Oxford

Over the past 3 days we explored and fell in love with Oxford.

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,

She needs not June for beauty's heightening,

Lovely all times she lies ...

From Thyrsis, Matthew Arnold

The city was quiet; its students’ home for the Christmas holidays and the flow of tourists at their lowest ebb in these gloomy January days. Despite the cold greyness Oxford was enchanting with its narrow-cobbled streets, college buildings embellished with gargoyles, towers, spires, ornate windows and heavy wood doors, grassy meadows nestled between the arms of the Thames and Cherwell rivers and the stories left behind by the fascinating people who have called Oxford home. L and A appreciated the shops; hip clothing stores, multiple American candy stores, Harry Potter merchandise everywhere and the HMV store which was the girl’s idea of heaven: pop-culture paraphernalia from Stranger Things via K-Pop and Anime to Pusheen and Hello Kitty coating t-shirts, pencil cases, cups. Not a music record in sight. We chased the ghosts left behind by Oxford’s famous story tellers, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and Lewis Carroll, visiting Narnia’s lamppost and the wooden door guarded by a lion and a faun, walking in the shadow of the high walls of Merton College where trees that inspired Tolkien’s Ents once stood guard, following the river where an Oxford maths scholar entertained Alice and her siblings on boat outings with a story of a bored little girl who followed a white rabbit down the rabbit hole …. We discovered that Exeter College is otherwise known as Jordan College, Lyra Belacqua’s home in Pullman’s Dark Materials universe and L excitedly informed me that the author of her current A Murder Most Unladylike book, transformed medieval Magdalen College into a Cambridge college! The Story Museum set the scene, taking us on a journey through time beginning in Anglo-Saxon Oxford, when the shadows lurking behind flickering fires were brought to life by storytellers weaving tales of monsters and heroes and gods. We stepped across the threshold of illustrious Christ Church college, dutifully listening to the audio tour which cleverly keeps tourists quiet. We gawked in wonder at the Harry Potteresque dining hall, at once cozy and formal, intimidating yet intimate. Both girls are now dreaming of their future selves as students at Oxford, eating meals alongside friends in the dining hall under the watchful gaze of Henry VIII, reading books on the perfectly mown square of grass in Tom quad, becoming lost amid the stacks of ancient library books. One morning we walked the corridors of the fabulous Ashmolean Museum, A leading us with a museum map to find its top ten highlights, such as Guy Fawkes’ lantern, the ceremonial cape worn by Pocahontas’ father, Powhatan, The Alfred Jewel - a beautiful Anglo-Saxon decoration A recognized from her Viking project in school and the Messiah, a Stradivarius violin, rarely played and now imprisoned within the museum walls. Will its voice ever be heard again? It was a fascinating adventure and a fun way to start the year.  Happy New Year!