Nick Hilton explains why he is reluctant to learn another language

Oxford is a magical place over Christmas. Fairy lights twinkle in every window. Children, wearing mittens, frolic down Cornmarket, whilst their parents, hot toddys in hand, watch on with beaming smiles.

It is a place of love, a place of beauty, a place of Christian charity… Of course, this is all in my imagination, because I never get to see any of this.

I left Oxford, before Christmas, the day after finishing my coursework paper — giving me about 18 wakeful hours to drink in the Christmas atmosphere — and returned to Oxford amidst a deluge that blocked off the Abingdon Road, and made the approach to Pembroke feel like drawing teeth. In a Lexus. The flooding in Oxford, which has been covered in agonising details by the local papers, is just one of the ways in which the city has started to feel inhospitable.

The giant body of water, desperately trying to separate me from ‘academia’, was just a mysterious ecological metaphor. This column rotates back to me via terribly composed academics, for whom the terms have blurred into years, and the years have blurred into careers. But for a ‘career student’ I can’t help but notice the fact that each week that passes has a different character. 0th Week: Fear. 1st Week: Panic. 2nd Week: Resignation. 3rd Week: Return of fear…etc. And, of course, my tutors don’t recognise any of this.

They’re just counting down the weeks until the start of their mandated sabbaticals, when they can abandon their snotty undergraduate charges and commence work on the ‘important’ book that will be cited, annually, in the theses of about five or six random freaks. One of my tutors had the audacity to suggest that it might be beneficial for me to learn some Afrikaans for my study this term. I couldn’t even dignify it with a response.

I have two months to do two papers; why would I start learning a language spoken by 15m people on the other side of the earth?

Not to mention the fact that all I got out of my slavish devotion to Spanish was a pass at GCSE and the ability to regurgitate a phrase that means ‘the economic development of cities is insufficient’. The divergence of student and teacher mentalities is more defined at this point that at any other time in my academic career.

At A-levels, teachers are assessed on their students’ results, which gives them a semi-cynical investment in their performance.

But, frankly, if you’ve already made it to professor and have a chaise longue in your office, what are you really working towards? A longer Wikipedia entry? A Blackwell’s book signing? Two chaises longue? And that’s why I’m feeling so misunderstood.

If only the floods had created an impenetrable moat around Oxford, cutting all the tutors off in a Lord of the Flies-style island…Even William Golding couldn’t have imagined what would’ve happened in an island community entirely made up of Piggys.

So please accept the fact that, as a frantic finalist, I have neither the cool head nor the designer facial hair of Seamus Perry. Jammer, I’m too busy learning Afrikaans to get a 2:1.