Fire-ballooning
Yesterday, on a train from London Paddington into Oxford, I spotted a World War Two pillbox in a field. There are actually two of them; they were designed to be anti-tank defences by the railway line against potential advancing forces up the Thames valley, and after sixty years with no invasion, are getting a little mouldering and decrepit. One might quite reasonably ask why I know so much about one particular WW2 pillbox in one particular field, to which the answer is, well, I had lunch in it a couple of weeks ago. As in, perched on the edge of it, looked out over the field and ate red pesto with ham rolls. It was a strange and idyllic moment.
It's probably worth noting that usually, on a visit of OMG, I am in a foreign city where I barely/don't speak the language, having trouble with currency, public transport and my own shoelaces, and I wash up on a distant shore and likethesun2 and/or the_acrobat takes me gently by the hand and leads me to salvation, or at least saves me from liver as a foodstuff and thirty-foot inflatable Komodo dragons.[1]
For this reason - and also the reason wherein my visits of OMG are getting asymptotic, i.e., they seem to be going 1, 1.5. 1.75. 1.875, etc. - I am disinclined to actually call this one a Visit of OMG. the_acrobat was visiting me in my home city, where I speak the vernacular, understand the peculiarities of the inhabitants and don't get lost on public transport. Instead, we ended up going on a twelve-mile walk across the Oxford countryside, armed with pesto, ginger cake and Three Men In A Boat. At the end of February, we went on an eight-mile walk to Abingdon down the Thames path, which was lovely - although, we did go, buy pick 'n' mix and get the bus back, which no one found strange - and this was the next leg of the journey down the Thames, from Abingdon to Clifton Hampden and back via Nuneham Courtenay. This is a journey well-documented in Three Men In A Boat, which is, for those unfortunates who have never been exposed to it, a minor Victorian travelogue about three men (and their dog, Montmorency) taking the journey up from London to Oxford in a skiff, meeting along the way with such disasters as locks, ukeleles, Hampton Court Maze, Montmorency getting into fourteen fights, and methylated spirit cake. It is possibly my most favourite book. So I took it along, and, sat on a bridge somewhere near Culham, read out the bits that pertained to the trip we were making - "Abingdon is a typical country town of the smaller order - quiet, eminently respectable, clean, and desperately dull" and we did indeed go to the pub recommended in Clifton Hampden, the Barley Mow.
("The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this." We tried this. I am short. shimgray and luminometrice are not. It was fun.)
The book also approves of Nuneham Courtenay, and so did we, but I think when Jerome was writing, it was perhaps unlikely that a) the house was owned by the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University or b) you had to walk three quarters of a mile down an A-road with no pavements to get there. Just a supposition. But still, it was a lovely day. It's very easy to forget, living where I do, that the English countryside is all laid out there and beautiful, but nicely tame with pubs along the way, and I've started to realise lately how important the river is. The Thames in Oxford is known as the Isis and is rarely deep enough to drown in - that is, it's not like the sea, it's not like the way the landscape defines every feature of where my parents live up north - but regardless, it shapes the way people live without their particularly noticing. There are, for example, only two bridges crossing the river in the centre of Oxford, which means you have to take significant detours whenever you want to go anywhere not in the vicinity of one of them, and it is extraordinary how you can just fall in to taking the landscape as an endogenous variable. I'm not sure how much sense that makes, but I'm very keen on this motif, in literature and real life, of people and their thought processes being made and constituted by their environment. It's interesting.
But I digress. The day was a lovely one, and we ended up crossing fields full of pylons and murderous bovines, and also singing "Jerusalem", because it seemed appropriate when observing our green and pleasant land from such close quarters. That said, after twelve miles, the_acrobat and I spent the rest of her visit eating pizza and watching DVDs. My poor feet.
And so on, and so on. The next thing on the list - the list in my kitchen, "Things to do when freeeeee!", made while we were all doing Finals and fantasising about free time - was "go strawberry-picking at Stanton St. John!" So we did that. I borrowed magic_doors' bike, and had a wonderful time flitting around the city on a bicycle, because I've never done it here before, and then off we went on a glorious sunny morning to pick-your-own strawberries. I hadn't done it since I was very young; chiasmata had never done it; shimgray had done it as a small child picking raspberries. The three of us sat in the straw surrounded by the plants with a can of whipped cream and picked all the berries in sight. Idyllic, lovely, decadence, followed by stir-fry, Pimms and Doctor Who in the evening.
That was Saturday of eighth week, the last day of full term, my last day as an Oxford undergraduate. shimgray and I went home in the very last of the daylight, so the sky was black at the zenith but fading down towards the edges, and it was about half past ten as we crossed Donnington Bridge. The water below was black and slow-moving but not still, and reflective, showing us the sunset and clouds, fluffy and underlit with red and pink and purple, and you could see the movement of the currents downsteam towards London. We stood there for a few minutes watching it get softer, darker, and down on the bank below I saw a solitary flash, probably another bicycle light, probably someone else, like us, on their way home.
