Operation: Prefect’s Office

A Night of Piracy, Petty Theft, and Perilously Poor Decision-Making

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Ernest Hemingway

We did not, despite later allegations, arrive at the Manor with larceny in our hearts. The evening began, as so many Oxford evenings do, with the unspoken agreement that we would all behave just badly enough to forget our academic obligations, but not so badly that anyone lost funding. The occasion was a bop, Oxford’s charming euphemism for “a costume party held by people who pretend not to enjoy costume parties.” The theme was pirates, which meant the Manor looked less like the Caribbean and more like the aftermath of a school play directed by someone with a grudge against children.

I, Mark, entered in a state of tentative sobriety, flanked by my companions Marcel and Antonio, both of whom had been pre-drinking with the zeal usually reserved for political revolutions. Marcel wore his plastic cutlass like he expected to be knighted at any moment. Antonio, meanwhile, was already walking with the exaggerated care of a man trying desperately to prove he is not drunk by behaving in a way that only the very drunk would consider normal.

The Manor’s entrance hall was clogged with pirates of every conceivable misinterpretation. There was a man in a feathered hat who insisted he was “channelling Jack Sparrow,” though he looked more like a disgraced bird-watcher. A philosophy DPhil had drawn a beard on with eyeliner and was explaining to a horrified chemist that piracy was the purest form of resistance to late capitalism. Someone had come as a mermaid, for reasons that will forever remain unclear.

Recorded music blared from speakers in the corner, no DJ, merely a Spotify playlist assembled by someone with a sentimental attachment to sea shanties and early-2010s Rihanna. The transition between the two was every bit as traumatic as one imagines.

Marcel and Antonio promptly joined a drinking game run by a group of PPE students who had reinterpreted the rules halfway through and were arguing about game theory in a way that suggested none of them had ever understood it to begin with. A Classics student in a plastic eyepatch was attempting to seduce a cluster of biologists by quoting Homer; tragically, he chose The Iliad, which contains fewer romantic sentiments than a tax audit.

Meanwhile, I busied myself observing the chaos. One man challenged another to a duel with inflatable swords, only to lose to a third participant who had not been involved in the challenge at all. A woman dressed as a pirate queen regaled anyone who would listen with an impassioned critique of the university’s laundry prices, which, in fairness, was the most coherent political speech of the night. Over by the cheap fairy lights, draped across the room with all the structural integrity of a dying spider, two historians were deep in debate about whether pirates counted as proto-libertarians, though both were too drunk to define “libertarian.”

In short, it was exactly the kind of evening from which regrettable ideas emerge, fully formed and utterly unopposed. And though none of us knew it yet, somewhere in that rum-soaked tangle of egos and polyester costumes, the seed of a spectacularly foolish plan was already germinating.

The Afterparty at Marcel’s Room

Like all sanctioned merriment in Oxford, the bop came with an obligatory curfew, a kind of institutional acknowledgement that nothing good happens after midnight and therefore students should absolutely not be allowed to find out for themselves. The lights were flicked on with bureaucratic cheerfulness at 11:59, and by midnight sharp, the social secretaries, brave custodians of order, began shepherding pirates toward the exit with the delicacy of airport security.

But the thing about graduate students is that we are very bad at accepting limits, especially when alcohol is involved and especially when Marcel is involved. The official party might have ended, but there was no rule, divine or otherwise, against convening a private assembly of degenerates. And so, like moths lurching toward the nearest flame, we drifted toward Marcel’s room for the natural continuation of events.

Marcel, by this point, was walking with the gait of a man trying to navigate an earthquake occurring exclusively beneath his own feet. His speech had devolved to a warm, affectionate slurry. Yet he insisted, with great patriotic fervour, that the night was “young”, a bold claim at nearly half past midnight. Antonio and I did what any supportive friends would do: we quietly liberated a few bottles from the bar, tucking them under our pirate coats like Victorian pickpockets, while loudly promising ourselves that we’d tell the bar manager, Rory, and pay for them “tomorrow.”

The journey to the afterparty was blissfully short; Marcel lived right there in the Manor. So there was no pilgrimage across Oxford’s labyrinth of cobblestones, no freezing bicycle ride, no philosophical detours. Just a stumble up a staircase that smelled faintly of damp and ambition.

