Free The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry Page A

to smokers and irritated by those who nag and bully them.
    I was at a dinner party many years ago, sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses, but between mouthfuls. An American woman opposite watched in disbelief.
    ‘And you so intelligent!’
    ‘Excuse me?’ said Tom.
    ‘Knowing that those things are going to kill you,’ she said, ‘still you do it.’
    ‘How differently I might behave,’ Tom said, ‘if immortality were an option.’
    Substances seem insignificant compared to the big things in life: Work, Faith, Knowledge, Hope, Fear and Love. But the appetites that drive us and our susceptibility, resistance, acceptance and denial of substances define and reveal us at least as much as abstract expressions of belief or bald recitations of action and achievement.
    Maybe it’s just me. Maybe other people have greater control over their appetites and less interest in them. I seem to have been driven by greedy need and needy greed all my life.

College to Colleague

Cambridge

    The Winter of Discontent, they called it. Strikes by lorry drivers, car workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, railwaymen, refuse collectors and gravediggers. I don’t suppose I had ever been happier.
    After all the storm-tossed derangement of my teenage years – love, shame, theft, scandal, expulsion, attempted suicide, fraud, arrest, imprisonment and sentencing – I finally seemed to have found something close to equilibrium and fulfilment.
Seemed
. Smoking a pipe as a placid and confident figure of authority in a small prep school was one thing. Now here I was at a huge university starting all over again as a new boy, a fresher, a nobody.
    It is natural for people to despise the very idea of Oxford and Cambridge. Elitist, snobbish, hidebound, self-satisfied, arrogant and remote, the Ancient Universities, as they conceitedly style themselves, seem to embody the irrelevant, archaic, moribund and shameful past that Britain appears to be trying so hard to shed. And Oxbridge doesn’t fool anybody with all that flannel about ‘meritocracy’ and ‘excellence’. Are we supposed to be impressed by the silly names they give themselves? Fellows and stewards and deans and dons and proctors and praelectors. And as for the students, or
undergraduates
, I beg their pompous pardons …
    Many people, but especially I think the young, see pretension and performance all around them. They will read attitudinizing and posturing in every gesture. If they were to walk down Trinity Street in Cambridge during term time they would encounter youthful men and women that it would be very easy to characterize as self-conscious poseurs or play-acting pricks. Oh, they think they’re
so
intellectual; oh, they think they’re
so
Brideshead Revisited
; oh, they think they’re
so
la crème de la crème. Look at the way they bicycle along the cobbles with their arms folded, too cool to touch the handlebars. See how they walk along with their head in a book. See how they wrap their scarves around their necks with a flick. As if we’re supposed to be impressed. Listen to their drawly public-school voices. Or, worse, listen to their fake
street
accents. Who do they think they are, who do they bloody think they bloody are? Mow the fuckers down.
    Well. Quite. But imagine for a moment that these wanky arsehole poseurs are actually no more than young men and women with real lives and real feelings just like anybody else, just like me and just like you. Imagine that they are quite as scared and unsure and hopeful and daft as you and me. Imagine that instant contempt and dislike really says more about the onlooker than about them. Then imagine something further. Imagine that just about every single student newly arrived at such a place as Cambridge went through exactly those same feelings of dislike, distrust and fear when looking at the easy and assured second- and third-years millingaround them with all their relaxed confidence and their