Oxford: Carrot on a Stick
This is part four of #largenumberthreatened. If you’re starting here, you may wish to take a step back and peruse parts one, two and three first. But be warned: you have been warned.
Two trains and three rather ludicrously-extended preludes later, I was in Oxford. Well, as close to Oxford as anyone was prepared to let the railway go, in any case. The pleasant thought that Arriva had now concluded its involvement in my holiday blinded me ever so slightly to the rather unassuming and, some may say, inauspicious station in which I now found myself. Whilst by no means as ugly or worn-down as - well, take your pick of the Virgin-run stations, really (of which more later, of course), there’s nothing to really make this station stand out. It’s very much a tired building frequented by trains, which is a shame. The view on leaving the station may present the illusion of some kind of integrated transport system, what with all the bus stops right outside the main entrance, but this is, as is so usually the case, an illusion. In truth, Oxford has little more truck with buses than it does with cars or trains and prefers to start its bus routes from various streets around town, as opposed to having anything so ludicrous as a central bus station. Oxford, as would later become all-too-readily apparent, was the city of the bicycle.
Greeting me outside the station were Ruth, Dan and JTA, three quarters of the Oxford leg’s “host” contingent. Twenty-five per cent of this party, I was informed, in the shape of Paul, was presently entertaining his French-baked-bean-hating parents. Now, sometimes, ten months can fly by almost before one has noticed, but it really did feel like a few moments short of an eternity since the wedding at which I last saw this merry band of Aber-escapees. High time, then, to catch up with much-missed old friends - definitely the best way to start a holiday.
Next up was something else I’ve missed. The relocation of various Aberites over the last few years has left something of a dearth of Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot enthusiasts (or perhaps “sympathisers” would be a better word; I, for one, would not consider myself a devout Carrot enthusiast, but I certainly don’t share the disdain with which so many view the game), but whilst the others indulged in something called a Sainsbury (an anathema within the walls of Aber, but out there in the wide world it turns out that Morrisons Is Not the Only Supermarket), Dan made the - some may say foolish - decision to let me pluck any game I fancied from the enviably-large stack overlooking the dining table.
And so it was that Dan and I spent the hours around lunch unleashing our Killer Bunnies (or, at times, distinct lack thereof) on that much-missed quest for their cherished Magic Carrot. I’m often accused of having some kind of cunning master plan when playing these games which, it is postulated, I attempt to hide under an “unconvincing” veneer of making it up as I go along. Now, I’m fairly certain that, at best, this is something of a double-bluff, albeit one that takes place on an unconscious level during gameplay. Oh, how I envy, at times, those who can go into a game like this with some kind of overarching scheme to see them through. Alas, my main strategy in these instances tends to be to come up with short-term plans “on the hoof”, as it were, to see me through to the next round. This is, of itself, a good idea, of course, as it allows one to adapt to the vagaries of one’s opponents, but to be truly successful, it would be handy if I could marry this “wing and a prayer” method to some kind of long-term plan.
Now, one could accuse Dan of a lot of things (although it’s important to point out at this juncture that none of these things has ever been proven in a court of law), but it would be a very foolish person indeed who tried to argue that he doesn’t go into this sort of game without some kind of plan. During the course of many a Geek Night, Dan has very much, to my eyes, at least, emerged as the archetypal Man With a Plan - a plan that usually involves appearing to help everyone out until he’s in dominant enough a position to dispense with such chicanery and revel in having engineered a situation from which he is certain to emerge triumphant. One could almost resent the ease with which he’s able to do this time and again, but he does it so bloody well one can only sit back, accept defeat and admire and envy this overwhelmingly-successful strategy.
Well, that’s not quite all that one can do. One can also confront this strategy, this high-cunning, with its polar opposite: a sort of strategy-deficient low-cunning, at which, as previously noted, I flatter myself I rather excel, even if others sometimes mistake this as a de-facto strategy in its own right. By dint of this ploy, I took an early lead in the game, as one might expect, as I was looking only at this round, the next round and, if I was feeling particularly clever, maybe the one after that, whereas Dan was rightly looking further afield, deciding where he needed to take the game in the long-run.
Such early dominance is almost always a mistake, of course, as it both allows far too much space for the tables to turn and can give the impression that one is a threat in need of being crushed before the game’s denouement. But hey, what did I care? My plan was to wing it and by this definition I was doing well, getting everything right. I was winning! What could possibly go wrong?
Ah yes, I thought, as the game reached what would turn out to be not quite the half-way mark: now I remember. What could go wrong was that Dan could stop letting me win and could start playing back - and playing back with the sort of vengeance that would send my Bunnies to their burrows in the sky with what some could take for an almost reckless abandon. Long before the end of the game, it was clear that careful strategy had won the day over a wing and a prayer. Dan could be the only logical winner of this game.
What a relief, then, that we were playing Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot, the rules of which have scant regard for any notion of logic when it comes to the final reckoning. By the end of the game, Dan had acquired a bumper crop of the carrots that hold the key to victory, whilst my coffers, whilst mercifully by no means bare, were certainly not in the rudest of health. Those familiar with the game will be aware that all is not lost for players with fewer carrots than may be desired, as there is still a chance - albeit a more slender one - that they have the only carrot that counts for anything: the one shuffled to the bottom of a separate pile at the start of the game which has been taunting us with its anonymous presence throughout. Dan, for all his superior gameplay, who would undoubtedly have won, if this were any game with a particularly sane method of choosing the victor, found that, alas, when the chips were down his many, many carrots were worth little more than… well, carrots, actually. Through absolutely no skill of my own, it transpired that I had fluked a victory. Such is the glorious majesty of Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot.
Those who suspect that Aberystwyth to Oxford is a long journey to make simply to play a game are of course completely mistaken, but they may nevertheless be mollified by the knowledge that, as the next chapter of this unfeasibly long and drawn-out tale will relate, the conclusion of this particular quest ushered in the start of another: to discover the delights on offer in Oxford itself.