"Well, you're not in monastic history, that's for sure."

[chaletian]

The crap thing about Oxbridge is that it’s such a notable achievement to get in (for most people), such an important mark in one’s career in life, that leaving becomes an equally – if not more – important mark. It’s such a defining thing. Most of the time I don’t care that I didn’t graduate from university, because I bop around in my life and it’s quite jolly, and I think that generally I made the right decision at the time. But God, I do regret it sometimes. And I think it’s mostly in a melancholy, sentimental kind of way, because I wanted so desperately to go, and because the concept of ‘Oxford’ had been such a part of what I read and so forth, but I wish that I could have experienced Oxford the way they do in books, and as so many people seem to do in real life, rather than as I did, which was mostly mulching around being fabulously depressed and living in some sort of crazy dreamworld bubble type thing. And I read books or articles that interest me, or see a play, or watch a TV programme, and I have such a yearning to study it, but I *don’t* and I know that I never will, because I never seem to quite want it enough to do anything about it, and any attempts at independent study have been abject failures, because I have no self-discipline. If I hadn’t been depressed, would I have managed to graduate? I don’t know. I certainly had the brains for it – even at my most self-loathing, I never really doubt that (except for that one time, Xanthe!) – but I don’t know if I had the commitment. I think I probably would have done, out of habit if nothing else. I’d have got a second class degree, probably a 2.ii, because I’ve always been a bit lazy, and known that if I’d really worked hard, I could have got a First. But I went a bit mad and sort of lost touch with reality, and that was that.

Posner lives alone in a cottage he has renovated himself, has an allotment, and periodic breakdowns. He haunts the local library… and has a host of friends, though only on the internet and none in his right name, or even gender. He has long since stopped asking himself where it went wrong.

I may stop listening to The History Boys now. It is depressing me ever so slightly.

ETA - Sorry to keep banging on about this time after time. Still, that's sort of the point. It's hard to let it go completely. Pants.