I was at University for three years and, as far as I can remember, attended one lecture. I would imagine that they laid on at least three lectures a day for us, but I preferred to stay in bed, eating crisps and making my own amusement.
And if I was going to get out of bed and stop examining myself very thoroughly for testicular cancer, but mainly for penis cancer, I would spend my time writing jokes and skits with Stewart Lee or going to the library to gaze longingly at women that I was never going to have the courage to actually speak to.
It was a fine life.
I never imagined then that I would pay good money to go to a lecture, but that is what I did tonight as I headed to Pushkin House in Bloomsbury Square to attend a lecture entitled "Rasputin Resurrection" which was put on by the Oxford University Society – London Branch. Admittedly I was mainly going because I am hoping to write (more) comedic material about this historical figure, but that is still one step closer to being an academic.
As you can imagine there were quite a lot of elderly and eccentric individuals at the event. Academia either attracts slightly unusual people or turns people slightly unusual, but it’s a good unusual. It's an unusual I like. The kind of unself-conscious unusual that you spot at Dr Who signings. People who like what they like and don't give a fuck about trying to pretend to fit in with some perceived norm.
My friend Ben, who was in the year below me at University (and also appeared in just his pants, playing Tsar Nicholas in Ra-Ra-
Rasputin), accompanied me and for a long time I thought we were going to be the youngest people in the room. But a couple of younger ladies eventually came in. We were all wearing badges with our name and college and year of matriculation (when we started at the University) on them. Later we would talk to the young women and I ruefully noticed that whilst I matriculated in 1986, they had done so in 2005, 19 Bridesheadian generations after me. "There’s no hiding the fact that we’re old," I told them, "Thanks to these badges."
One of them looked at Ben’s badge and said,"Oh yes, 1987… that was the year I was born."
When I had started University this woman had been nothing but an egg, and maybe a sperm.
Which was a grounding experience and I didn't feel as young as I had before they had arrived.
I don’t know if all University lectures were as funny, interesting and entertaining as tonight's, because this was only the second one I have been to. It was better than the other one. Or at least at a more reasonable hour. Plus afterwards there was a bar doling out vodka, which might have enticed me to better attendance if that had happened back in the mid-1980s. The talk was mainly about Felix Yusupov, who my potential script is about, the man at the centre of the plot to kill my hero Rasputin. He had attended University College, as had my friend Ben (though not at the same time) and much of the talk was about that period of his life, which I didn’t know too much about. Yusupov had studied the unusual combination of English and Forestry apparently Dr Mike Nicholson, our lecturer, had managed to come up with quite a lot of documentation about his time there and had worked out, from Yusupov's memoirs, which room he had (probably) stayed in (which even though he lived some of the year in Siberia he found unbearably freezing).
There were photos of Felix and his fellow students (who matriculated in 1909, so good job he wasn’t there tonight talking to me or he’d have felt REALLY old) sitting in the quad and although it shouldn't have surprised me, it was quite surreal to see an historical figure in a situation and location that was quite familiar to me. No doubt many of the young men around him would perish in the Great War that was already practically visible on the horizon. Only one of them would be involved in the murder of a Mad Monk though. But it was good to hear that his best friend at college, Eric Hamilton, would later become the Bishop of Salisbury, but stayed friendly with Felix right through to the 1960s when they both died.
And Eric got to go on a trip to Russia with Felix, in which he saw hundreds of peasants queuing up to pay homage to his University pal and whose diary also includes a tantalising detail about a meeting between Felix and Rasputin in 1910 and the suggestion that Yusupov was already working on a scheme to oust this crazy "hypnotist". Which shows it was on his mind a lot earlier than perhaps some historians have realised.
Given I have read pretty extensively on this subject it was good to find out a few extra titbits that I didn't know about (or had forgotten). As a child Felix trained his dog to urinate on the legs of visitors to his palace (by giving it treats when it performed its party trick) and in other excreting dog news, one of the pearls that Felix managed to get out of Russia supposedly ended up in the possession of Elizabeth Taylor whose dog ate it one day, meaning an anxious wait for its reappearance. I love things like that. A piece of Russian history passing through a Hollywood superstar's dog's rectum. Lovely stuff.
I love history really. If only I had worked a bit harder on it at college I might have ended up spending more time in the company of these strange and slightly twitchy academics. But alas not enough of history involved dogs' rectums or mad monks who had lion-taming daughters, or transvestite assassins (Yusupov often dressed as a lady as a young man, and King Edward VII once saw him/her at a party and declared "Who is that ravishing creature?" – if only he could have carried it off and married the king, how different our history would have been).
I drank too many Moscow Mules and then headed home. Back to the land of comedy where no one is eccentric or strange.
