Tag Archives: life

Oink

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Only kidding. I’m reasonably certain that I just have a typical summer cold, nothing worse. Grounds for this are the regular metronomic progression of symptoms – a sore throat earlier this week, a day or so of no discernible symptoms and then yesterday the awareness that I was sneezing more than usual. Then I woke up at 2.30 this morning with a blocked/runny nose, one of the most irritating symptom combinations ever devised, and thereafter it was a couple of minutes sleep maximum, clutching a Kleenex, each time waiting for the next sudden gush of snot. Lovely.

But it meant that come 6am I was pretty certain I should be staying in bed, and so I did. This meant that when the heavens broke round about 7am, I was lying in a comfortable warm bed in a cool, shaded room listening to them. This is an experience everyone should have. Pause to think how rarely it happens. Torrential rain like that itself is rare. If you’re in bed when it comes then you’re probably asleep, or have been woken up in the small hours so are grumpy and resentful, or you’re trying to get to sleep in the first place. But to lie there, awake, with a totally clear conscience and to hear it tipping down all around you is an awesome, near religious feeling.

Once it had stopped – which it did all at once, like turning off a tap – I realised the sash windows had all been open top and bottom so all the windowsills needed mopping down. Meh. Worth it.

Best Beloved was on her way to work when the rain hit and got totally drenched. There are plus sides to working in a theological college, and one of them is that she could simply proceed on into work and borrow a surplus surplice and robe. Apparently the robe gaped a little so the surplice was used as an undergarment. Part of her job is to greet visitors and I wish I had been there to see it.

Now tired, headachey … the cold progresses as normal. Should be done by the end of the weekend. Unless it is something worse. Again I say, oink.

Corporate and bilingual

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Just been doing some web surfing to see if I need a visa for Canada next month. (I was pretty sure I didn’t, and I was right, but you know how these panic attacks can be …)

I’m pleased to be able to report that the Canada Border Services Agency “delivers innovative border management“. Or, if you like (this is Canada) L’Agence des services frontaliers du Canada “assure une gestion novatrice de la frontière“. Which means pretty much the same thing.

I personally wouldn’t want my border services agency to be innovative. I would want them to keep the bad guys out and let the good guys in, which as far as I’m aware is a quite traditional interpretation of the role. Any development thereon may not be such a good thing.

I await the innovativity both with interest and avec l’intérêt.

A whole in my mind

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I have fragmented knowledge of bits of Oxford. The Wycliffe area. St Giles. Broad Street, the High Street … I very rarely travel from one to the other, though. I make each one my destination for whatever purpose, and go there and back again. So, how do all those fragments fit together?

I could look at a map, or, I could walk it.

Park the car at Wycliffe. Along Norham Gardens and then down through the University Parks to the High Street, via St Cross Road – a handy back-alley route I didn’t know and the first of the threads to link the different bits together. Past Magdalen and over the bridge, hanging a left to St Clements and the Islamic Centre, looking suitably Islamic as it towers over the leafy green trees.

Then turn left just before the Magdalen Sports Ground and you’re in Mesopotamia – a shaded walk between two streams of the Cherwell, a mill stream and the natural channel, named with impeccably accurate Oxonian clever-gitness as Mesopotamia means “between rivers”. The walk is along a concrete causeway with overgrown banks on either side. You join at the point where the two streams merge again and the upper one pours down in a weir, so the air blowing at you down the alley is cool and moist. After that, though, you begin to see that it rained quite heavily earlier in the weekend – not a sign of it now, but it’s all evaporating and the air hemmed in by the overhanging undergrowth is humid.

You follow this as far as the point where the two streams diverge in the first place. The slipway with rollers at top left is presumably for getting punts between the two levels, but to my fevered imagination I could see it being an emergency punt launching device, for those occasions when the punt has to be in the water now.

And then you’re back in the University Parks again, walking up the Cherwell, and a couple more fragments have been sewn together. But you’re only just starting the trip into terra incognita because now you cross the river again and strike out for points east, or Marston, whichever comes sooner. This is the flood plain of the Cherwell, completely flat, immaculate sports ground on one side and overgrown grazing-and-hay-making-meadow on the other. You cross fields and go down more leafy tracks, and even though it’s completely unknown you see things like the minarets and a cluster of trees in the middle of the sports ground and the roof of the JR – each line of sight a further thread to bind the whole. Then through Marston itself, deciding not to look at the inside of the 12th century church, round in a big anticlockwise circle via the Victoria Arms on the Cherwell, which you do decide to look inside. Oh, so that’s what this place is. I punted here on a company social once, but obviously I came by river. Anyway. Now you’re heading back down the Cherwell again and suddenly, presto, you’re back in the University Parks and on the way back to the car.

Then home, via Summertown and Wolvercote. A final binding thread around the top of the town.

Six miles, apart from the driving bit, according to the book of walks; lovely weather; and not one hayfevery sniffle. How a Sunday afternoon should be.