The Oxford Posh-O-Meter

1. Where do you live?

A) College accommodation. Are you kidding? Look at the fucking beautiful quad! I’m literally in Hogsmeade.

B) Cowley or Blackbird Leys. Living in an impoverished neighbourhood has such an intriguing energy, and adds to my cultural capital.

C) Cranham, Juxon, Albert, Rathborne, Observatory, Walton. My hood is Jericho ya bish.

D) Geneva. My private jet commute to Exam Schools is really not that long.

2. Where do you normally eat?

A) In my college hall, instagramming the shit out of me and my food so all my home friends see how I wear a gown to dinner!

B) Alpha Bar in the covered market, where for £5 I can get any type of quinoa, chickpea or just lumps of grass in a box.

C) Itsu – the salmon & tuna tartare is to die for.

D) Bill’s, the Old Parsonage, the Randolph – anywhere to pick up something quick and cheap.

3. You want to catch up with an old friend. Where do you go?

A) Four Candles for two snakebites and a Blue Lagoon.

B) Pezevenk! – the new Turkish cafe on Cowley Road, serving exclusively organic homous.

C) The Turl Street Kitchen, where the 250ml Elderflower & Ginger Presse is a snatch at £4.95.

D) A drawing room in Peck Quad, Christ Church for some Port.

4. Where do you normally work?

A) My College Library.

B) The SSL, whose soulless, rectangular interior serves as an ironic comment on the New Brutalism architecture of the 1960s.

C) The Rad Cam, which provides enough friends of mine to round up every twenty minutes to take a break in the easily accessible Missing Bean.

D) The Chinese Institute, the closest library to Jericho, so I never actually have to leave Walton Street.

5. What do you say when something is annoying you?

A) “Fuck me, stop being such a muppet son.”

B) “Me no come fi wine wit no slabba-slabba girldem.”

C) “That is so bum out! I’ve had an absolute shocker, Anastasia.”

D) “Maaate, I am rutting so hard. The yat from last night won’t text me.”

6. For you, a big night out means…?

A) Ring of Fire → Spoons → Park End → Hassan’s → walk home at half past midnight. Bish bash bosh, up in time for lectures.

B) Mooching round Cellar, looking as unimpressed as possible at the DJ’s attempt to fade a 135bpm Boddika song into a 120 bpm Bonobo track. How can the DJ think both Tech House and Prog House are going to maintain a coherent, musical narrative in the same set?

C) Pon de Adidas Original and get down to whatever Simple’s Nick Gladwin has invited me to on Facebook.

D) Coked to the gills in Bridge VIP.

7. The ‘Bullingdon’ to you means…?

A) …the thing I’ve read about in the Daily Mail, and my home friends in Solihull taunt me that I’m in it. God, those stereotypes are so lazy, aren’t they? Thank God Oxford’s full of really normal, chilled out people like me.

B) …Bullingdon Road in Cowley, where I visit one of the Ruskin studios in my Boy London sweatshirt even though I’m not a Art student. This shows that art is not just a degree, but a state of mind.

C) …the Bullingdon Arms on Cowley Road, now known as the Art Bar, where I go every fortnight to bump some of that Rose Hill ketamine up my Cheltenham Ladies’ nostrils, to DJ mktpkt-xYxY, who I think is ‘sick’ after streaming one track of theirs on Sound Cloud. Safe.

D) …the Bullingdon club, where I drink red wine that is older than St Catz, while playing games of Monopoly for actual pieces of Britain. I managed to join the club once I’d dropped into conversation with Arturio von Fortesvatch from St Benet’s that my Viscount of an Uncle once knocked up Lady Grantham.

8. To you, feminism is….

A) …Laurie Penny talking on Newsnight.

B) …the only sufficient movement to emancipate the human mind from the hegemonic patriarchy, whose oppressive mechanisms pervade society, denying the ability of truly free-thinking and freely-acting individuals.

C) ….manifested in you taking control, and making sure the guys you pick up at Jericho house parties always make you finish. You’re fed up of spending your youth serving up blozzers at dawn at different public school 18ths in the Home counties, only for the Marlborough or Radley boy(s) not to return the favour.

D) …a good idea! You think women should be able to have jobs.

9. Dropping….

A) ….out? Half your school might have done so at 16, but you’re a workaholic and have got this far – there’s no chance you’d give it up now.

B) ….two tabs on Portmeadow was a #NANG way to ease those 5^th week blues.

C) ….tonight? No, I’ve going to the football tomorrow, and I hate going to Stamford Bridge on a comedown.

