Oxenford

Well, nowadays, we call it "Oxford", but in days long long gone by, maybe around the time of the monks that developed the city, it was called Oxenford.

Whatever it used to be called, or is called today, I call it magnificent. If I loved London, I adored (in a completely non-religious, but definitely passionate way) Oxford.  So much so that since I have returned to West Hollywood, I have watched  a CD (a gift of Heather) of Inspector Morse's Oxford (where the series was set) and six full seasons of  the series that ran from 1986 to 2000 (the wonderful late John Thaw, I wish I had watched when he was working on the show) and begun seeing the pre-quel, Endeavor, just to see the places where I trod in my short two and a half day diversion there.



My wonderful host and travelling companion on many days, Heather, was able, with the help of a niece to get us a couple of nights, at 45 pounds (about 60 dollars), in the guest facility for family at her college Worcester (pronounced Were-ster). I had no idea of how beautiful a place I would be staying and how much I would be wishing I could stay for weeks, or even months.

Although the distance is only 48 miles or so from London to Oxford, we did the travel by two buses, the first a local bus to the travelling bus station and then a tour like one to the university town, which consistes these days of 38 colleges surrounding the city centre and its environs. With the exception of about four colleges, all are for undergraduates, and some go back in their foundings to the 11th century. If you saw Oxford twenty five years ago, thus, it will look pretty much the same today, as it probably did, twenty five years before that. And so on. The fashions of the undergrads might change over which they place their gowns (which they happiily still use), and hair for that matter, but the stone, and cobble are the same, for students and visitors as they were for people like TS Eliot, (Merton) or CS Lewis (Magdalen, pronounced, "Mawd-lyn"), or John Henry Newman, (Trinity and Oriel),and so many before, up to and including that old rascal Wolsey who founded Christ Church, formerly called Cardinal College (he was a humble guy), until Henry took that away from him probably around the same time as he took Hampton Court.  Christ Church is one of the wealthier of the colleges, and also the one at which many scenes of Harry Potter were set and filmed. I had taken lots of photos of that, but deleted an entire 200 or so shots accidentally, including some that I surely would have treasured from Littlemore and Blessed Newman.

We arrived with our bus at Gloucester Green station.

This is the other side, the store and market (on Wednesdays), where there are coffee shops and a few eateries and a kind of common you pass through on the way to main streets.

We got there about 3 or 4 and wanted to drop our stuff in our spare rooms at the modern Sainsbury Building--two dorm like rooms with a bathroom for Heather and I to share. Spare, but light and airy and just the place to sleep after a long day's walk a bout.  Gloucester Green was only a few steps from the college.

 

 

 

 

Bicycles, as those seen against the wall at the entrance of Worcester College, are EVERYWHERE. And here, despite my antipathy for bicycles with traffic, somehow it all works. It is as it has always been. I saw a version of the following postcard, in my case it was a fellow or don wearing a helmet along with his other Oxfordian gear on a bike.

 

 

 

 

That's the thing. The old and the new merge wonderfully at Oxford. I don't know how, but all these modern shops and restaurants and movie theaters (the Odeon chain) somehow fit comfortably with the memorials, and churches and walls and bridges of sometimes ancient times. The feeling is still small protected town, despite its growth and fame.

 

You walk through that iron fence and through a large door and you are in the quad of Worcester College.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Here is a little about the history of the college, 26 acres (no I did not see all of it), its origins going back also to the 13th century.

The thing about England, London, Oxford is that nature is both wild and tamed at once. Each college is different, some more formal than others; and some, like Worcester, more bucolic. There was no place that I walked within the walls (we had an electronic key for after 8 p.m.) that wasn't peaceful country like, with amazing flowers, roses, wisteria.

 

 

 

 

It got dark late, I think I have mentioned, and one night, maybe that first night in Oxford, I sat by the lake inlet, in which this swan and many ducks resided(ducks and swans were everywhere in Oxford).  It was quiet. I was surprised more students weren't around, but it was exam time and so maybe they were studying. There was to be a performance of the Merchant of Venice on the grounds the next day. Two girls suddenly arrived, one with a walkie talkie. I would learn that they were behind the scenes production folks for the dress rehearsal of the Merchant. They seemed to be waiting for something to happen, but I did not know what. They talked about mutual acquaintances and perhaps one young man who was no longer at one of the colleges. Said one young girl to the other, "Is he not?"  This was not how college kids talked in the Bronx. I liked the formality of these two kids in jeans. Suddenly a boat rowed by a young woman in fake chain mail arrived and two young men, also in costume, one with a lute and the other with a flute, disembarked and ran off into the woods toward wherever the rehearsal was running. The row boat was called, "Blind John of Bohemia".  I felt like Alice in Wonderland, whose author as it happened, was somewhat inspired by the grounds of Worcester College.

 

It was also that first night, earlier, that we attended "Evensong", the kind of thing you see in those movies like Shadowlands (yes, I know I have said, and shall say again) I watched these films again after I returned in an effort to re-savor my days at Oxford.  The chapel at Worcester is smaller than several of the others I saw during my sojourn, but large enough and old enough to be impressive all the same, with its wooden seats and candelabra with actual candles.

 

I wasn't much fond of the piece, relatively modern, as has been the one in the Catholic Cathedral in London, but the hearing of these strong voices of college men and women in their robes, was a fantasy come true.  I was standing here. I was hearing these sounds. I was in heaven on earth.

 

A rather pedantic middle aged woman we met on the tour bus (we did a swing around several times to get familiar with the place and hear the history), said that it was Merton that had the best choir, and so one evening after I had tooled around for hours, I took my sore feet and met Heather at Merton, and its large chapel and larger choir than that at Worcester. We waited about a half hour before the proper time, sitting on a bench amid long grass and manicured flowers.