Marcel’s room, to his eternal credit, was enormous by Oxford standards: high ceilings and enough floor space to host seven drunken adults and at least three poor decisions. The seven of us included:

• Elena, a Russian mathematician who drank like she was training for a competition that no one else had heard of.

• Patrick, a mild-mannered historian who became aggressively talkative after midnight, especially about Tudor monarchs.

• Shivani, who worked in neuroscience and spent a good portion of the night explaining, incorrectly, how alcohol “reorganises neural pathways for fun.”

• Max, who had come in full pirate regalia but was now down to socks and one glove for reasons never explained.

• Antonio, of course, who maintained a stable blood-alcohol concentration best described as “festive oblivion.”

• Marcel, our beloved host, who was busy trying to pour wine into a mug shaped like a skull.

And then there was me, who had been peer-pressured into joining, though in truth I’d been at Marcel’s afterparties so many times that peer pressure was more a formality than a necessity.

The ambience was what estate agents might call “charming”, and the rest of us might call “a mess.” Fairy lights, left over from someone’s romantic gesture, glowed warmly around the room, giving the illusion that we were pirates in a very cosy ship. Music played from Marcel’s speaker, a playlist that oscillated wildly between French rap and 80s power ballads. Someone opened a window to “let the vibes circulate,” inviting a gust of cold air that made us all question the concept.

The shenanigans came swiftly. Max attempted to start a philosophical debate about whether parrots count as honorary pirates. Elena poured everyone shots that smelled like they could remove paint from the walls. Patrick, half-drunk and fully earnest, launched into a detailed explanation of why Henry VIII would have been an excellent pirate king. Antonio tried to tell a joke but forgot the punchline and then, five minutes later, the setup.

At around 1:30 a.m., the collective energy began to resemble a ship running out of wind. People slumped into chairs, onto the floor, and, in Max’s case, halfway into the enormous armchair that seemed to be swallowing him whole. The bottles steadily emptied. The room grew hazier, louder, then softer again. There was laughter, the kind that comes from exhaustion and excess rather than actual humour. And at roughly 2 a.m., the natural attrition of human physiology took over.

One by one, people peeled away. Shivani vanished to the bathroom with the tragic dignity of someone who knew what awaited her. Patrick announced he was leaving before he began “revising Tudor naval policy in his sleep.” Elena took a final shot “for the motherland” and wandered off into the corridor. Max curled up under Marcel’s desk as if that were a normal thing to do.

By the time the door clicked shut behind the last of them, only three figures remained upright: Marcel, Antonio, and me. And it was in this diminished, drunken, utterly unwise state that the night’s next act, our short-lived career as art thieves, would soon begin.

The Genesis of the Terrible, Glorious Idea

By the time the last of the afterparty refugees had departed to either vomit or sleep, often both simultaneously, the room had settled into a kind of drunken still-life: three pirates slumped in mismatched chairs, surrounded by empty bottles, discarded costumes, and the unmistakable fragrance I have long called “party scent.” A heady blend of stale alcohol, sweat, despair, and the faint ghost of bathroom cleaner. Not pleasant, but tragically familiar.

Marcel was beginning to sober up, not by choice, but because I had seized control of the makeshift bar. I confiscated a nearly full bottle of rum just as he was reaching for it.

“No more for you,” I said, the way a disappointed father might speak to a toddler who has eaten an entire box of crayons.

“But Mark…” Marcel began, eyes wide and pitiful.

“No,” I repeated. “You’ve reached your philosophical limit for the night.”

Antonio offered silent support, mostly nodding while scrolling through his phone, probably too drunk to read whatever was on the screen. He never quite mastered the subtle art of social cues, but to his credit, he understood the concept of solidarity.

The music was turned down to a low murmur, just enough to disguise the occasional gurgling sound from the pipes or, possibly, from Antonio. The room looked like it had given up trying to remain dignified several hours earlier.

We began recounting the night’s highlights: the guy who’d vomited near the smoking area, as if he’d been offended by the very concept of fresh air; the dramatic courtship failure of someone who had, in his drunken delusion, tried to flirt using a lecture about Wittgenstein; our collective plan to stiff Rory on the bar tab, which earned us a round of chuckles.

“Imagine Rory’s face tomorrow,” Antonio wheezed.
Marcel snorted. “He’s gonna think pirates robbed him.”
“Technically, they did,” I added.

