Oxford revisited

Susie, Mom and I went up to Oxford in Susie’s purple Nissan Micra this past weekend to spend the day with the Itens. As the disstupid amongst you will have surmised from the title, it was not the first time I had visited.*

*I’m reading Nicholas Nickleby at the moment. Has anyone else noticed how round-about Dickens’s style is? Instead of saying “he was thinking about Smike”, Dickens writes: “[h]e sat in a musing attitude for some time, regarding Smike occasionally with an anxious and doubtful glance, which sufficiently showed that he was not very remotely connected with his thoughts”.




Remarkably, for me, I remembered to take (and use) my camera. I had intended to post my photos in this blog, but I am prevented from doing so by my own manifest disintelligence: Tired of carrying my camera around all day like a Wally, I thought I would be Clever and slip the camera into Susie’s bag, unnoticed. But at the end of the day, I forgot to retrieve the camera. Like a Wally. By now Susie’s probably flogged it on the grimy streets of Tower Hamlets. But fear not. I’ve plundered some photos my mother posted on Facebook, so the less verbally-inclined amongst you can still follow our adventures in narrative pictorial form.

We started off with a tour of Ben’s and Jaime’s place at Wolfson College. The flat is surrounded by family-friendly facilities (including safety gates for families with small children) and beautiful gardens. And the River Cherwell meanders along the borders of it all. Inside, the flat is spacious, with a large and functional kitchen, a light, airy sitting room and roomy sleeping quarters (with a view!). (I can’t help sounding like an estate agent right now. Sorry.)

I was particularly delighted by the signs everywhere reading “RIVER DANGER”. Given that Oxford is spiritual home of mediaeval English literature, this presumably refers to the threat posed by Grendel’s mother or similar.

For lunch we walked to the King’s Arms, one of the better pubs for food in the centre of town. I wasn’t about to repeat the mistake of a fortnight ago, when I marched everyone into the wilderness but failed to produce the fish and loaves. The King’s Arms proved a good choice, although curiously everything was served with salad on top. Including the pizzas.

While hovering outside the pub before continuing our tour of Oxford someone spotted a 20 pence piece on the ground beneath one of the picnic tables. An ingrained sense of social decency prevented any of us from collecting it for the Found Fund, as this would have involved crawling on hands and knees beneath a table full of revellers and physically lifting someone’s shoe out of the way. In anticipatory compensation for this failure, the Itens had produced a 10 Euro cent piece. (This has been noted in this week’s draft report to head office.)

We toured Oxford, stopping in at the Turf Tavern and the Bodleian library (pictured), and going round Merton College, where we saw Mob Quad (pictured), Fellows Quad (site of the annual Merton Time Ceremony), and the gardens. After this we visited the Covered Market for coffee, and then made our way back to Wolfson to crown our visit with a game of Pooh sticks and a tour of Wolfson’s grounds.