#NewMayDays: Oxford is silly

My last two days of May I spent visiting a new restaurant (Las Iguanas, amaze), and experiencing the joy of trashing a finalist friend. Since the latter of these two things is a delightfully and stupidly Oxfordian practice, I thought I'd write about a couple of other sillinesses specific to my university. Trashing

When Oxford students finish summer exams - particularly finals - their friends celebrate by ambushing them outside the exam schools and pelting them with horrible things. #friendship. On Saturday I participated in the trashing of my musician friend Anna; I turned up very naively with confetti and a smile, her boyfriend brought the bubbly, and a Hawaiian lei and a party hat were provided by her housemates. Very tame - or so I thought. The proctors patrol the outside of the schools to make sure no food items are thrown in their vicinity and well they should, because by the time we hit Oriel Anna was covered head to foot in a mixture of shaving foam, shampoo, lentils, custard pie and birdseed. Thankfully someone decided the dogfood was a step too far, but strolling through Oxford on a packed Saturday and coating unsuspecting tourists who walked too close to our human dustbin with goo was a great Saturday activity.

Corpus Christi's Annual Tortoise Race

This is exactly what it sounds like. Corpus Christi's annual tortoise fair and accompanying tortoise race is so popular that I struggled to catch a glimpse through the jostling of iPhones, but I do know that its victors were the aptly titled Zoom and Shelly - both from Worcester College, suspicions of doping abound. I did remark that the tortoise selection all pleasingly reflected their respective colleges: Sampras from Christ Church was unnecessarily massive, Oldham and Foxe from Corpus were very well-mannered if unengaged, and Balliol defiantly stood out from the crowd by sending a human representative whose handicap was to eat an entire head of lettuce before he could begin. The most impressive entrant was probably Regent's Park's Emmanuelle who is rumoured to be over a hundred and still going strong, but ultimately Corpus Christi's tortoise keeper stole the show by rocking a green curdouroy jacket and a tortoise-encrusted bow tie. Aside from reptiles there was Pimms and ice-cream and even a bouncy castle; a very civilised afternoon out, if totally ridiculous.

Oxford is silly and we love it.