Then the conversation dipped into that awkward lull where all three brains silently acknowledged the night’s natural end. I was planning my exit strategy. Antonio was almost certainly rehearsing his next sentence, like an actor terrified of improvisation. And then, because fate loves a drunk idiot, Marcel struck.

“Let’s steal the painting from the Prefect’s office,” he announced.

The silence was immediate and total.

Antonio blinked. “What?”

I stared at Marcel with the expression one reserves for people confessing that they’ve decided to join a cult. “Are you fucking mental?”

Marcel, however, sat up straighter, his eyes gleaming with the dangerous enthusiasm of a man who had once stolen a bicycle simply because he didn’t feel like walking home.

“No, no, hear me out,” he said, waving his hands dramatically. “We sneak into the office, easy, it’s just upstairs, and we liberate the painting. We take a couple of pictures with it. We put it back before office hours. Boom. No crime committed. Perfect.”

Antonio looked concerned. “Is… is that how crime works?”

“Absolutely not,” I replied.

Marcel ignored both of us. “Think about it! A little nocturnal art appreciation. Victimless. And we’d be legends.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Marcel, how exactly do you plan to get into the office?”

He leaned back smugly. “I can pick the lock.”

I stared at him. “Since when? Since you watched Ocean’s Eleven twice?”

He shrugged. “Pretty much, yeah.”

We burst out laughing, but Marcel wasn’t joking. He gave us that shit-eating grin, the one that says “I’ve made up my mind and you’re coming with me because you’re idiots too.”

Antonio leaned forward. “Wait… you’re serious?”

“Dead serious,” Marcel replied, in the tone of a man who was absolutely not dead serious but had convinced himself otherwise.

“What about CCTV?” I asked. Someone had to be the adult.

Marcel waved this away like a bothersome fly. “Mate, it’s 3 a.m. Wear a hoodie or something. Throw on a cap. We’re pirates, this is the best disguise we’ve ever had. And the porter won’t be doing rounds. Guy’s probably asleep or knitting or whatever porters do at night.”

Antonio nodded thoughtfully, though I’m not convinced he processed any of that. “I mean… he has a point.”

“He does not have a point,” I countered. But the truth was beginning to creep in around the edges of my sobriety: this was not the first time we had embarked on something spectacularly stupid with Marcel leading the charge. There had been… incidents. The stolen bicycle on High Street, for example, was locked, claimed, and ridden off into the night because Marcel decided walking was beneath him. And those liberated mugs from the bar, which we pretended were darts, chucked at Magdalen’s high walls, which we pretended were the dart board at 4 am. We had helped. Happily.

So really, the question wasn’t whether we were capable of this. It was whether we were drunk enough to think it was a good idea.

Antonio spoke first. “Fuck it. I’m in.”

I sighed the sigh of a man who knows better but refuses to be left out of a good story. “We go in, pick it up, take pictures, put it back. Nothing else. No touching anything. No moving anything. And no pissing around.”

Marcel beamed like a proud parent. “Boys… this is going to be brilliant.”

And just like that, at 3 a.m., smelling like disappointment, dressed as pirates, and powered by the collective IQ of a malfunctioning toaster, we agreed to commit art theft.

The Heist — A Symphony of Idiots

We moved like ninjas. Well, like drunk ninjas, which meant we were simultaneously trying to be silent and failing spectacularly at basic motor control. The Manor was still, the kind of unnatural stillness that only appears after 3 a.m., when even the architecture seems to be asleep. We crept toward the front door where the porter’s lodge sat like the final boss of a very low-budget video game.

Peeking around the corner, we found the porter valiantly catching some shut-eye, chin collapsing into his chest in slow-motion spasms. The lights were dimmed to a bureaucratically acceptable glow. Not a soul crossed the corridors.

“Right,” I whispered. “Clear.”

“Clear?” Antonio echoed, far too loudly.

“Shh, you twat.”

We hurried, quietly-ish, to the staircase and began climbing toward the top floor. “Top floor” sounds dramatic, but it was only four flights. Under normal circumstances, it would have been leisurely. But drunk, paranoid, and dressed like discount pirates? It became a pilgrimage of breath-holding and panicked flailing. Every creak of the staircase echoed like a gunshot in a monastery.

By the time we reached the Prefect’s door, we were panting like we’d climbed Everest. The door was formidable, tall, heavy, a proud slab of wood that had probably watched generations of students confess to academic sins. But its lock was not the ancient iron monstrosity we expected. It was… modern. Almost offensively simple.

