Not All Cats are Grey in the Dark

If you wander around Oxford long enough, you begin to realize that it is actually two cities sharing space but taking turns in time.  Oxford by day is weathered Gothic architecture that looms over fast-flowing rivers of bicycles and clusters of tourists skittering from place to place like water bugs.  At night, Oxford shape-shifts into vaporous phantoms who keep watch over pub goers, kebab seekers, and late-night studiers. Where Day Oxford is industrious and imposing, sheltering the accumulated wisdom of history and those who maintain it, Night Oxford is indifferently protective, looking down bemusedly on those who venture out into the dark.

Dusk was falling as we joined the queue for the first Evensong of Michelmas term in the New College chapel.  Evensong is a religious service in the Church of England that is mostly sung, and in a town overflowing with talented choirs, New College’s is one of the best with over 100 CD’s to their name.  New College is known for several other things as well, starting with its name.  It seems odd to call anything 600 years old ‘new’, but this is probably better than it’s official name, The Warden and Scholars of St Mary’s College of Winchester in Oxford.  Then there is the college’s motto, “Manners Makyth Man”, which is notable for its surprisingly egalitarian suggestion that a person’s behavior rather than their noble birth or accumulated wealth is what makes them who they are.  And this being Oxford, New College has a bizarre tradition. Every first of June, the duly appointed Mint Julep Quarterperson uses a 150 year old endowment to provide free mint juleps to all college members. There is a story behind this, but it feels more in keeping with the spirit of Oxford if you just take such things at face value and tell yourself, “of course they do.”

Perhaps in alignment with the college motto, even scruffy American tourists draped in cameras are allowed to attend Evensong, though sadly we had to stow our gear out of respect for the strict No Photography policy. Once seated we gazed around the high, narrow chapel and as the twilight straining through the stained glass got bluer and dimmer, the candles set amongst the choir felt warmer and brighter.  As the service began, the ethereal sound of the New College Choir filled every crevice of the chapel.  Oxford is a city where on some nights you can choose from four or five Evensong services, so the combination of centuries-old architecture, sublime acoustics, and the best choristers in the world is perhaps a bit old hat for the locals. But speaking for wide-eyed Americans, it transported us to an astonishing other place and time.

As a photographer, my favorite time of day has always been night.  The day bathes everything in a smothering, normalizing light that elevates the bland and trivializes the brilliant.  In the day, everything can feel the same.  But at night, selective illumination plays favorites and changes the story.  This is especially true in Oxford where the night reveals all sorts of architectural details that go unnoticed during the day.

  

When I dream of Oxford, I am always there at night. The crenellated towers and mullioned windows are what I see, and the moon is always out. The honey colored stone takes on an even warmer glow in the dim light, and curtains yet to be drawn reveal tantalizing glimpses of private libraries and studies. The few other pedestrians are hurrying past with purpose, and only I seem to appreciate the sturdy beauty all around. Oxford is the one place to which I must always return, in person as much as possible and in dreams when I am lucky.

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The Land of Milk and Money

The Telegraph once determined that thanks to Inspectors Morse & Lewis, Oxford has a fictional murder rate 11 times higher than New York City’s actual rate.  That’s a lot of corpses tucked behind ionic columns. Which means that if you’ve read the Morse novels and decide to go for a walk around Oxford, you experience constant jolts of excitement as you recognize locations where something nefarious happened.  I love this.  Not the murder part, but the idea that the British landscape is so richly chronicled that wherever you go you’ll see someplace that already exists in your imagination.  This is just as true in the country as in the cities, and there may be no square mile of British countryside that does not feature in literature.  If every page written about the British countryside were torn from its book and placed at the spot it describes, it would be a heavy snow falling across the kingdom.

The countryside has a firm hold on the British imagination, but this passion gets expressed in many different ways.  Beatrix Potter and Susan Allen Toth are among the purveyors of an over-the-top tweeness that imagines the rural landscape is dotted with hedgehogs on their way to tea, whereas James Herriot and The Archers focus on the agricultural foundations of the country, giving us simple folk with simple values.  Laurie Lee draws a vivid picture of the horrors, joys, and hardships of between-the-wars small village life, while Agatha Christie fills her fictional village of St Mary Mead with the venal and the dead.

