one particular gown and no other is appropriate.

The gown I have got to wear costs a hundred and sixty quid, slightly less if I want the polyester version, which I don’t, we all remember the fuss about the trousers in the prison service.

If I pass I am supposed to have a gold silk hood as well.

I will worry about that when I get to it. There will be plenty of time to save up before then.

Cambridge has its own school shop, which not only does school uniforms for Cambridge, it also provides uniforms for peers, high sheriffs, orders of chivalry, judges, barristers and other similar pillars of society. Compared to the ermine-trimmed extravagances I discovered on other pages of their website, a hundred and sixty quid for a black dress with the sleeves sewn up is a mere bagatelle. There was a picture of the Queen wearing one of their outfits, with half a dozen people holding up the trailing bit behind her.

I will not need a trailing bit behind me. A Cambridge School Scarf will be sufficient for my requirements, and it was suggested that I might wish to have a hoodie which proclaims to the world that I am a Cambridge student.

I am not sure what I think about these. Obviously I want one very much, because it is an opportunity for showing off which can hardly be bettered, but it might be very uncool to actually wear it for school, where no showing off is necessary because everybody is a Cambridge student.

I want one anyway, I will have to save up. I can wear it in the taxi afterwards.

However, to my very great happiness, Madingley Hall, which is where I will be actually studying, and which turns out to be far more tolerant than I would ever have dreamed, has written to me and said that it will be perfectly all right for me to live in the camper van in the garden if I like, and they will even provide access to water, and wondered if I might like to borrow electricity.

I had never in my wildest dreams that Inclusivity Policies might stretch to include people like me. They never do usually. Hurrah for Cambridge.

Obviously they haven’t yet seen the camper van, which might prove to be a game changer, I am not sure that anybody is quite that inclusive. However, in the meantime it is magnificently good news, because college residency fees are absolutely through the roof, and I was already considering them with some trepidation when the email came through this morning.

I will have my own little camper van and a bicycle. I might even take Roger Poopy’s father, to guard the camper van and stop him from pining. Everybody needs an ancient, very smelly dog, maybe Cambridge won’t mind that either. They are very inclusive.

I am rather overwhelmed at the thought of living quietly in the camper van, in the garden of a Cambridge college, writing stories and taking the dog for slow ambles around the town. Anybody who doesn’t appreciate the loveliness of that can look at pictures of Madingley Hall on the mighty Internet, and be astonished at its magnificence.

I have been contemplating all of this today, mostly on my walk over the fells with the dogs this morning. I am not going to be away very much, but it will be more than I am used to, and I am going to miss the Lake District. Not the endless rain, obviously, but it will be very odd to start the day in the southern flatlands instead of milling about all over the rugged heath like some sort of modern-but-decrepit version of Catherine Earnshaw.

The book list has also arrived. It extends to about ten pages. I looked through it hopefully but discovered that I have not read a single one of them, nor even heard of most. There are hundreds of them, so it is a good job I will be On Site, because I am going to need their library.

I am not going to complain about Oliver’s school costs any more.

I have got my own.