Marcel, with the swagger of a man who has not yet faced consequences in his life, pulled out a small black case.

“Where the hell did you get a lockpicking kit?” I hissed.

“Oh, Phoebe lent it to me,” he said casually, as if he were talking about borrowing sugar. “She has a whole lockpicking practice set. I’ve been working on it.”

I stared at him. “OH. So that’s why you’re so damn confident.”

He grinned, proud as sin.

We positioned ourselves so our faces were angled away from CCTV, three idiots stacked like a drunken Jenga tower, huddled so tightly we must have looked like a rugby scrum. The corridor was dead silent except for Marcel’s tools gently tink-tink-ing inside the lock.

Antonio muttered under his breath, “I thought you said you’re good at this.”

Marcel shot back, “I’ve only practised on one kind of lock, dude.”

I groaned. “Brilliant. We’re going to get caught with our pants down.”

“Speak for yourself,” Marcel said, tongue sticking out in concentration.

What felt like an eternity (or approximately forty seconds) passed before we heard a faint click.

Marcel froze, then stepped back dramatically and performed an exaggerated bow.
“Et voilà, messieurs.” He swept the door open. “After you.”

We scrambled inside and shut the door behind us with the delicate precision of people trying very hard not to vomit.

The Prefect’s office was… nicer than expected. Sparsely decorated but tastefully done: a full wooden desk stacked with papers, a leather chair that screamed “administrative authority,” and behind it, the crown jewel, the painting. A portrait of some solemn, long-dead aristocrat whose expression radiated condescension through centuries of oil and varnish.

There was also a small table with guest chairs and a sad-looking coffee setup, instant sachets, and a kettle whose best years were decades behind it.

We stood in silence, taking it all in, perhaps struck by the gravity of what we were about to do. Then Marcel broke the moment.

“Not my first time here,” he said, far too casually.

I turned slowly. “What do you mean by ‘not your first time’? When the hell were you here?”

“The Prefect asked me to tutor some girl in maths,” he replied matter-of-factly.

I blinked. “YOU? Tutor? Really?”

He raised an offended eyebrow. “Hey, I’m actually pretty good at what I do, despite appearances.”

We all chuckled. A brief, fraternal acknowledgement that we were, collectively, disasters.

I gestured to the painting. “There it is, lads. Our priceless treasure.”

Marcel grinned. Antonio smiled in that slightly vacant way he always did when drunk.

“So,” I said, “you blokes wanna bring it down so we can get this over with?”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Marcel replied.

We dragged a chair across the room, stealthily, or so we believed, though the screech it made suggested otherwise. Marcel climbed up with the balance of a toddler on stilts and lifted the painting off its hook. It came free easily, a simple string, a simple hook. He passed it down to Antonio, who leaned it against the desk with tentative reverence, as though it might bite him.

I pulled out my phone, the latest iPhone, ready to immortalise our stupidity in glorious resolution. “Alright, lads, let’s do this.”

They posed like morons. Side by side, arms crossed, pirate hats crooked. In front of the painting. Next to it. Lying on the floor with it. Antonio attempted a smouldering look that made him resemble a constipated goat.

And then Marcel, with a glint of mischief in his eyes, said, “Check this out.”

Before I could object, he stripped down to his boxers with alarming speed.

“DUDE. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?” I exclaimed.

Antonio collapsed into laughter.

Marcel began… rubbing himself against the painting. Sensually. Obscenely. Cackling like a man possessed.

It looked less like a prank and more like a deeply questionable lap dance. The poor oil-painted aristocrat’s face now bore the expression of someone watching their estate taxes being raised.

“Take a video!” Marcel shouted.

And, like an enabler of the highest order, I obliged. Antonio laughed so hard he nearly fell over, wiping tears from his eyes.

Then, mercifully, Marcel announced he was done and began putting his clothes back on. Antonio and I exchanged a silent, exhausted “let’s end this before we go to prison” look.

“Aight, boys,” I said. “We’ve got enough pictures to blackmail each other for life. Let’s put it back and get the fuck out of here.”

Antonio moved to help rehang the painting, but Marcel stopped him with a hand on his chest.

“Dude,” he said, eyes wild again, “what if we steal it?”

I froze. “The fuck, dude?”

“No,” Antonio said immediately. “Absolutely not.”

“Come onnnn,” Marcel pleaded. “Who would know? We return it tomorrow anonymously. It’ll be like the movies! We’ll be legends!”

