Catching up

Spent our last morning in London in the launderette where the woman in charge, with some amusement, was letting one of her customers show us how to work everything. The women were all giving each other cheek and generally enjoying themselves.

Before we left London, we had a cup of coffee in a café run by a man who was more than a little off the wall. He sang, and he made ridiculous jokes, and claimed that the old woman assistant and the attractive young assistant were both madly in love with him. He had a voice like a door in need of oiling, and appeared to do far more talking than working. But it was fun to be there watching and listening.

Onto Northampton to see Celia’s two sisters and their husbands for a couple of days. This is the last time we’ll catch up with them and it was all a bit sad when we left. Watched the latest James Bond movie on DVD because my brother-in-law is a mad Bond fan, and has all the movies in his library. (When he came to NZ a few years ago he watched most of my son’s collection of Bond movies…!)

We also went to see Ratatouille, which Celia had been keen to see for a while – even though it’s an animated movie and she normally falls asleep during them!

Stopped off in Cambridge on the way back, a place we’d talking about going to see a couple of times previously but hadn’t ever managed to do so. It’s different to Oxford, which appealed straight away, but it has its own charm – and when we went exploring St John’s College (pretending we were students rather than tourists) we discovered just how pleasant it must be to attend University there. The buildings, dating from the late 17^th century, are certainly very pleasing to look at, and have been built to delight the eye. We didn’t explore a lot more (apart from a wonderful bookshop and the market) because it was getting colder and colder and a chilling drizzle was starting.

It's also a bit strange wandering around a town that has an area called Jesus.

And so back to Attleborough, by which time a cold that’s been hassling me for a couple of days decided to get itself into full gear.

Market

We discovered the Oxford market by accident: it’s similar in style to the inside market in Melbourne: lots of little permanent shops all crowded together under a permanent roof, some of them fully enclosed so you have to enter a door, some of them open (like the fish shop and the butchers) so you can buy straight over the counter, like you would in an open air market. One of the most appealing was a cake shop where they were doing the decoration of the cakes in full view of the public. They had dozens of things on display, cakes with people on them, and all sorts. And then there were hundreds of decorations you could buy to put on cakes, some of them edible and some not.
There was also a small café where they had free internet access, so of course we stopped there for a little while, as we carry the big baby, as it gets called to distinguish it from the little baby (the GPS), around with us most of the time for just such occasions. We only do this while we’re staying in places where we don’t have some internet access at home - we’ve been fortunate to be able to use other people’s broadband a lot of the time.

Oxford

We’ve been to Oxford today [Monday], in spite of having to struggle our way through yet another traffic jam. The town is everything you’d ever heard about and much more. It’s full of delightful buildings from a number of eras, and decoration abounds. Once you’re in the centre you can’t help but stumble over history at every point. We sat for some time in a church - the University Church of St Mary Virgin, if I remember rightly - where John and Charles Wesley preached, and where John Henry Newman rattled the rafters.
We went to a free exhibition of books related to Plutarch and Dante and Boccaccio. Some of the books had belonged to Plutarch himself, and had his notes very tidily written in the margins. (Making comments in the margins is nothing new, obviously.) Some of the books had the most glorious paintings alongside the text (and more comments from the owners). The colour was as fresh as the day it was done. There were all sorts of editions of Dante’s work, and a number of pictures and cartoons and drawings connected to that great tryptich. (I once had an edition of Dorothy Sayer’s translation of the book, which I think I must have left behind last time I was in England. Unfortunately, along with a trunkful of other books that we left in the care of a family member, it’s never been seen again.)
Oxford is curiously busy in certain streets - chock full of mostly young people speaking other languages - and then suddenly quiet in another street. Bicycles abound (their riders inconsistent in their use of helmets) and students are everywhere, debating on the street, striding along listening to ipods, walking seriously from one famous building to another, or laughing and having the time of the lives in a place they can barely comprehend the history of. Who can? Trying to be aware of the fact of the famous people who’ve trod these streets is nearly impossible; even in the church I could only think that the people listening to Wesley and Newman were no different from me: they ate, drank and slept as I do. They were privileged to hear men I’ve never heard, but I wonder if they considered it a privilege at the time.
In these church buildings you keep walking over memorial stones set in the floor. I’m not sure how many people are normally buried beneath these stones, or whether anyone is at all, but the memorials are a distinct reminder of our own mortality. One day, in a sense, people will walk over our graves too, careless as to who we are and what we did or didn’t do, incapable of appreciating our tiny role in the history of the world. It’s awfully sobering. Thank God we matter to God and to those close to us, otherwise it would be very depressing.