D) ….out of Oxford might be necessary, as Tatler want me to go full-time as their Henley Regatta correspondent, and it’s hard to churn out essays on Lucretius with such a raging coke habit.

Mostly As, Not Posh

Coming from a state school, you’re probably quite clever as you didn’t have an 800 year-old public school with a history of academic excellence and child abuse to mould you into a Oxbridge robot with a ‘passion’ in theology.

Some of you As consistently refer to your old school ‘holding you back’, and the horrors of your sixth form classes, painting a picture of 180 students crammed into one single room without any pens or pencils, but only chalk to scribble your thoughts onto walls. Was it really like that? We get it, you worked hard to get where you are!

Many As are typically full of college spirit, given you drink, eat, work, and experience all the elements of Uni Unay! within the walls of your college. How great is the pooling system at always putting people in the one college where their best friends happen to go too? Huh. You once spoke to someone not from your college on a night out, and your friends slightly resent this, calling him/her your ‘outside friend’.

The money you save from always eating in college and predrinking Sainsbury’s Gin is spent on fancy dress costumes for the coup de grâce of your social calendar – college bops. For what else would you talk about in the first hour of the party if not people’s outfits?

Mostly Bs, Alternative posh

You’re the rollie-smoking, clubnight-running, dungaree-wearing types who took university as a chance to reinvent yourself with a new identity.

The thought of being branded as one of the Made in Chelsea glitterati revolts you, because they go out in West London and think that Disclosure is “deep house”. But equally the thought of being seen getting crunk in a onesie at a bop would make your hero J Dilla do full 360 degree somersaults in his grave.

Resenting both ends of the spectrum, your love of weed, bad UK grime and your white North London attempts at patois places yourself in the ‘edgy crew’, a phrase which immediately shows that in truth Oxford has no such thing.

Over the vacation your Mum asked you why you’re still wearing a tie-dye rucksack at Christmas dinner, and why you refuse to watch any film that isn’t a documentary.

Mostly Cs, Posh rank and file

This is the run-of-the-mill Carhartt posh person, from the Marlboro Gold public school factory which churns out Oxbridge students year after year. The Cs are the most common type of posh, and despite speaking like their parents, it could be worse – at least they don’t also dress, vote and hunt like their parents (see Ds).

Cs spend their holidays going off in a bucket hat to whichever festival in Eastern Europe features the most artists from the Eton Messy/Majestic Casual pages. Sometimes the pressure and emotions of term time can get just a little too much, and within a couple of hours there’s an Addison Lee car waiting outside your door to whisk you back to North London for the weekend.

Without being in the Bullingdon or the Stoics, the Cs will happily set up a college drinking society, pop along embarassed-but-not-really to the Grid Iron, and enthusiastically smash the annual summer Home Counties Public School Reunion, or as it’s also known, the Piers Gav.

The Cs tend to be quite smug, as they see themselves as cooler than the red-trousered Ds, more likeable and less holier-than-thou than the Bs, and unlike the As, they know that however little they try in life, they have a public school network that will probably sort them out with a living.

Mostly Ds, Ultimate Posho

Now there’s a line where someone who’s just a posh person becomes a ‘posho’. A posh person’s poshness goes as far as their background, their school and their voice, none of which they can really help. A posho on the other hand really indulges in their privilege, because why the hell not? They own most of Kent for fuck’s sake.

For the posho, everything in life is either ‘classic’ or ‘rut’. For example, wearing chinos and brogues to a nightclub – classic! Wearing a shirt without a collar – rut. Shooting animals in tweed – classic! The end of the British empire – fucking rut mate.

Oxford’s perfect for this type as there’s almost a black tie event every day of the week to go to. In fact, most of type Ds are guys (or gentlemen rather, forever about 57 years old), though there are always a couple of swanning, ghostly females who orbit the males about a yard behind them, with their chin held higher than their forehead.

You might have seen the Ds in Bridge VIP one night, and you’ll wake up hungover the next morning and there’s already a black-and-white photo on Facebook of them beaming, holding a Bloody Mary in a cocktail bar in Paris, from ’10 minutes ago’. How the fuck is this possible?!

There’s literally nothing that can go wrong for the Ds, who swan through life bullet-fingering to Breach’s ‘Jack’ with a venison-filled belly popping out of their Barbour. And there’s no reason for these people to ever be sad, or care what other people think of them – they’ve inherited that much money. Especially when one of the girls from the Stoics’ drinks has agreed to tell people she’s their girlfriend in return for a holiday home in the Cotswolds.