JAMES DELINGPOLE
Why do our sweet boys behave
in these stupid ways?
My suspicion is that it has got consid-
erably more widespread than it was in my
day. But that could be just my memory play-
ing tricks, because now I think about it, my
own first-year excess was pretty epic. For the
inaugural (and only) dinner of the Christ
Church Slurred Speech Society, we drank
the following per head: a half bottle of cham-
pagne, a bottle of red, a bottle of white, half
a bottle of port. At the Beer Vedge, which
met every Monday night, we had to down
five pints in the college buttery, followed by
five tequila slammers in George’s Wine Bar.
What we didn’t generally do, though,
were these formal initiations. Also, back inthe day, I think it was mainly rugger buggers,
oarsmen and dissolute public schoolies
pathetically trying to relive Brideshead
Revisited who engaged in these vile antics,
whereas now they have become ubiquitous.
Why oh why do our darling boys do
these things? Partly, I think, it’s an excuse
to get away from girls, who, as I mentioned
last time, are becoming increasingly trouble-
some and censorious and politically correct.
Mainly, though, it’s because they are male.
When you’re of an age to go to university,
your body is primed for war. Sure, these days
you’re less likely to find yourself on a raidto steal the neighbouring tribe’s women and
cattle, or to invade the rival baron’s castle,
or do your bit in the trenches. But regardless
of how peaceful our culture becomes, those
primal instincts will always remain there just
beneath the surface.
At college these urges are usually chan-
nelled into drinking or sport, which is of
course a playful form of combat. As with sol-
diers off to war, the team’s esprit de corps is
key to their success. That’s why these bonding
initiations are so important: they’re at once
a shared rite of passage and a test of cour-
age, endurance and self-sacrifice by which
you demonstrate to your comrades that you
are a reliable member of the brotherhood.
And it is, it should be stressed, a volun-
tary process. Many anxious mums, I’m sure,
imagine that their sweet, innocent boys are
corrupted and compelled to do these things
by bullying second years. No. Boys do it
because they desperately wish to belong and
because they wish to live up to the standards
set by previous generations.
‘But do you have any idea just what hor-
rible things they’re expected to do?’ critics
of these rituals are wont to ask in anguished
newspaper articles. Duh. That’s the whole
point. If there wasn’t a degree of apprehen-
sion beforehand and a considerable amount
of suffering during and after, it wouldn’t be
an ordeal, would it?
This is why I think attempts by univer-
sities to clamp down on these activities are
doomed to flounder. Short of locking them
up in cells at night, it’s hard to think how
you can stop boys behaving like boys. You’d
be fighting against hundreds of thousands
of years of ingrained instinct. Whether it’s
11-year-old Papuan New Guinea boys scar-
ring their skin so that they resemble croc-
odiles, or choristers at my old prep school
having to leap off a high place into an ankle-
twisting rockery, or Bullingdon boys ritually
trashing a restaurant, or Durham under-
grads diving headfirst through the fork in a
tree trunk, it’s just chaps giving vent to their
inner berserk warrior — and proving them-
selves worthy of the tribe.W
hen the Fawn saw the selfies Boy
had taken in the aftermath of his
college football club’s initiation
ceremony, first she burst into tears, then she
was spittingly furious, then she finally settled
into a state of gnawing anxiety and despair.
‘There’s a lesson there, son,’ I told him.
‘And I hope you’ve marked it well. There are
some things you simply do not share with
your mother on the family WhatsApp group.’
I hated having to say this because we’re
one of those families that likes to be open
about stuff. If my kids are ever going to
end up doing drugs, say, I’d rather they did
so after some expert advice from their dad
— not guiltily and in secret at some scuzzy
dealer’s dive. But still there are occasions
when discretion is the better course — and
that photo was definitely one of them.
It showed Boy, eyes dull and skin all
blotchy from the previous night’s excess, his
once lovely blond hair looking as if it had
been attacked by a drunken ape wielding a
barber’s electric razor. (These haircuts are
known as ‘shlids’ — short for ‘shit lids’.)
‘Look, it could have been so much worse...’
he pleaded.
‘I get that totally. Just don’t tell your
mother or it’ll only upset her more,’ I replied.
The Fawn is not the only one. Right now
across the land parents with boys who’ve
just started at uni, mums especially, are agi-
tating about the heartbreaking story of poor
Ed Farmer, the sweet 20-year-old lad who
died of a cardiac arrest from alcohol poison-
ing after an initiation ceremony bar crawl in
his first term at Newcastle University.
‘There but for the grace of God goes my
boy,’ many of them will be thinking. And
up to a point they are right to be worried,
because these drinking rituals are rife. I
doubt there’s a university anywhere in Brit-
ain where it isn’t de rigueur for male under-
graduates to spend their first weeks downing
endless pints and shots, abasing themselves
in humiliating rituals (Ed Farmer’s culmi-
nated in having to drink from a pig’s head),
performing dangerous stunts — and con-
cluding their evening in a pool of vomit.
These bonding initiations are at once
a shared rite of passage and a test of
courage, endurance and self-sacrifice‘Do I drink to excess?
Hell, I’ll drink to anything!’