Only In Oxford TT06 Part 2

One of Oxford's many wonderful eccentricities is that students must sit their exams in Sub-Fusc. This basically means for guys it's a suit, white shirt, white bow tie and gown and very smart black and white for girls. The regulations must be strictly adhered to (there is no room for flexibility) right down to the need to carry in a mortar board (which one is not allowed to actually wear, I hasten to add).

A tradition which goes hand in hand with this is that of wearing carnations in the lapel - white indicates it's your first exam, red indicates it's your last and pink is worn for the ones in the middle. It is the norm for someone else to buy the carnations for you and it fell to me to buy them for a friend who started this week.

This had amusing consequences when I met someone from the real world the other afternoon; the conversation went as follows:

"Where are you off to?"
"I'm off to the library, but first I need to buy some carnations"
"Oooh - who's the lucky lady?"
"No it's not like that! They're just for one of my male friends!"

Some explanation rapidly followed as I realised that beyond Oxford it is not normal to just 'buy carnations for male friends'.

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