Today, Jesus Envy. Not to be confused with Jerusalem Syndrome or Messiah Complex or other manifestations of religious hysteria. If you are looking for sister distempers, think Magdalene Fever, or Corpus Christi Bile. All examples of wishing you had gone to an older and therefore more venerable Cambridge college than the one you are at.
Should you already be a member of Jesus (founded 1497), or Magdalene (founded 1428), or Corpus Christi (founded 1352), you won't of course suffer from any of the above. Or indeed from envy in any form, since he who goes to Magdalene or Corpus Christi need envy no man. But if you find yourself at Fitzwilliam (founded 1869), or Churchill (founded 1960), or, God forbid, the college I went to, in protection of whose anonymity I will call Pipsqueak College (founded XXXX, yours is an unhappy lot.
The occasion for these thoughts on the invidiousness of the college system is the news that Cambridge University intends to throw up three new ones on a site to the north west of the city, close to where two major roads and a motorway converge, in other words barely in Cambridge at all [click for THES report]. Beckham College, Madonna Centre of the Holy Kabbalah, and Trinny and Susannah Hall. That's the rumour anyway. Desperate measures. Because no one who fancies Cambridge as his alma mater is going to accept a place in a glass and steel shed half-way to Huntingdon.
Call it the University of Fen Drayton and you might be in with a chance. There are people who will go to places of learning they have never heard of in the same spirit of self-defeating bitterness that makes them wear baseball caps backwards and dress in prison clothes. Call it the masochism of our times. But a park-and-ride Cambridge college misses the point of Cambridge altogether - which is to be hugger-mugger around a handful of lanes and to ride your bicycle where monks and scholars of the Middle Ages first rode theirs.
Whatever its intellectual and moral merits, Pipsqueak (founded XXXX) disappointed me from the moment I realised it wasn't only a newcomer, but was situated, as is the way with newcomers, in the wrong part of town - handy for the station but a five-minute walk or more from King's Parade. In the Cambridge I had read about, undergraduates hung out of their windows in King's College (founded 1441) and hallooed over the rooftops of the Old Schools to their friends in Gonville and Caius (founded 1348). From Pipsqueak (founded XXXX), the only people you could halloo to were the drunks coming in off Parker's Piece, one of whom, once the sadness of it all had sunk in, was as often as not me.
To be so close, and yet so far - there was the pity of it. And with recency of buildings and provinciality of position went Johnny-come-lately manners in those functionaries who in other colleges ministered to undergraduates as though they were nobility, but at Pipsqueak sought only to draw out our commonness. I had been led to believe that a "gyp" would make my bed each morning, and from the name I deduced servility, laced with a degree or two of impertinence perhaps, but never so much as would blur the social and intellectual distinctions between us.
What I got was a "bedder", a Sairey Gamp style of woman who was too large to squeeze into my rooms other than sideways, and who addressed me, with what I took to be unwarranted Fenland familiarity, as "naughty boy". Whether this was an allusion to the smell of stale cigarettes and sherry she encountered whenever she edged crabwise and puffing into my bedroom - that's if you can imagine an out-of-breath crab - or because I always left my clothes strewn on the floor, with my shirt still inside my jacket and my jacket still inside my academic gown, or because I made a point of being asleep when she called, I never found out. In the 12 months she was my bedder I never addressed a word to her, so thoroughly did she disappoint my expectations.
Snooty of me, you say? Of course it was snooty of me. I had gone to Cambridge to look down on everyone who hadn't gone to Cambridge and there I was being looked down on by everyone who had got further into Cambridge than I had. Apart from an ex-Barnardo's boy with a stutter I knew at Fitzwilliam (founded 1869), my bedder was the only person left in Cambridge I could feel superior to.
In the matter of moral tutelage too, I considered myself hard done by compared to Christ's and Corpus Christi men. From all I heard, a moral tutor in an old college invited you for dinner in his rooms, opened his best claret, conversed with you into the early hours, put his arm around your shoulder and if he didn't want you for himself - or after he had had you for himself - would suggest you for his daughter. My moral tutor had so little interest in me for himself or for his daughter - or for his bedder come to that - that he never once remembered my name or understood what I was doing calling on him, and invariably took me to be Scottish.
"So what I can do for you, Macleuchar?" he would ask. "It's Jacobson." "Why, what's Jacobson done to you?" "Nothing, what I meant..." "Excellent, McWheeble. Don't forget to come and see me next term."
It's in the walls, you see. It's in the vintage of the ivy. If your college isn't half a millennium old it won't know how to behave. Cambridge should be shrinking not expanding. They shouldn't have had me there. They should have said it's Corpus or it's nowhere, McTavish. You go to Cambridge to penetrate the nation's social mystery and to stay there, like a spider at the centre of its web. Anything less is plain misrepresentation. Whatever else you want to say about elitism, it doesn't work when it's for everybody.