We are off to Oxford in an hour or two for an overnight stay. The Systems Administrator suggested the trip originally as a birthday outing, and I had to confess that we couldn't go away for the SA's actual birthday because I had agreed to do a woodland charity talk in Thundersley the night before, and was working the day after. I did run the talk past the SA at the time, but it failed to register as at that point we weren't thinking of going anywhere. When I told my mother we were going to Oxford she looked slightly confused and said, oh, is it a gaudy? but it isn't, just a sudden desire to revisit the scenes of our youth.
I don't think the SA has been back to Oxford at all since our graduation ceremony in the autumn of 1983. I've been back twice that I can remember, both flying visits. I don't know exactly why the SA wants to go now, but maybe I'll find out over the next couple of days. We don't have much of a tourist agenda. We'll look at our old college, and the college where my father was a fellow and where I was born, and have a drink in the Turf Tavern where we used to go in our courting days. (I was a cheap date, being genuinely happy with halves of bitter). We'll probably look at the botanical gardens, not because they hold any special associations or because we are avid Philip Pullman fans (we're not, though I have read the books) but because it is the oldest botanic garden in England, and we always go and look at the botanical gardens if possible when we visit anywhere. I have gracefully conceded that we needn't go and look at Howard Hodgkin's collection of Indian art in the Ashmolean, since it's not my birthday, and the SA isn't interested in Indian art. We could try the new rooftop restaurant, though, which somebody at the music society tells me is very good.
We could look at the covered market, which would bring back memories of youthful purchases of cheese and ground coffee. We will probably spend a lot of time wandering about the streets and staring at the colleges and the Radcliffe Camera. I suspect that compared to the Oxford of my memories it might all look very small. We might go and have another drink in the Turf Tavern.
In truth I don't remember very much. I think I enjoyed it at the time, so I don't think this is due to a process of repression, like Ari Folman suppressing all memories of Sabra and Shatila. It's just that it was a long time ago, and since then my life has taken a path a long way from academia, and it doesn't seem to have all that much to do with the person I am now, so I don't think about it very often. My memories of Oxford are pretty unreliable anyway. As a devoted watcher of Inspector Morse back in the 90s my visual memory of the streets is hopelessly mixed up with what I saw on the screen, which in turn combined and moved around features of different colleges and roads, so that it didn't correspond to any reality on the ground. And further back than that my undergraduate life was superimposed on faint memories of early childhood, so my 1980s Oxford sits on a 1960s one, and was covered over with a fantasy version.
I didn't live in Oxford for long. We moved to the West Country when I was four and a quarter, and spent a year before that in America (where my pa was a distinguished visiting professor). I can remember our garden in the house against the city walls in Holywell Street, the fascination of watching a horse crapping in the road outside the front door, and the thrill of a visit to a hardware store (a taste for the smell of compost and galvanised iron remains with me to this day). I remember (I think) my grandmother's house, very faintly, and being scolded for pulling some kittens by the tail (I didn't realise I was being cruel, it was before I learned to have empathy with cats), and being told to keep an eye on the purse in the shopping basket of whatever female minder was taking me shopping, and feeling very mortified when it was stolen, and surprised when the grown ups decreed that I was not to blame and that it was an unreasonable request to have made to a small child. I remember my mother going away twice, once I think for the birth of my brother (which was conducted in hospital after a fright with me on college premises) and once to go to a conference in Africa (which I think was about a railway). I remember some very loud wallpaper (think that was in the dining room) and tricycling around Rose Lane. That is partly why I would like to go to the Botanical Garden, to imagine my toddler self, tricycling about.
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