We decided to spend our last day wandering around the rolling hills of the Cotswold Area of Natural Beauty (an official designation), and our first stop was the fetching town of Burford.  It quickly became clear that Misses Tiggy-Winkle and Marple were nowhere to be found and that the only fictional characters we might encounter were Simon and Minty Marchmont from the BBC’s Posh Nosh series. Ostensibly a cooking show, Posh Nosh is actually a razor sharp satire of Hunter Barbour Land Rover Aga fetishists – toffs and wannabes who imagine that the brand of stove they own sets them apart from the great unwashed.  Burford has a lot more charm than the Marchmonts, but it’s easy to see where the stereotype comes from.  After lunch at The Cotswold Arms, a pub miraculously offering gluten free granary bread in their Ploughman’s Lunches, we headed north.

  

Passing through the village of Little Rissington we saw a public footpath, so we parked and headed into the fields.  We passed a charming little church and graveyard before heading out into open pasture land.  Farmers and land owners have historically taken a dim view of the “right to ramble”, a concept which gives the public limited access to private (generally uncultivated) land.  Some of this suspicion dates back to a time when protecting hunting and fishing grounds was an economic necessity, but many landowners simply figure that their land is theirs to do with as they please.  So significant though is the countryside to the British self-image that the 1949 Countryside Act and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 have enshrined public access to the countryside in law.  Clever landowners make a virtue of public access by directing walkers to farm shops, tea rooms, and pubs that they own.  And even those landowners who only grudgingly grant access to their land probably benefit from it in the form of a larger population of voters sympathetic to countryside issues.

After a quick stop in Bourton-on-the-Water (which bills itself as the “Venice of the Cotswolds”), we arrived in the Slaughters.  Upper and Lower Slaughter are in many ways the quintessential Cotswold villages because they so fiercely guard their rural, non-commercial character.  Where Burford might have a few too many shops selling souvenir tea towels, Lower Slaughter wouldn’t allow a single icebox tricycle (a bicycle-mounted ice cream vendor) to take up position in the village because “the selling of ice creams and lollipops is totally inappropriate for the village of Lower Slaughter”.  The parish council even argued that the tricycle “could be a danger to young children who might climb on the trike and then fall into the river.”  So growing up in Lower Slaughter might not be a lot of fun, but it is a bewitchingly beautiful place to visit.

  

In Upper Slaughter we found a bridleway draped in green and decided to walk along it for a while.  Though we needed to turn around and get back to Oxford, I would have been very happy to just keep walking.

Yodeling Down Memory Lane

The highlight of my childhood summers was an annual trip with my Mom and sister to the tiny town of Dry Tavern in southwestern Pennsylvania’s coal country.  There, my grandmother’s house would overflow with aunts, uncles, and cousins who had gathered for a laid-back family reunion.  I looked forward to that week in August like it was Christmas for a lot of reasons, a prime one being the chance to hang out with my Aunt Barbara while she spun records from her vast collection.  We would sit in what had been my grandfather’s radio and television repair shop, and amidst the skeletons of old console TVs and shelves full of vacuum tubes, we would listen to albums for hours on end.  Barbara’s musical tastes were wide ranging and seemed far too sophisticated and exotic for such a rural part of the country.  She introduced me to Suzi Quatro, Patsy Cline, The Ramones, and a strange Dutch band called Focus. I still remember being transfixed when she set the needle down on the opening track of Focus’s Moving Waves album. My sheltered ears had never heard anything like the frenzied guitar riffing, maniacal yodeling, and superhuman flute playing of “Hocus Pocus” (that’s right, “Hocus Pocus” by Focus).  And after that came an even bigger surprise when the rest of the album became a heady blend of jazz and classically influenced instrumental music that was even less like anything I had ever heard.

I quickly became a huge Focus fan, listening to everything I could get my adolescent hands on.  Their songs combined the sweetest plaintive melodies, a subversive sense of humor, and virtuosic musicianship. Their music felt intimately familiar to me, as if I already knew their songs – it became the background radiation of my brain.

