While the cat's away

Skype conversation (abridged):

"You remember you told me not to burn the house down while you were away?"

"Yes"

"Well, there was an emergency"

"Emergency, what kind of emergency?"

"Oh, it's over now. I tried to get you but you weren't on Skype."

"Well, what time was it?"

"About midnight here in Atlanta."

"That's 5am in Oxford. We were asleep. What happened?"

"You remember that globe I had in 1st grade..."

There's a new rule in the house - only food allowed in the microwave. And if the one involved in the "incident" isn't cleaned up when I return home, someone, who shall remain nameless in this blog, is buying me a new one.

technology immigrant

Being an old fart, I am a technology immigrant as opposed to a technology native (terms I picked up from Colin's class he is teaching here...) I bought a new cell phone before we left the US, one that has a camera. Here I am squinting through my bifocals trying to work out how to make the thing work with some degree of control. And in public too. 

We were at the Jam Factory, a funky little cafe and art space housed in the old Frank Cooper's Marmalade Factory building - you know the kind that says Oxford marmalade... They do really good coffee, but surprisingly, only scented teas like Earl Grey and lapsang souchong, and not in a pot either. I opted for a large cappuccino, which was quite delicious.
Tonight we scrounged our way into (free) dinner at Worcester College. If there are spare seats, faculty can dine there. We have to stand outside, like Oliver Twist, and wait to see if there's room. How humiliating. For this food, I'll stand a little humiliation. The Hall was barely a third full as many of the students have taken themselves off to other places for the weekend and aren't yet back. The menu:

tomato soup

pork chops

roasted potatoes

mixed steamed vegetables

apple and pear crumble with custard

coffee in the cloisters

Feeling somewhat full, stuffed actually, Colin and I took a leisurely post prandial stroll along the riverside path down to Folly Bridge. At this point the Thames is known as the Isis. The banks are delightfully overgrown with hawthorn, elderberry, stinging nettles, borage, campion, rose mallow and other plants.

Spotted in a shop window as we made our way back through town to the hobbit house. All taken with the cell phone camera!

mooch to your heart's desire

Meet Granny Rose, Colin's mother,  who is visiting us in the hobbit house for a week. She leaves next Thursday to visit friends who live  near Newbury and then she will eventually make her way back to Whitby in Yorkshire where she lives.

This afternoon we strolled over the street to the Ashmolean Museum which is really just a few minutes away. I wasn't prepared for the delightful experience that awaited me therein. As an Art struck teenager I was a big Pre Raphaelite fan - I had a poster of the Lady of Shallot on my college bedroom wall. I loved the red haired women with Botox lips, the vivid colors of their dresses and the romantic subject matter. The Ashmolean has a large collection of Pre Raphaelite paintings. And 16th century Dutch still lifes. And 20th century English painters like the Camden Town Group. And Constables. And a Picasso. And, and, and...

I need to write and schedule an appointment to see the Michelangelo and Leonardo drawings - I can't wait.

We rounded off the visit with a late lunch in the Museum Cafe - tuna and roasted vegetable sandwiches, chocolate cake and a bottle of  Speyside Glenlivet still water " bottled at source from our own underground spring, located high in the beautiful and unspoiled mountainous Braes of Glenlivet"

My English Laundry

Today was a typical English summer day - overcast and drizzly. That kind of rain that one of the students called "really annoying", the kind I find gives me big hair. Despite the weather I decided to do a load of laundry, hoping that the clouds wouldn't deliver any rain. Here are pictures of my English Laundry system. I have a washing line and four (4) clothes pegs. I guess doing laundry isn't a big priority here in the intellectual capital if England. Of course, it did rain and so I set out in search of a clothes airer so that I could dry the laundry inside. And while I was at it, I tried to get some more clothes pegs too. Turns out they are quite difficult to find. I tried several stores before being directed to a little hardware store on Shoe Lane. I got everything I needed there. In the end, it was so cold and damp that we had to turn the heating on in the hobbit house, and so I had a third laundry option - the old English standby of draping the wet clothes over the radiators, thereby ensuring dry but stiff underwear.

Hardcore tennis in your face

There are a handful of people (you know who you are) who I would get up very early in the morning for. There are even fewer events that I would willingly arise at the crack of dawn to participate in - Art, Democracy, Education, and Tennis. Yesterday, I got up at 5:30am to catch a bus into London, another bus out to Southfields, stood in line in a field for 2 hours and finally arrived inside the hallowed grounds at 12:45pm. Worth every second of it!

During the first week there are lots of matches on the outer courts as well as in the show courts. Oh, and just try getting tickets for those courts anyway. So I was able to watch James Blake's match sitting on a park bench by the side of the court. I could hear him speaking to himself. He was just a few feet away from me! I also watched Arnaud Clement and B. Becker (not Boris), Danielle Hantuchova, and as the light was fading into another English summer night, the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, play a doubles match on court 19 at the furthest reaches of the grounds. It was pure magic. Venus has a beautiful serve. Serena is muscular but not nearly as BIG as I thought she would be. And all the tennis I watched was good tennis. 

It's interesting to see these world class athletes making the same errors as we club players do. But the strangest thing is that you feel like you know these people - from watching countless hours of tennis you know their service motion and how they move. And there they are right next to you! Also, they make the court seem much smaller than when we play tennis. I guess they move more and faster. 

So that's what I did all afternoon and evening  - watched live, in my face tennis at Wimbledon. Didn't buy any souvenirs, only got a bite to eat (no strawberries or champagne at inflated prices), just hardcore tennis watching.

And then, I had to get back to Oxford - it was almost midnight when I walked in the door.

Art in the strangest places

I needed to get my tennis fix - here we are in England with Wimbledon in Day 3 and I haven't seen any yet. We have no TV in the hobbit house. So off we went to to the JCR (Junior Common Room) this afternoon. Things have been moved around to make a computer lab for the Georgia Tech students, but there is a large TV in there still. After a while, I became aware of the painting on the wall. The one obscured by the TV. It looked kind of familiar, and closer inspection revealed that it was a Paul Nash. There on the JCR wall, obscured by a TV.

The Head of Security is becoming well known to us as he also supervises telephone communications and it was he who brought the BT men to the house. I recognized his tie pin as the Ox & Bucks regiment as my granddad was in that regiment during World War I.  think he was pleased that I knew what it was. The phone handset was very old and when it was fixed it scared us half to death the first time it rang. It sounded like a parrot being strangled. So when he gave us a brand new one later today, I asked about the painting - yes, it's a Nash and it's alarmed. I saw some Hogarths in a meeting room yesterday which I assumed were prints...

The Oxford Canal

When I was 18 years old, I went on a long boat voyage with some friends. We sailed along the Oxford Canal from Cropredy to Banbury in a barge named Bilbo. We never got as far as Oxford, the canal's terminus. The Oxford Canal runs along the far side of Worcester College's grounds and it's very pleasant to walk along the tow path to get somewhere, rather than along the busy streets. We strolled along the tow path this afternoon, saw a moorhen and her baby, some barges moored on the banks, almost got run over by an old man furiously pedaling and ringing his bicycle bell, got intimate glimpses into the back yards of houses that back right onto the canal and worked up an appetite for another College dinner.

Our destination was St. Sepulchre's Cemetery which was opened in 1850, then on the outskirts of Oxford, as a cholera cemetery.

We stopped in a thrift store on the way home and picked up a couple of big mugs for a better tea drinking experience, and some paperback books. The latter can be donated to the Georgia Tech Oxford program's yard sale when we leave. It was held this evening before dinner, and we bought a box of laundry detergent ( only a few scoops short of a full box) and a barely used pop up laundry hamper. We passed on the ice skates and electric drill...
Proceeds go towards buying dvds for the program's library, and also supply cheap "stuff" for the students and faculty.

Dinner tonight, although I'd be hard pressed to call a meal at 5:30pm"dinner", in the Great Hall with all the students who were too late to request the 6:30pm tickets.

Menu:
salad
chicken Italian style
pasta
courgettes (as zucchini are known here)
cheesecake
coffee in the cloisters

Dinner in the Great Hall

We were invited to have dinner with the Georgia Tech students in the Great Hall - refectory tables and all. Since this was an informal dinner, the faculty sat with the students and not at the High table. It was all very familiar to Colin, a Castle man at Durham. We were very pleasantly surprised at how good the food was, expecting school dinner standards. 

The menu:

Carrot and Coriander soup

wholewheat bread roll

poached salmon

buttered, minted new potatoes

steamed broccoli

summer pudding

After lunch, we headed back to Worcester College where the students from Georgia Tech had started to arrive. While Colin was doing professorial stuff, I took a walk around the magnificent grounds.

A busy day part 1

We slept well in our attic bedroom. Good job we didn't have to get up in the night, as the bathroom is on the ground floor and we're on the third...
Our Scout ( more of him in a minute) had stocked the fridge with bacon, eggs, tomatoes, milk and bread, and there was also tea and Nescafe (filthy stuff). We had a leisurely breakfast, Colin managing to set off all two fire alarms when he burned the toast, and then heard someone breaking into the house via the front door. It was Robert, our Scout, i.e. housekeeper, maker of beds, vacuumer, trash taker outer, and laundry man. And this morning, bearer of a fruit basket. Soon followed by the maintenance man, David, who fixed the washing machine which had no water coming into it, and the head of College Security with two BT telephone engineers who were fixing the phone line.
We left to run errands - picking up Colin's debit card, buying a few things we had forgotten, and going to the college to check out Colin's set up fopr tomorrow morning when he has classes to teach.

And then a nice lunch at the Jericho Cafe, just up the road from us.

The antidote to jet lag

I cannot get my jetlagged brain around this blog's system so bear with me. 

We needed caffeine so we set off into town looking for some and ended up at The Buttery where we had baguettes and a big post of Assam tea.

Here we are

Armed only with the Porter's Lodge phone number we arrived in Oxford early Sunday morning. They weren't expecting anyone from Georgia Tech until Monday, and as there had been the big June Ball on Friday, it was a bit chaotic for them trying to regroup. We were soon in our new accommodations and very nice they are too. 2 Walton Street is a very old cottage with thick stone walls, a pretty walled garden and very small rooms. We have four bedrooms. Ours is in the attic and has exposed beams and a spirally staircase.

One week to go, and all the information we have is the Porter's Lodge phone number.