Hill Slug Chronicles: Oxford is Precious

This is how Jack sits down to dinner.

17 November 2014

Jack is a Visiting Fellow at The Warden and College of The Souls of All Faithful People Deceased in the University of Oxford. All Souls for short. From the centennial celebration/denigration of a mallard to the requirement that dessert be pushed across the table with a stick, All Souls is as full of ritual as any other Oxford college.

As a tomboy of jeans and sneakers, the Princeton uniform (a scarf or six) is too much for me; that I had to pack a set of Girl Clothes in order to Dine In College last night was about as much as I'm willing to handle on vacation.

Backing up a bit:

Having slept on the plane, I was awake enough to skip the nap and walk around Oxford. I didn't yet have the camera unpacked, but my old iPhone (unlocked and with a UK SIM card, which is cheaper than a US carrier international plan) did the job well enough.

This is the Great Quad at All Souls, facing outwards. The round building is the Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library complex (more on that later). Those who have walked around Princeton University's campus might feel a sense of familiarity.

The lawn is of uniform color, height, and species. One does not set foot on the grass.

This is the Fellows' Garden. One may walk on the grass. If one is a Fellow, of course.

More spires from within one quad or another:

Outside of the college walls (which block the sounds from the street completely), there are more spires and walls.

Modeled after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, this is called the Bridge of Sighs. Of lesser size. (Later, PDaniel will call it the Bridge of Whingeing.)

More University as we little people would see it:

A window on a side street:

After lunch at a pub, where I first noticed that the American word "fries" is replacing the English word "chips," we collected my bags from Jack's office and took a short bus ride to Beechwood House, where Jack has a room (two rooms, really), a shared bath, and a shared kitchen.

While British plumbing has come a long way since my first trip over here in 1989, I have to say this: They have been very slow to adopt the concept that hot and cold water can be mixed in a pipe that precedes the faucet, rather than in a basin, where one simultaneously burns and freezes one's hands. They have grasped the concept in the context of the bathroom shower and kitchen sink (sometimes), which is a significant step forward.

Continuing our tradition of traveling during the Thanksgiving Holiday, we've added to our tradition of finding ourselves eating tapas as our first meal abroad. The disadvantage of eating in a college town is the crowd noise. The advantage is that food comes (relatively) cheap.

We'd made sure to buy decent coffee and a French press, as well as breakfast food, before returning to the house for the night. This helped ease me into the next morning, when we had to be up early so that we could meet our college friend, PDaniel at the Natural History Museum at 10:00 a.m.

The scratch on my lens is getting annoying, but I'm not buying another camera just yet.

The museum is housed in one hall, with cases surrounding open displays of dinosaur and mammalian skeletons, whale jaws, and fossil creatures. We found two mule deer antler racks.

Inside a booth of fluorescent minerals:

Nestled within the displays on the outer wall is a gift shop. I sneaked off to buy several stuffed moose for Jack. These I presented at various intervals. The first took a ride in his left pocket.

An obvious allusion to Tarrantino:

Domino and question mark...

(I'm not telling you until you look at them and admit how cool they are)

...cockroaches. C'mon. Would you really chase one of these off your sandwich without watching it for a while first?

The Natural History Museum is attached to the Pitt Rivers museum, which was among the first to organize anthropological collections according to function rather than origin. In this way, we were introduced to not one, but two cases of lamellaphones.
.

More Oxford architecture:

Another pocket moose:

This reminds me of that gingerbread house on Rockaway Road near Oldwick:

Jack and PDaniel:

We ate lunch at the Turf, a gastropub tucked into an alley. The ceiling is so low that PDaniel had to duck.

PDaniel had booked us an hour and a half tour of the Bodleian Library. We weren't allowed to take pictures for most of the tour, but we did get to see a few places where Jack has done his research on various Oxford trips.

This is at the main entrance:

The library was a divinity school first. We gathered in what used to be the chapel to begin the tour. Getting a good picture of the inside wasn't going to be as fruitful as taking pictures of the outside from within, so that's what I started doing.

After the tour, we went back to Jack's office. Here, he opens one of several small doors from the street. Only Fellows have access to these entries. Jack enjoys making the little people on the street jealous by brandishing his massive Harry Potter-style key and stepping inside.

