Light of the World

It's our last day in Oxford. The students and most of the faculty left early this morning. So we have been packing and tidying up and getting ready to come home tomorrow. A girl's gotta have some fun though, so while Colin was doing yet more grading I walked over to Keble College. It's only about 10 minutes away from the hobbit house, and in the chapel is Holman Hunt's first "Light of the World" painting. Another 70's favorite of mine.

No-one else was in the chapel so it was just me and it, all quiet and reflective on a Sunday afternoon. But here's the weird thing - I had to press the red button in order to be able to see the painting, as it's behind the side chapel altar and very poorly lit.

This evening we squeezed in our last candlelit concert at Essex College chapel. tonight, charivari agreable was comprised of Kah-Ming Ng on his chamber organ, and three male singers: a bass, a tenor, and a counter tenor. The concert was called Singing in Secret and featured, " choral music by recusant composers from the golden ages of Elizabeth I of England and Philip II of Spain." Stuff by Tallis and Byrd. It was divine.

lbw, maiden over, and a sticky wicket

Today dawned cool and rainy. Actually, I arose really late after having had such a fun time last night, so I have no idea how the morning started out. But, by late afternoon it was sunny. Colin was sat out in the garden under the pretext of grading final exams. He said he kept hearing the sound of leather on willow coming over the garden wall, and so we walked over to the college to investigate.

There's a little pavilion and if you look closely you can see that the team batting had made 40 runs for 5 batsmen. They were losing. We watched a few overs sitting on the damp grass, and all was well with the world.

final exam

This is a multiple choice question:

The Georgia Tech faculty and friends met in the Hobbit House last night for one final get together before the summer school abroad program is over. Did they -

a) drink champagne and dance all night, under electric candle light (because they're a little bit Kinky, if you see what I mean)

b) sit around the hearth discussing esoteric matters of one kind or another

c) let their hair down, metaphorically speaking, and stay up way past their bedtimes

d) enjoy a brief poetry reading about underwear

e) all of the above

f) none of the above

The flip side...

... to all this culture, wonderful walks, and whatnot is that England can be really, really frustrating. Particularly when it comes to shopping, which is not my favorite activity anyway. Earlier this morning, I ventured into Marks and Spencers  aka Marks and Sparks, purveyors of all sturdy underwear and much more besides. There I encountered the attitude sometimes known as " job's worth" as in "it's more than my job's worth to help you one bit". And also a line ten women deep just to get into the changing room. Needless to say, I didn't need the articles I had in my hand badly enough to wait that long. Hello, M&S you lost quite a bit of business there.

My foray to Sainsbury's grocery store was somewhat better, the shelf fillers there have obviously been schooled in how to notice if shoppers are looking for something, and they're very polite too. But the lines were very long and one man in the self service ( don't even get me started about that) checkout had a problem with a leaky bottle. It was dripping all over the floor, and he was asking for help. None of the check out operators paid a blind bit of notice, no -one called for someone else to come. The man was shouting by now and said,"It's your shop, don't you care if there's stuff all on the floor?" Someone eventually came, clearly rather disgruntled at being asked to do something that must not have been in his job description.

Julie and I had  a couple of similar experiences on our days out in Lincolnshire when we tried to get some food at a pub that clearly had a sign that said food would be served on Mondays. They were adamant that no food, not even a sandwich, could be served, but happily sent us to somewhere that "might" be able to feed us. At one pub, we ended up having a Kit-Kat with our afternoon coffee because the kitchen couldn't produce the desserts it was advertising it sold.

I'm not saying that Kroger and Publix are perfect, but you do at least come away with the feeling that they do want to sell things to you.

Oh, and I forgot to add that as I was leaving the Mall that Sainsbury's in in, a child in a stroller lobbed a chunk of whatever he was eating at me, hitting me full on. Delightful.