Walking home through wonderland

I have an ambiguous relationship with Oxford, where I live but today it was unequivocally beautiful. I walked back from work along one of the loveliest parts of the university city, along a gravel path which runs from a cobbled street between two ancient colleges. From one college I could hear someone playing gentle jazz piano and as I went past the chapel window of Merton College, the sun hit the stonework, the cherry tree was out and the organ was playing inside.

All this sunshiny luvliness though rather reminds me of Sherlock Holmes telling Watson about the horrors that lurk behind the “smiling face of the countryside”. Despite the Morse factor I don’t know of that many murders and certainly not of the intricate and Byzantine type of the detective story. Although it is always possible that the murderers in Oxford are just better than anywhere else and don’t get caught out. Indeed knowing how ruthless the callings of both academia and medicine can be I’m often surprised there aren’t more unexpected vacancies in the higher reaches of the university ladder. Perhaps it is the words that wound the more whilst leaving no visible scars.

But there is something of the stifling gilded cage about the place. There are things so wonderful – brilliant, spirit enhancing choirs, fantastic enthusiastic campaigners, original thinkers who change the thinking of whole societies and others who set up Oxfam and Earthwatch and so much more. So it is a little churlish to rail against this little jewel. But, but, how delighted I was when I read a book by an author who knows exactly what this city is about. Charlotte Mendelson says it all for me.

The problem for me of course, is that having become somewhat inoculated against some of the worst excesses of the place, I’m now turning a bit native. By which, I mean of course, that I wasn’t born here at all so I’m merging with the melee of transients and tourists who people this place. (According to a recent review, the group least represented among the university work force is native Oxonians although the transience can quite easily exceed 25 years or more). For the most of us there is always the knowledge that we make no mark on this obviously ancient and self contained, self satisfied city. I knew of a man who was a student here and fell in love with the learning, the debate, the greenery and the river, the whole youth and beauty thing; the drawing out of his skills and the making of his mind. Poor man could never get over the experience and his family felt that it was the separation from paradise that led to his early death from drink. Not the first by any means. This city does not have much of a heart I suspect but it can certainly put on a pretty face.