This is the Codrington Library in All Souls, where Jack has been doing much of his work. It was close to 5:00 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. We were the only ones in the room (which shows you what slackers these humanities people are as compared to postdoctoral scientists, who, if not seen in the laboratory at all hours, are considered failures).

Jack pointed out the workspace of a fellow Fellow who is, except for now, always in the library:

The Great Quad again, clearly the inspiration for Princeton's Whitman College dorm.

More Great Quad:

So, two museums and at least three libraries later, we added one more: the History of Science Museum. It is a small space with many cases of astrolabes.

There's old-school laboratory glassware:

And this:

Failed ice cream flavors (see bottom right):

And a microtome, for the maybe two readers of this blog who have ever seen or used a microtome:

We had a snack in one of the two oldest coffee houses in England. That's when the rain started, so, of course, we had to take a walk and get soaked.

We left ourselves with enough time to dry off in Jack's office. I changed into my Girl Clothes -- barely girly by any measure but mine, my measure being anything without pockets or thick rubber soles and that turns a woman into an object to be undressed and analyzed from head to toe -- consisting of trousers, a blouse, and a jacket that date back to the first W administration. We went down to the Common Room for dinner.

Seriously. This is the dinner table.

There was a fire, which, if not from real coal, did a good job of faking it. Given how everything else we'd seen so far is so precious, it wouldn't surprise me if these coals were real.

Before the other three Fellows arrived, I said it aloud: "Everything here is so precious."

"Of course it is!" Jack said. He's enjoying every minute of it. I spent the rest of dinner commenting at every opportunity that I'm only from Princeton after all.

The ritual is that one must not sit down until the Presiding Fellow utters a two-word prayer ("Benedictus BenedictCumberbatch" or something to that effect). One eats what is put in front of one (credit to Jack for telling them I'm a vegetarian freak ahead of time) for three courses (not American sized courses, fortunately).

One can only leave dinner after the Senior Fellow stands and says "BenedictCumberbatch" twice again. If one is staying for dessert, one can then sit down.

After this comes the ritual removal of the table cloth, at which time one server stands at each end of the table, and the cloth is folded in on itself. The server at the far end then rolls it in as we sit back and try to stay out of the way of things.

Dessert is served with the lights off. Plates are to be passed to the left, never lifted from the table but rather slid along to the least senior Fellow, who is given the title of Mister Screw (played tonight by another Visiting Fellow, Mark, from Belgium).

I'm not making this up.

Mister Screw is given three tools: a hook, a slider, and a candle snuffer. Mister Screw is to pass the plates back to the head of the table with the slider, to pull bottles of wine around with the hook, and, once dessert has ended (no later than 9:15 on a Sunday), to snuff the candles.

Speaking of snuff, there's also snuff. And finger bowls to cleanse one's fingers after partaking in snuff. None of us partook.

I don't know if I broke protocol by standing up to take a picture. It doesn't matter, really, because we'd already been cursed when PDaniel lifted the cheese plate. We took turns playing with the hook and slider. It was irresistible. Culinary shuffleboard with sherry and silver.

There was coffee and a plate of chocolates in the non-smoking Smoking Room, where we went while Mister Screw stayed behind to snuff the candles (but only those on the table, mind you).

In a week we'll be having dinner in the Hall, a much more formal location, on Guest Night. That will make this look like, um, Princeton?

Then it was back into my real people clothes (still wet, but still more comfortable than the pocketless trousers, stifling blouse and confining jacket), and back into the rain to catch the bus to Beechwood House.

This morning we couldn't sleep in because breakfast ends at 9:00 a.m. The house staff, a woman who might as well be Jackie Tyler from Doctor Who (with a pinch of Jack's aunt Mary thrown in), chatted away as I worked the French press.

I watched the rain through the dining room window. There would be no rush to get into town this morning. Jack worked on the talk he's giving this afternoon, and now he's on the rowing machine I nagged him into promising he'd buy so that he'd get some exercise (it's cheap, but it only has to function for the 13 weeks he's here).

Two friends are coming in from London today at 4:00 p.m. I'll hang out with them while Jack gives his talk, and then we'll all go to dinner somewhere. The rain is forecast to be over by then.

Hmm... There might be time enough for me to take some pictures of the house from the inside. I'll be back in a few minutes...

Our rooms, the bathrooms, the dining room, and the kitchen are one level up from the ground floor. Getting from our rooms to any other requires some fancy footwork: