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"He was not, it is true, resigned; but this last blow failed to force him into an outward betrayal of any emotion...Did he still cherish hope? Did he still believe, now that the door of this prison was closed upon him, that he would succeed?"
Chapter 34

So, another extremely helpful letter has just arrived from Oxford- the long-awaited feedback:

This, cutting out waffle about processes etc., etc., said precisely the following:

"Thank you very much for supporting Francesca's appliction to the college; we enjoyed meeting her and were sorry not to be able to offer her a place. Francesca scored a reasonable 63% in the History Aptitude Test, but although bright and engaged at interview she did not give as nuanced and sophisticated answers as our best candidates. We wish her every success in her applications to other universities."

Oh, I do love official letters. No, in all seriousness, as an aspiring writer and a connoisseur of insincerity and jargon, I genuinely enjoy them . Let's decode what all of this means, shall we:


"Thank you very much for supporting Francesca's application to the college; we enjoyed meeting her and were sorry not to be able to offer her a place."

= "Hem hem. Testing, testing."

"Francesca scored a reasonable 63% in the History aptitude test"

=  "Her test scores were average" (note the zinging emphasis on "reasonable". You can practically sense the italics. And owch, I normally got at least 70-something% in the practices)

"Although bright and engaged at interview"

= "She was the busty Swedish girl with the blonde plaits, right? No, wait, it was the mousy one with the sniffles? No? The Scottish one with the big glasses?"

"She did not give as nuanced and sophisticated answers as our best candidates"

= "She stuttered and looked down at her feet and mumbled some rubbish about the Roman empire"

"We wish her every success in her applications to other universities"

="Stop pestering us, don't you know we've got important academic work to be getting on with?"

Perhaps the above may sound a touch bitter, and I shall immediately desist, because no-one wants to read bitter ranting and anyway I only look silly when I get angry, but I'm afraid such a letter inevitably draws sarcastic remarks from me. In essence it is a dismissive paragraph rather than "feedback":official, insincere and absolutely useless. If I didn't get in, I want to know exactly why, how and where I went wrong. Essentially, I would rather be insulted for a page than receive this soothing mail-merged waffle. I would even prefer something like:

"Francesca is...how to put it? Weird. Her answers were waffling and irrelevant, her test paper unreadable tripe. She should really do something about that handwriting. Also, her shirt was untucked, and what is with that haircut? Butch or what?"
Ok, so this is exaggerated, I know, and I doubt it would be the sort of petty thing that Oxford interviewers would really think. And I know they really do the best job they can and are really very nice people and have big fluffy cats called Mr Paws who they go home and cuddle every night, bursting into tears from the strain of deciding between so many excellent candidates. And I know that, life being short as it is, they really have better things to do with their time than to soothe the vanity of jumped-up little eighteen year olds.

But...well, from where I'm sitting, it looks like such a cold and heartless brush-off to something that I've wanted since I was fourteen. To me, this is not one in a hundred tedious candidates they have to get through, to me this is special.

But if there's one thing I've learnt from all this, it's that harsh lesson that everyone learns some day, that they either deal with, get over and get a life with, or wallow in and allow to defeat them. That is: I'm really not that special. Not special at all.