Students on a train

I am on a train about to leave Paddington, the only occupant of a line of three seats. Similarly, the triple seat facing me also only contains one passenger — a suited man in his late 50s speed-reading an academic book.

“Bet he gets off at Oxford too,” is my sole deduction, before returning my attention to my noticeably less intellectual reading matter.

He is reading about syntactic paradigms, whilst I’m reading about Melanie Sykes getting a new tattoo.

Just as the train doors electronically shluuussh close, a pack of students occupy the four remaining seats in our previously isolated republic of calm.

The suited academic and I exchange a fleeting gaze. Two strangers connected by disappointment; brought together by a shared grieving for our lost tranquillity. Our hope of a peaceful train journey now atrophied. Our dared hopes for a journey spent in quiet rueful introspection, beset with reading opportunities, now lost.

The students are noticeably young, brash and loud. They appear to be compiled of two separate girl/boy couples, as if Noah had mistakenly ordered twice for his ark’s breeding pair of ‘shouty annoying student-types’.

“Oxford is like soooo supposed to be intimidating, ya, but it like so isn’t,” announces the taller of the two females as we pull out of the station. As becomes quickly evident, she feels the need to announce a lot of things. Very loudly.

I consider getting off at Slough and waiting 30 minutes for the train behind. Merely moving to another carriage would not have worked — they would still have been audible. An equally loud brown-haired girl puts on a woolly hat, even though the temperature of the carriage — cramped with people — would be sufficient to cook boil-in-the-bag rice.

Music leaks from the headphones of a passenger two seats away, but even he cannot avoid the tumultuous din of student voices.

These include informing the entire carriage of the minutia of woolly hat girl’s breakfast muffin preferences (“And I got like only four bits of chocolate in my white chocolate and raspberry muffin.”).

This is fascinating stuff, but surely she should retain an anecdote this good until she’s interviewed on Desert Island Discs. She has probably already announced the information on Facebook and Twitter.

They reveal everything to the train. So loudly that passengers waiting on stations where we do not stop will hear them as we whoosh past their platform. The four are in the Sixth Form at a private school and are coming to Oxford for college interviews, elaborating at length how the college will wither in grateful acceptance of their presence.

The two boys forcibly inform everyone on the train: “This college will probably be begging us to study there — so I’m not going to say ‘yes’ to the first Oxford college to give me an offer.”

His male friend agrees.

“My sister went to Cambridge. She’s given me something we call ‘cue card bull’. I just say barely believable bollocks about how it is my destiny to study at Oxford.”

All four collapse into laughter at this proposal.

One of the girls, still continuing her compelling muffin monologue (“I had, like, too many raspberry seeds.”), then informs everyone throughout the entire train’s eight carriages about last month’s skiing trip. Although with a voice as loud as hers, the resort was probably closed all week due to avalanche warnings.

“The college dons who interview you can’t breathe outside their Oxford bubble,” she declares. “I’m like so pleased I plan a gap year to get out of academia. I like so need a year off.”

A year off from what? Instagramming your friends, pointlessly uploading pictures of yourself onto Facebook and reaching Level 6 of Grand Theft Auto?

At Reading a woman in her mid-20s joins our carriage and sits opposite. Clutching meretriciously coloured designer bags, she is wearing all black. Her skirt is so short it is on the cusp of failing to exist. As passengers disembark, she claims both seats next to her with bags.

An elderly man asks if he can sit down. She refuses to move the bags – or look up from her texting — and remarks, “There are other seats on the train.”

Even the four students notice this discourteous conduct.

“Ancient manners is like so important in interviews,” hollows Hat Girl.

“Yeah,” agrees Shouty Boy, “cos at Young Fogey College they are all living in the past.”

All four fall into hysterics, repeating as much of the phrase ‘Young Fogey College’ as they can say before laughing.

After a platform wait so long it is likely the station had to build it first, starting with submitting a request for planning permission, we arrive in Oxford.

“Just spin a load of bull about upholding proud Oxford traditions, believing that any relationship I have with my college won’t be for three years, but for life. You know, all the bull you can deliver whilst keeping a straight face,”

advises one of the shouty males.

They all nod collectively like chickens pecking feed off the ground.

“Oh, and mention your dad is a regular benefactor to his old college — that’s a complete lie, obviously, but if they get a whiff of the word ‘benefactor’ then you’re in.”

The suited man opposite, whose demeanour somehow manages to pull off an enviable combination of avuncular yet headmasterly, gets down a large umbrella and expensive looking coat from the luggage rack, before speaking for the first time.

“I’ll probably see you four later,“ he says, joining the conversation of the four students and matching them for ballsy confidence, if not volume.

“Err . . . hello?” says the taller male student, clearly startled but also dismissively recalcitrant towards a stranger talking to him. “I’m the Principal of [better not say] College, Oxford, a.k.a. Young Fogey College.”

Their faces.

Richard O. Smith writes comedy for film, TV and Radio 4. His books include The Man With His Head in the Clouds, Oxford Student Pranks, As Thick As Thieves. Funny football novel The Unbeatables (Signal Books, 2015) is available now as a paperback and eBook.