Pembroke graduate Nick Hilton reflects on his time in this fair city

Leaving Oxford is an experience that 99 per cent of undergraduates have to undergo. Of course, there are always those people — who I’m sure have hated every word of every column I’ve ever written — who come to Oxford age 18 and leave in a casket. But, for most of us, the experience is more transient: we come, we grow, we leave.

My experience of Oxford started on a blisteringly sunny day back in October 2011. I wore green trousers (how times have changed!) and shuffled awkwardly amidst the throng of people who would become my friends, my acquaintances, and people with whom I avoid eye contact.

To think that that was almost three years ago is a scary proposition, not because it seems like a long time, but because it seems implausibly short.

The version of Nick who turned up on Pembroke’s Chapel Quad bares scant resemblance to the version of Nick who sat on that same Chapel Quad in black tie after Leaver’s Dinner, watching the fireworks exploding from Christ Church Ball.

What will I remember most from the years that were sandwiched between these bookends? Probably, and unavoidably, the week I spent in Examination Schools, scribbling frantically along with hundreds of other perspiring finalists. Those exams have ended up being the sum total of my achievements in Oxford — I was recently sent a sparkling hologrammed version of my ‘Academic Transcript’ — but, of course, tell only a fraction of the story.

My time in Oxford won’t come down to bombing on my coursework or acing Middle English. It’ll be fragments of people, places and experiences. I’ll remember tutorials, not individually, but as a giant intimidating blobmonster. I’ll remember my room as a hybrid version of my panoramic groundfloor complex from First Year, my shoebox-sized MDF nightmare from Second Year, and my neglected, criminally untidy Malory Towers-style dorm from Third Year.

I’ll remember the friends I lose contact with as a single pretentious, lightly bearded, stereotype. Because I’m part of the 99 per cent who are leaving Oxford decisively, I’ll also probably never live in the city again.

As a Londoner, Oxford has always seemed a strange city: deceptively large but socially polarised, stunningly beautiful but with an equally exquisite industrial apron, packed with students and tourists and yet never quite as irritating as that makes it sound.

It’s a city that, at times, feels almost claustrophobically small, and yet I watch the buses on St Aldate’s, in the words of Robert Lowell, ‘nose forward like fish’, without wondering too hard where they’re swimming too. What’s south of Folly Bridge? What’s north of St Hugh’s (surely nothing?)?

I will inevitably miss Oxford more than it misses me, but I’m glad that I had the opportunity to spend some years living in a city as confused and confusing as Oxford.

Back in London now, I already miss knowing that I could, at any time, hit a library with a stone. In all likelihood, after my Graduation Ceremony, it will be some time before I return to Oxford. I probably won’t be able to go into WH Smith’s on Cornmarket and flick through The Oxford Times, trying to find where they’re hiding my nonsense this week. If you write a column for a newspaper, but don’t read the column, does it make a sound? Thanks for reading and for the comments on the website — my tears keep me humble. I hope my successor toes the line.