Oxford revisited

We took the scenic cross country route to Oxford, a nostalgic journey for the Systems Administrator, whose father perfected the route from Berkhamsted in the course of years spent commuting to Wantage.  Our hotel was in the Abingdon Road, and as we walked towards the town centre the view looked very unfamiliar, and it took me some time to work out that the tower on our right belonged to Christ Church.  There again, I didn't have any friends at Christ Church, and I'm not sure I ever had any reason to go over Folly Bridge before in my life.

I dragged the SA to the Ashmolean rooftop restaurant for lunch, since I'd been told it was good, it was already gone 1pm, and having a definite plan to go somewhere seemed better than playing the game of peering into pubs in an increasingly hungry and tetchy state and asking each other if they looked OK.  The rooftop restaurant turned out to be pretty busy, and we had to wait ten minutes for a table, though there were some original seventeenth century botanical prints on the wall to look at while we waited.  The room was big and very light as the walls consisted mostly of glass, and the light fittings innovative, all very modern and trendy.  We had a good lunch there, with two or two and a half caveats.  The service was slow.  It took over half an hour from ordering for them to produce two plates of salad and some bread, and by the time we'd eaten the room was starting to empty out, and all but one of the waiting staff, including the manager, were having a cheerful chat at the end of the bar and no longer catching people's eyes who wished to pay their bills, and once I'd managed to get the bill the manager wandered off and did it again instead of bringing me a credit card machine.  The menu was very fish heavy, including adding clams to the only pork dish so that it counted as fish to anybody with a seafood allergy, like the SA.  The half caveat is that it was pricey for what it was.  It was nice food, no quibbles, but if you are going to pitch prices that far above Pret a Manger for salads whose raw ingredients cost a fraction of the price of the finished dish, service has to be spot on, even if you do have a fantastic room.

We headed for our old college after lunch, and as we walked up Holywell Street were slightly disconcerted by the number of alarms going off, while the drunk who upturned a full dustbin outside the music rooms and then walked on up the street clutching a drink and shouting abuse at immigrants added to the jangly atmosphere.  The porter was happy to let us in on the strength of my alumnus card (the SA claims never to have been sent one, and is feeling hurt) and explained that the alarms were going off due to a power cut.  Term had finished so there weren't many students about, but there were a number of school parties being led round, presumably as part of some scheme to increase access.  There must have been a conference as well, as the college was liberally dotted with neat laminated notices pointing out the way to every meeting room and facility in the place. In normal life you just have to learn to find your way about, or you did in our day.  We walked around the quads, and looked up at our old staircases, and peered into the JCR, which used to be the Nelson Mandela Room but has been renamed the Christopher Cox Room in the intervening years.  The alarms began to stop, and we walked around the garden, and the cloisters, and went and sat in the benches in hall while a tour guide reassured her gaggle of serious faced youngsters (mostly but not exclusively girls) that they didn't have to eat there unless they wanted to.  Some of the tables were laid for dinner, presumably for a conference, and I noticed that the strange giant rectangular soup spoons of our day had been replaced by more conventional cutlery.  I'm not sure the plates have the college motto on any more, either.  We couldn't visit the chapel which was shut for a concert.  I think the concert had actually finished by then, but the door was still locked.

We visited Merton as well, which has a lady porter (not in our day) who was happy to point out which building was The Old Warden's Lodgings, and received the news politely that I had been born there, and the alumnus card worked again.  We were able to visit the chapel at Merton, and admire the view from the garden out over the playing fields, where some very small boys were playing football.  Then we cut up through the covered market to look at the house in New College Lane where the SA had a room in our second year, the SA by a weird symmetry having come bottom in the room ballot whereas I had come top and so resided in splendour (though with practically no heating) in the garden quad.  The SA had forgotten my desire to visit the botanic garden, so we hared back to whence we had come, and made it in with two minutes to spare before last admissions at 4.15pm.  In fact, at this time of year when there isn't much growth visible above ground in the order beds, three quarters of an hour is about right to spend there, and we looked in all the glass houses and walked around the full extent of the garden.  One of the glass houses contains a huge jade vine, but it showed no signs of flowering at all, which confused me in that I visited Cambridge Botanic at about this time of year a while back, and theirs was full out.  The Oxford one did have a computer coded card on it which, if we had had a smart phone and clicked on the code, would have let us access a film about the jade vine.  That's the first time I've seen that in any garden or museum, and it seems a marvellous idea.  Oxford Botanic suffers from plant thefts from its glass houses, which is sad.

We had a drink in the Turf, which was slightly scuzzier than I remembered, and then walked up to Keble and across the university park, as it was rather early to settle in the pub for the evening.  I don't understand how anybody mountaineered up the outside of Keble chapel, but they used to.  We looped back down St Giles, and back up Broad Street, and had another drink in the pub at the end of Holywell Street, which lacked the faint smell of either vinegar or off beer that had worried me in the Turf.  We looked at the Bodleian complex, and found a Thai restaurant in a handsome timber building in the High Street, which the SA thought in our time had held a very smart French eatery, which the JCR committee a year or two after us had disgraced themselves in by holding a very swish dinner there and charging it to JCR funds.  This act of larceny even made the pages of the Daily Telegraph, and they ended up repaying the money, but probably went on to careers as bankers and MPs.

It wouldn't be true to say that memories came flooding back.  As the afternoon and evening wore on I began to remember people I hadn't thought about for years, not with any particular sense of loss, but rather as if starting to remember a novel I'd read a very long time ago.  The streets around college were deeply familiar, and I realised what a limited part of Oxford I'd inhabited.  My world was generally confined to the area bounded by Walton Street, St Catherine's, the psychology block in the science area, Magdalen Bridge and Merton Street.  I was as limited in my geographical scope as any inner city teenager, but in much more salubrious surroundings.

We heard many foreign voices, on the pavements and in the pubs and restaurants.  Compared to the early 1980s, modern day Oxford is teeming with Americans and continental Europeans.  The family on the next table to ours at breakfast were Japanese.  The other thing I noticed is how well the city is doing.  In our walk up the main shopping street, the Cornmarket, and along the High Street, and through the covered market, we saw scarcely any empty shops or units at all.  Parking in Oxford is a nightmare, but the economy appears to be booming.