“Mate,” I said, “they might ignore a harmless prank. But if we actually steal the painting? They’ll call the cops. And then what?”

“You honestly think they’ll do that?” Marcel scoffed. “It’d be embarrassing for them! It’s just a joke!”

“A joke?” I repeated. “We ain’t MIT or Caltech, man. These tweed-wearing assholes don’t have a sense of humour.”

I turned to Antonio. “Right. I’m the fuck out. You coming? Or are you staying to become his accomplice?”

“Wait—wait—don’t leave—” Marcel started.

But Antonio was already shaking his head with religious conviction. “No way. I am not going down for art theft.”

And so we turned, slow and dignified, like two elderly noblemen refusing to partake in barbaric customs, and walked out the door.

Marcel’s protests echoed behind us, fading into a mixture of indignation and drunken pleading as we left him alone in the office to reconsider every decision that had brought him to this moment.

THE MORNING AFTER

Antonio and I slipped out of the prefect’s office the way guilty men in Victorian novels do, shoulders hunched, eyes darting, each of us convinced our footsteps were louder than the church bells at St. Mary’s. Antonio walked like a man trying to remember if he’d left the stove on, and I brought up the rear, hugging the wall as if it were a long-lost lover.

The MCR was dead quiet. Not a soul about. The cleaning staff hadn’t yet arrived to wage their daily war on student squalor. Even the ghosts of former wardens seemed to be off duty. Perfect conditions for a getaway, if only we had the brains to match the opportunity.

We made it to the Manor’s entry hall, exchanged a few hushed, triumphant “Mate, we actually did it” whispers, and then split. Antonio shuffled off to his room, mumbling something about sleep and potential consequences. I made my way out into the cold Oxford air, the night fully surrendered to dawn, feeling like a criminal who’d earned his breakfast.

A few hours later, I woke up groggy from the severe lack of sleep. I downed a glass of water, silently repented my sins, and stumbled to my office, because I've got tons of stuff I’m sitting on. By midday, my brain was approaching human functionality when my phone buzzed. It was Marcel.

Marcel: Bro, I’m being summoned to the prefect’s office.

I blinked at the screen. Summoned is not a word one encounters casually. It implies ceremony. And doom.

Me: WHAT. THE. FUCK. HAPPENED?

A typing bubble. Then the confession:

Marcel: I took the painting out. But it was huge, man. Too big. I didn’t wanna carry it all the way to my room. So I left it leaning against the door… and left.

I froze. I reread it. Slowly. Painfully.

Me: You LEFT it. At the DOOR. Of the OFFICE YOU STOLE IT FROM?

Marcel: Yeah I… think so. I was tired, man.

Tired.
He was tired.
Napoleon lost Waterloo because it rained; we would lose our reputations because Marcel was tired.

Antonio joined the group chat, immediately sounding like a man who’d just been informed he was wanted by Interpol.

Antonio: How the hell did they know?! CCTV?? Did someone grass??

Marcel: Idk man. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I’m caught.

He added a shrug emoji. The digital equivalent of sighing while lighting a cigarette before a firing squad.

Antonio: You gonna grass on us?

To which Marcel, God bless him, replied with a laughing emoji and:
Depends. If they clamp my nipples to car batteries or pull my fingernails out, maybe I’ll scream your names.

At this point, I burst out laughing in my office, drawing suspicious stares from the postdoc at the next desk. Antonio, however, sent a message that somehow conveyed worry, Catholic guilt, and resignation all at once.

I typed back:

Me: I trust you, mate. But if you grass, I’m going full Michael Corleone on you. Fredo treatment.

Then, because melodrama is a coping mechanism:

Me: But honestly, Oxford punishment is like… what… being made to polish silver for a month? That’s what the undergrads told me when they got caught doing god-knows-what.

Marcel sent another laughing emoji, this one with tears, which felt either ironic or prophetic.

The tension broke. And because no great disaster is complete without irrational future planning, I wrapped it all up with:

Me: You know what, ten years from now, if we ever pull an Ocean’s Eleven, I want you lot in.

A cluster of laugh emojis appeared in unison, like fireworks celebrating our collective stupidity.

And that was that: the hangover, the panic, the brotherhood, and the moment we realised the universe occasionally punishes idiots, but sometimes, just sometimes, it lets them finish their coffee first.

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