 

I was all over. Baudelian Library (no, the four original copies of the Magna Carta were not available for viewing), Blackwell's, a bookshop with a long history of sales to the students and us tourists.  Next door was the White Horse pub, also I would later discover, a set for the Morse series, where I had a half pint and the Ploughman's lunch, yum, cheese and bread and various delicacies.

 

And the

I was not, however, done with pubs, as on the bus tour another pointed out was the Eagle and the Child, on St. Giles Street, near the Martyrs' Memorial. This had another literary connection of pleasure for me, one of the several places that the writer, CS Lewis and his friends, including JRR Tolkien (whose sketches for his science fiction I saw at the Baudleian) frequented. Their group was once known as The Inklings. I was surely going to have a little something something cold there and take in the atmosphere. As I jumped off the tour bus, my feet were pretty tired from the walking I had already done and I was actually looking forward to a full stop, but then I noticed across from the Randolph Hotel (the only five star one in Oxford), the Ashmolean Museum. There was a banner hawking the sketches of people like Rembrandt and Da Vinci, so feet a pouting or not I decided to take a look. All of this reignited my desire to paint when I got back home, which I have, after a fashion.

 

 

What I saw was so little of the inventory, but it did not matter. My view on these few trips I have taken is that whatever I do see is more than I ever have and a sculpting of my soul, so "no worries."

 

 

 

               

 

 

I was a little embarrassed going in, another tourist on a quest to touch a bit of writing history, but a lovely man with a true cockney accent was so inviting, "Anywhere you want, luv", he said as I walked inside and ordered something light and cold. I sat in the back, past the picture just above, which was a little disappointing in that it looked like a modern add on. Still, there I was and it felt nice to rest among the ghosts of the Oxford fellows of the early 20th Century.

 

Funny, how in just a bit over a month and a half since I returned, it seems as if I am forgetting something in my tale of Oxford. Well, not forgetting exactly, as I will have a second part about my side trip to Littlemore and the small "college", really a kind of retreat house that he formed while he considered his conversion, of John Henry Newman (1801-1899).

 

So, in conclusion for today, OXFORD RULES!  And I have denominated myself a two day alumna of Worcester College. 

 

 



 

Sunday at Westminster Cathedral

Let me first avoid any confusion. Westminster Cathedral is different from Westminster Abbey. The Cathedral's parishioners are Catholic. The Abbey, Catholic from something like the 11th century, was converted into King Henry VIII's branched off faith, which fully merged then with the state, and became known as the Anglicans. There was a lot of back and forth after Henry's self denominated Supremacy. On both sides of the battle, alas, there were martyrs.  But ultimately a combination of Evangelism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism took hold and Catholics became the minority. Luckily, things became a bit more tolerant on all sides.

So sometime in the mid 1800's a Catholic Cathedral was built off Victoria Avenue, about a mile and a half from the Abbey. It's style was, and is, completely different from that of the Gothic Abbey (and man I love the Gothic Abbey as you will recall), more Byzantine. But like all the Churches in England it simply is so much to look at. It is deep and comfortingly dark.  Well before the altar hangs a most dramatic Franciscan Crucifix that constantly refocuses the eye of the heart.

Oh, dear, as I searched for the photos I took of the outside of the Cathedral, I realized that somehow I deleted them along the way. But I guess the most important part of going to the Cathedral is in some ways less about the edifice than about sharing a beautriful choral Mass at 10:30 celebrated by the Archbiship himself, and joined by my friend Freddy, who mved back  to England, his land of birth, last summer.

I have long known Freddy, probably close to 30 years. We were parishioners, servers and choristers together at St. Victor's.  He even rented the place I now live in from me for a couple of years before he returned to England.  So there was something incredibly joyous about sitting next to him in the crowded Cathedral as of old in our small parish. 

After Mass, Freddy asked me what I wanted to do. He suggested Covent Garden (you know, of My Fair Lady fame), but I had actually been there on one of the days on which Denise, Heather and I saw our first play. It was fun, but not unlike many tourist like markets, with food, trinkets and entertainment, I have seen in many other places including Los Angeles. I wanted to go toward Notting Hill, (yes, it is because of th\e movie with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts which I STILL love). As it turned out Freddy used to live on the border of Notting Hill and Bayswater, so being so familiar with his haunt from a time before he had even mved to Los Angeles, he took me around.  We stopped first at the Pub he used to frequent and had a Sunday Lumch, a massive thing of roast beef and bread. And of course a pint.

I rather wanted to see where Freddy had lived as a young man, and so he took me to his former "flat". He had owned it, and when he sold it in 1980 somthing to move to America, he received about $26000 pounds, in today's exchange rate, about 40 thousand dollars.  Suffice it to say that his neighborhood, like neighborhoods in so many places all over America and Europe, the cost to buy today would be well into the million or more range.

I loved the neighborhood. And saw all those little private gardens that were featured in the movie Notting Hill. Many in London have become public but there still remain a few attached to the homes and apartments in the area. I could live here. Oh, except for that darn weather again. 

 

Freddy walked me through Kensington Gardens, and there was the palace at which young Will and his bride, and mother to be, live. Hyde Park. Everything was perfect and the people were all over enjoying the uncustomary sun. Water, and plants and picnics and blankets, and bicycles. At St. James Park (after we stopped for a spt of tea and a rest) we passed over a walking bridge with a view of water and lily pads. 

 

In the distance, Big Ben and the London Eye. 

 

Freddy and I walked toward them, he to pass over Waterloo Bridge and his train and me to the metro to get back to the Penn Club and a much needed rest of my feet.

 

In addition to rest, Heather and I shared wine and bread and cheese in the dining room of the Club. It was easy, pleasant and I felt like I was home.