And that was the beginning of the end. On Monday slasheuse went away, having spent the evening previously in G&D's making lists of musicals. Once we got to "Song of the South", we started making lists of things that are racist. "Apartheid. Sainsbury's "Ethnic Foods" section. White privilege. Flesh-coloured plasters. Ooh, racism, that's quite racist, isn't it?" And there was a lot of giggling, but a little sharp-edged, because it's the summer and everyone is going away.
So am I, pretty soon. I was in London with jacinthsong and zed92uk a couple of days ago; we went book shopping (I am now the proud owner of an anthology entitled "Alien Sex", for which some of the rejected titles were "Interstellarcourse", "Love is a Many-Tentacled Thing", and "Really Fucking Weird"); then Victory Dildo shopping (also on the list in the kitchen, but only mentally; we went to Sh! in Shoreditch and looked at vibrators, and I didn't buy anything because I will be in San Francisco in three weeks); dropped in at Villa Straylight (where the inhabitants were very sweet and welcoming and approving of alien sex, and fed us tea, and steerpikelet did an adorable doodle of me and my new hair) and, finally, went to see the Indelicates play in Islington. Which was great, great fun - I am a perfect child about live music, I love it with a kind of eyes-screwed-up intensity - and they played "Sixteen" and "Fun is for the Feeble-Minded" and "Our Daughters...", but not, alas, "...If Jeff Buckley Had Lived", which iTunes tells me I have now listened to ninety-two times. It was nice to be out of Oxford, actually - the first time I had been for about three months, barring twelve-mile walks across the countryside - and I am here again only for a couple of days, just for the St. John's Ball tonight, packing and Doctor Who tomorrow, and Sunday, home.
Last night, sitting in the kitchen, triptogenetica spotted two lights in the sky. I started thinking about UFO sightings, because really, they looked like nothing I'd ever seen, and I'd spent the day reading about aliens. But he figured it out: fire-balloons. Lightweight frames covered with paper and holding a flaming wick inside. As we watchd, one of them caught fire properly and combusted, dropping out of the sky above New College. Again, a small moment of unexpected beauty.
Speaking of beauty, I have a dress for tonight, and purple nail varnish, and many beautiful women wanting to come and get ready in my room, and I am happy but restless. Tomorrow is midsummer.
[1]In September 2006, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago was guarded by a thirty-foot inflatable Komodo dragon. I swear I am not making this up.
It's probably worth noting that usually, on a visit of OMG, I am in a foreign city where I barely/don't speak the language, having trouble with currency, public transport and my own shoelaces, and I wash up on a distant shore and likethesun2 and/or the_acrobat takes me gently by the hand and leads me to salvation, or at least saves me from liver as a foodstuff and thirty-foot inflatable Komodo dragons.[1]
For this reason - and also the reason wherein my visits of OMG are getting asymptotic, i.e., they seem to be going 1, 1.5. 1.75. 1.875, etc. - I am disinclined to actually call this one a Visit of OMG. the_acrobat was visiting me in my home city, where I speak the vernacular, understand the peculiarities of the inhabitants and don't get lost on public transport. Instead, we ended up going on a twelve-mile walk across the Oxford countryside, armed with pesto, ginger cake and Three Men In A Boat. At the end of February, we went on an eight-mile walk to Abingdon down the Thames path, which was lovely - although, we did go, buy pick 'n' mix and get the bus back, which no one found strange - and this was the next leg of the journey down the Thames, from Abingdon to Clifton Hampden and back via Nuneham Courtenay. This is a journey well-documented in Three Men In A Boat, which is, for those unfortunates who have never been exposed to it, a minor Victorian travelogue about three men (and their dog, Montmorency) taking the journey up from London to Oxford in a skiff, meeting along the way with such disasters as locks, ukeleles, Hampton Court Maze, Montmorency getting into fourteen fights, and methylated spirit cake. It is possibly my most favourite book. So I took it along, and, sat on a bridge somewhere near Culham, read out the bits that pertained to the trip we were making - "Abingdon is a typical country town of the smaller order - quiet, eminently respectable, clean, and desperately dull" and we did indeed go to the pub recommended in Clifton Hampden, the Barley Mow.
("The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this." We tried this. I am short. shimgray and luminometrice are not. It was fun.)