Focus was never a band that played the fame game very well.  Their uncompromising musical style wasn’t likely to appeal to a wide audience in the first place, and they had a penchant for naming both albums and songs “Focus N”, where N was a number between 1 and 10.  Turnover in the band was so great that their Wikipedia page resorts to showing a large color-coded chart of the comings and goings of 22 different musicians, and even with that the band took numerous multi-year breaks.  On top of all this, they were virtually unknown in the US, so I had no one to share my passion with.  Being a young Focus fan was tough.

All of which is to say that I never dreamed I would get to see the band live, and certainly not as they approached their 50th anniversary.  But amazingly, they were playing in Southampton while CB and I were in Oxford, so at the end of a day spent in the company of ancients, we headed south to see the merely old.

After a kebab dinner in Southampton’s high street, we managed to get lost walking to the venue and eventually made it just as Thijs van Leer, the band’s founder, driving force, and one constant presence, was playing the first haunting notes of Focus I.

Throughout most of the show, van Leer sat perched behind his Hammond organ looking out at the crowd like a slightly demented Captain Kangaroo as he scowled, laughed at the ceiling, hit himself on the head, and stuck out his tongue. Every once in a while, he would come to the front of the stage for a flute solo.

  

Drummer Pierre van der Linden was the other old-timer and his energy and precision, especially during his 10 minute solo, belied his 71 years.  I hope I can do anything half as well when I’m that age.  Relative newcomers Menno Gootjes on guitar and bassist Udo Pannekeet rounded out the group.

    

After the show, I wandered over to the merch table hoping for a t-shirt, but they only had size small (a little odd considering the band’s fan base is primarily older, larger men).  Disappointed, I noticed a new 3 disc Thijs van Leer solo album and saw the man himself shuffling over to greet fans, so I bought the album and asked him to sign it.  He did and graciously posed for a selfie with me.  The album was £30, or about $40, and van Leer apologized for the price, saying in his Dutch accented English, “I know it’s a bit dear”.  More than a little star-struck, I stammered, “Oh, no problem” and from the line of fans behind me I heard, “He’s American, he can afford it!”

It’s a long way from Dry Tavern to Southampton, but I’m glad I made the journey.  The music of Focus still appeals to me at an almost genetic level, and because of those long-ago happy summer days, it means even more to me now.

 

 

 

Forever Endeavor

After Avebury, Silbury, and West Kennet, it seemed the only thing left to do was head for the best known ancient site in the world, Stonehenge.  There are larger, older, and better preserved stone circles, but Stonehenge captures the imagination in ways that few other places can.  It is set in the middle of a wide open plain that makes the sky a dramatic part of the scene, and the densely packed stones radiate a sense of concentrated  power and mystery.  And to be sure, there is mystery here.

Stonehenge’s smaller bluestones weigh several tons each and could only have been quarried in Wales, 150 miles away.  How these stones were transported from so far away has not been definitively shown.  Researchers have built prototype devices based on rolling logs, but none of them have worked well enough to cover the distance required. But the really interesting question is why Stonehenge’s builders felt the need to use these stones in the first place.  What does it say about Stonehenge’s purpose and importance that its builders chose to use a particular kind of stone that required such a monumental effort, especially when other kinds of stone were much closer?

However the stones were transported, it’s likely that multiple generations of laborers were born, worked, and died without seeing the circle finished.  The intense faith they must have felt that what they were doing was important only adds to the aura of the site.

Stonehenge is a time machine.  Wander around to find your favorite view of the stones and you can almost see a distant human relative from 4000 years ago standing next to you, filled with the same sense of wonderment and awe.  We cannot help but think of them when we gaze upon their work, and it seems they were also thinking of us, because whatever its purpose and however it was built, Stonehenge was designed to last.  It seems unlikely that a human from any age would have devoted themselves to a project like this without giving a thought to those of us in the distant future who would enjoy the result of their labors.  For all of its cold stone, Stonehenge is an intensely human place.

Living On Barrowed Time

If the purpose of the Avebury stone circle is mysterious, nearby Silbury Hill is inscrutably enigmatic.  It is a 4400 year-old artificial mound, 130 ft tall with a circular base, and is so large that it likely required 500 men working for 15 years to move and shape its 300,000+ cubic yards of chalk and clay.

