Walking Around Oxford

19 November 2014

Mazz and Graham came up from London to see Oxford on Wednesday afternoon.  Jack was giving a lecture in the evening, but they arrived in time for him to give them a tour of the parts of All Souls that the little people can't see.

First, though, he took us to the All Souls chapel, which is open to the public part of the week.  It was only open enough for us to stand near the entrance and look through the iron gate.

We wandered around and found ourselves at Oxford's Christchurch College.  Put the Rockaway Road gingerbread house on Princeton's campus and you get this:

Further on is Christchurch Meadows, which borders the Thames River.  I had to take pictures of the cows, of course, because I knew that Plain Jim would expect it of me.

Check out the curly horns.

I emailed a picture from my phone to Plain Jim: "Cows!"  He later wrote back lamenting that there was no picture of me taking pictures.

So much for rules:

Jack left to give his talk while the three of us went to the other of the two oldest coffee houses in England to have tea.  We stayed almost two hours, catching up on each other's lives and trading pictures.  Mazz showed me the ones she'd taken of the Rememberance Day glass poppies at the Tower of London (more on this later; she gave me some pictures, and I'm hoping to see what's left of the display today).  I showed them pictures from the Hopewell Valley Stampede.  We had time enough to do a little more wandering.  They saw the Bridge of Whingeing and the Turf Tavern.  In keeping with the Turf's history as a filming location for the mystery series Morse, then Lewis, then Endeavour, we attempted to concoct a murder mystery in which Jack would be the culprit for an Oxford murder or two.  By the time we met Jack at Quod for dinner, we'd only gotten as far as having seen two ambulances pass each other coincident with Jack's unknown whereabouts.

Instead of taking the bus back to Beechwood house, I insisted on walking.  It's 1.8 miles from All Souls to the house and it ends on a hill.

I told Jack that I needed to sleep in.  We went to sleep around 12:30 a.m.  I woke up at 10:00 a.m.  We lounged about, turning breakfast into lunch in the house at noon.  There was no point in having coffee this late; I'd have to muscle through a dry-out day instead.

I wanted to walk into town, and to see the river.  Oxford is wedged between the Thames and the Cherwell Rivers.  There's a canal along the Thames that has a well-groomed path.  Jack knows the neighborhood well enough to figure out how to get to the river and follow it to Christchurch Meadows.

We left the house and followed a narrow lane, where the traffic sounds from the ring road disappeared (at least to my half-deaf, half-dead-hearing-aid ears).  We found the entrance to the Meadow Lane Nature Park and took a path that we hoped would get us to the water.  It did, but the towpath was on the other bank.

A message to Dale:  "Tell Sean we found the Raritan."

She sent back pictures of the ever-cuter Russell.

We doubled back onto the road, crossed a bridge, and went back to the river.  As we got closer to the university, there were more people on the path and rowers in the river.

A very fancy long boat:

It's safe to assume that the water looks muddy year-round. There are many muddy feeder streams.

 These boats come equipped with scoops for bailing out water; not the most confidence-inspiring sight:

Christchurch Meadow (cows are out of frame to the left):

A long boat with an easy chair:

I told Jack I could envision a long boat trip involving morning bike rides and afternoon boating to the next village.  Jack said he'd go crazy on a long boat.  I wonder if there are organized boat/bike trips, so that next time Jack is over here for research, I could see more of England...   (The Google says there are.)

On the back deck of this boat was a mountain bike.

Insert flooded basement joke here.  Those of us who have seen what happens along the D&R Canal are thinking, "Nice house and all, but no no no no no."

We surfaced at the Folly Bridge.

A poofy chair sounds like a good idea, but it's always raining over here.

View from a bookshop entrance on St Aldate's:

More winding wandering got us to the covered market.

"You can't buy happiness but you can buy cake, and that's kind of the same thing."  They weren't open, but I can come back.  The market is home to butchers, produce stands, clothing shops, and a specialty store that sells supplies for cake decorating.  They make hard sugar decorations that can be displayed or eaten, and little cakes with long shelf lives.  I might go back because the tiny stuff is easy to pack.

Jack wanted to attend a lecture at 5:15, so after a tea break at the other oldest coffee house in England.

We followed the Roman wall.

The sky turned purple.  In the time it took me to take a few pictures, the street lamp went on.

Yet another fenced-off courtyard at yet another Oxford college.

Not having any caffeine in my system, I failed to stay entirely awake during the lecture on seditious libel in the eighteenth century.  This was a lecture for specialists.  I hang around enough of Jack's type to know more about the era than most non-specialists, and I did follow along for the most part, at least enough to get the general idea and know who the main players were.  I did learn that writing unflattering things about the government would land you in a public stock, which would bring you some notoriety, which would then sell the very books that landed you in the pillory in the first place.

Jack is friends with the lecturer, and he knew a few others in the audience.  They'd all scurried off by the end, though.  We'd planned to have dinner at an Indian restaurant across town, but it would take some GPS wisdom to get there.  I burned through my old iPhone's battery navigating through the science complex.  Two things struck me about the buildings:  the back ends of laboratories aren't nearly as welcoming nor attractive as the back ends of the older university buildings; and the labs were uncharacteristically (by Penn and Princeton standards, anyway) devoid of people.  It wasn't even 7:00 p.m.  Slackers.

Near the Jericho area of Oxford is a bike advertising tours.  The frame and components are spray-painted red, but the crank spider is still worthy:

After dinner I suggested we walk home.  "OK," Jack said, "But it's gonna take an hour and a half."  Fine by me.  So we did, even though my bag got heavy with bottles of Ribena Light (it's an acquired taste) and Diet Coke when we stopped at a grocery store on the way home.

When we got back, I mapped where we'd been, more or less.  We'd only walked 7 miles in all this time. It felt like more.  I have no sense of distance on foot.

Today, as soon as we get off our butts, we'll go into London.