The book also approves of Nuneham Courtenay, and so did we, but I think when Jerome was writing, it was perhaps unlikely that a) the house was owned by the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University or b) you had to walk three quarters of a mile down an A-road with no pavements to get there. Just a supposition. But still, it was a lovely day. It's very easy to forget, living where I do, that the English countryside is all laid out there and beautiful, but nicely tame with pubs along the way, and I've started to realise lately how important the river is. The Thames in Oxford is known as the Isis and is rarely deep enough to drown in - that is, it's not like the sea, it's not like the way the landscape defines every feature of where my parents live up north - but regardless, it shapes the way people live without their particularly noticing. There are, for example, only two bridges crossing the river in the centre of Oxford, which means you have to take significant detours whenever you want to go anywhere not in the vicinity of one of them, and it is extraordinary how you can just fall in to taking the landscape as an endogenous variable. I'm not sure how much sense that makes, but I'm very keen on this motif, in literature and real life, of people and their thought processes being made and constituted by their environment. It's interesting.
But I digress. The day was a lovely one, and we ended up crossing fields full of pylons and murderous bovines, and also singing "Jerusalem", because it seemed appropriate when observing our green and pleasant land from such close quarters. That said, after twelve miles, the_acrobat and I spent the rest of her visit eating pizza and watching DVDs. My poor feet.
And so on, and so on. The next thing on the list - the list in my kitchen, "Things to do when freeeeee!", made while we were all doing Finals and fantasising about free time - was "go strawberry-picking at Stanton St. John!" So we did that. I borrowed magic_doors' bike, and had a wonderful time flitting around the city on a bicycle, because I've never done it here before, and then off we went on a glorious sunny morning to pick-your-own strawberries. I hadn't done it since I was very young; chiasmata had never done it; shimgray had done it as a small child picking raspberries. The three of us sat in the straw surrounded by the plants with a can of whipped cream and picked all the berries in sight. Idyllic, lovely, decadence, followed by stir-fry, Pimms and Doctor Who in the evening.
That was Saturday of eighth week, the last day of full term, my last day as an Oxford undergraduate. shimgray and I went home in the very last of the daylight, so the sky was black at the zenith but fading down towards the edges, and it was about half past ten as we crossed Donnington Bridge. The water below was black and slow-moving but not still, and reflective, showing us the sunset and clouds, fluffy and underlit with red and pink and purple, and you could see the movement of the currents downsteam towards London. We stood there for a few minutes watching it get softer, darker, and down on the bank below I saw a solitary flash, probably another bicycle light, probably someone else, like us, on their way home.
And that was the beginning of the end. On Monday slasheuse went away, having spent the evening previously in G&D's making lists of musicals. Once we got to "Song of the South", we started making lists of things that are racist. "Apartheid. Sainsbury's "Ethnic Foods" section. White privilege. Flesh-coloured plasters. Ooh, racism, that's quite racist, isn't it?" And there was a lot of giggling, but a little sharp-edged, because it's the summer and everyone is going away.
So am I, pretty soon. I was in London with jacinthsong and zed92uk a couple of days ago; we went book shopping (I am now the proud owner of an anthology entitled "Alien Sex", for which some of the rejected titles were "Interstellarcourse", "Love is a Many-Tentacled Thing", and "Really Fucking Weird"); then Victory Dildo shopping (also on the list in the kitchen, but only mentally; we went to Sh! in Shoreditch and looked at vibrators, and I didn't buy anything because I will be in San Francisco in three weeks); dropped in at Villa Straylight (where the inhabitants were very sweet and welcoming and approving of alien sex, and fed us tea, and steerpikelet did an adorable doodle of me and my new hair) and, finally, went to see the Indelicates play in Islington. Which was great, great fun - I am a perfect child about live music, I love it with a kind of eyes-screwed-up intensity - and they played "Sixteen" and "Fun is for the Feeble-Minded" and "Our Daughters...", but not, alas, "...If Jeff Buckley Had Lived", which iTunes tells me I have now listened to ninety-two times. It was nice to be out of Oxford, actually - the first time I had been for about three months, barring twelve-mile walks across the countryside - and I am here again only for a couple of days, just for the St. John's Ball tonight, packing and Doctor Who tomorrow, and Sunday, home.
Last night, sitting in the kitchen, triptogenetica spotted two lights in the sky. I started thinking about UFO sightings, because really, they looked like nothing I'd ever seen, and I'd spent the day reading about aliens. But he figured it out: fire-balloons. Lightweight frames covered with paper and holding a flaming wick inside. As we watchd, one of them caught fire properly and combusted, dropping out of the sky above New College. Again, a small moment of unexpected beauty.
Speaking of beauty, I have a dress for tonight, and purple nail varnish, and many beautiful women wanting to come and get ready in my room, and I am happy but restless. Tomorrow is midsummer.
[1]In September 2006, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago was guarded by a thirty-foot inflatable Komodo dragon. I swear I am not making this up.