Which means that Silbury was not built on a whim.  But various archaeological digs into the mound have come up empty, finding very few artifacts and no burial chambers or contemporaneous human remains.  So why was it built?

When I was young and living in England with my family we took a trip to Silbury Hill.  At that time there were no fences around ancient monuments in Britain, so my Mom and I climbed up the hill and log-rolled all the way down.  It was great fun and after recovering the ability to stand upright, I remember looking up at the hill and wondering about those who had built it.  I decided it had been made for exactly the use to which we had just put it.

A short distance from Silbury is the West Kennet Long Barrow.  A barrow is a burial mound, so we’d finally found an ancient site whose original purpose was understood, except in some ways it was more mysterious than the last two we’d seen. West Kennet is 5600 years old, making it one of the oldest sites in Britain.  It’s difficult to know what was important to a citizen of that era, but it’s estimated the barrow took 15,000 man hours to build, meaning this was not a casual undertaking (so to speak). When it was first discovered, the remains of 46 individuals were found inside, ranging from babies to elderly men. It is tempting to see this as the mark of an egalitarian society, but the effort required to build the barrow raises the question of who did the work. Were there people whose entire lives were devoted to preparing for other people’s death? And why aren’t there any enclosed structures for the living that have survived as well as this burial chamber?  As is so often the case with ancient cultures, it’s easy to think they were obsessed with death.

If the Sheep Know Anything, They’re Not Talking

The village of Avebury in Wiltshire looks like many other small English villages.  There is a Grade I listed church, a welcoming pub, a well-kept cricket ground, and many lovely brick houses.  There are also lots and lots of sheep grazing contentedly all around the village giving visitors the impression of having stumbled onto the set for a film entitled “Bucolic Britain.”

But Avebury is really known for being contained inside the largest Neolithic stone circle in the world, a circle that also encloses an ancient complex of earthworks and smaller stone circles.  The entire site is at least 4500 years old and its purpose remains a mystery.

The presence of several gift shops and the ubiquitous National Trust cafe convey the illusion that this is just another historical site to be considered, consumed, and consigned to history like a castle or manor house.  But Avebury is different because nobody knows what it really was.  A place for rituals?  A funereal site?  Was it, like its more famous sibling to the south, an astronomical observatory?  Or maybe it was none of these.

The mystery is simultaneously compelling and frustrating – how can simple folk from so long ago keep a big secret like Avebury from such technologically advanced wizards as ourselves?  I asked this out loud and got a few annoyed looks from a couple of sheep who paused their ruminating long enough to make it clear that my ruminating would not get an answer.

Nobel on Wheels

Oxford is a small city that punches above its weight in global influence thanks to the university and its many famous alumni and professors.  A list like JRR Tolkien, Albert Einstein, CS Lewis, Joseph Heller, Bill Clinton, Graham Green, Tim Berners-Lee, Aldous Huxley, Indira Gandhi, Jonathan Swift, Edmund Halley, Oscar Wilde, and Edwin Hubble only begins to scratch the surface of famous Oxonians.

And because central Oxford is closed to cars (and because the city is filled with thousands of students all carrying hefty overdrafts), walking and cycling are the most popular ways of getting around.

All of which sets up one of my favorite Oxford activities – spotting future prime ministers and Nobel laureates as they flow past you in the streets.  A good place to do this is outside the Christopher Wren designed Sheldonian Theater, where the 13 Emperors keep watchful (and wandering) eyes on all who pass.

Sometimes though, the people you see look less like future Wikipedia entries and more like the dodgy groundskeeper of a small college who becomes the prime suspect when students start disappearing and a new bed of out-of-season flowers suddenly appears.

The flow of students continues at all hours, and this reveals another reason why cycling is so popular in Oxford – you can always get home after a night at the pub.  During my summer in Oxford, a friend told me how he used to take the train to his hometown, consume as many as 18 pints of ale with his old mates, catch the return train to Oxford, cycle the two miles back to college, and scale the wall after the gate had shut to avoid the wrath of the college porter.  Anyone who can manage all of that has a bright future indeed.