Hey-yo. Happy Independence Day. We celebrated the fourth of July with a visit to one of the bastions of Old World knowledge. There were no fireworks, but it was definitely a holiday. In the British sense of the word.
So yes, on Friday, the first day of my weekend, I voluntarily got up at 7 to run just like on schooldays, in order to be back at the dorm and ready to go at 9:20. Five of us went – Conor, Sarah, Patty, Lissa, and I. We took the Tube to Paddington Station, where we bought tickets for Oxford. There are a lot of great four-for-two deals on the trains here, and we’ve taken advantage of them before to go to Hampton Court and Salisbury, they can get you there for way cheaper. We bought a four-for-two package and one extra single adult since we had five people, and we divided the costs up equally – we all ended up paying about 12 pounds, which is to say ten pounds less than we would’ve each paid had we gone separately. Pay attention, this will be important later.
So, right, we found seats on the 10:20 train, which was pleasantly uncrowded, and we all took out our separate copies of Vanity Fair and tried to read them. Sarah got fifty pages done in an hour, which I find appalling because I managed twelve, but I think her pages are smaller and her print is bigger. What happened in the end, of course, was that we all fell asleep (which means that technically Sarah read fifty pages of that book in less than an hour, but we’re not going to think about that) and stumbled, a little logey, onto the Oxford platform at exactly 11:20. We found some free maps at the station, and we struck out – Conor had heard about a tower from which you could see the entire town, so we bent our steps that way. The first thing I saw was a statue of an ox. Like Oxford. I get it.
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Lewis Carroll used asterisks to single, in the Alice stories, when things were going to take an especially unbelievable turn – right before Alice shrinks, for instance, and before she grows enormous. So in a variation on that, the above exclamation-point barrier signals the moment when things got amazing. More amazing than usual, I should say. Oxford is absolutely beautiful. I don’t know where to start – i suppose it is, kind of, how I pictured it. (That Oxford was actually a parallel-universe Oxford, but it looked a lot like this one. Never mind, it’s complicated.) Spires, domes, cobbled narrow streets with leaning buildings – wood and stone both – hedges and shady open fields. We walked uphill – we passed a door in a hedge overhung with a sign that said Conservative Club of Oxford, and I swear the air temperature changed when I went by, I got goosebumps – and wandered into a quadrangle framed by a series of stone buildings. The sign on the outside said Nuffield College. It felt a lot like one of our colleges back at Yale, actually, and I suppose it well might given that we stole the idea from them. It was perhaps a little more formal – a fountain, a long sort of canal with lilies – I wondered if this presented a hazard to tipsy revelers on weekends when school was in session – but a lot like one of our courtyards. Beautiful. Anyway, we kept going and we got to this place, Carfax Tower. The tower itself isn’t particularly old – 1818 – but apparently there’s been a tower on this spot since the tenth century, which is kind of cool. It was a beautiful clear day and after a short climb we came out on the roof. Oxford’s a very small city; you could see straight out beyond it, to rolling hills and water.
We broke for lunch – Patty and Sarah went to Pizza Hut, in honor of our great nation – and met back at the Carfax Tower corner. We wanted to see Christ Church College – according to a National Geographic article that I read when I was ten or eleven, this is the “epitome” of Oxford’s academic system (and therefore it was where I determined I wanted to go for undergrad, though it started to look like that was going to be as difficult to negotiate as getting to Parallel-Universe Oxford, given that there education system doesn’t really sync up with ours) – so we walked down a sunny street along the college’s outside wall, looking for an entrance. On the way we got distracted by “The Alice Shop”, a total tourist trap that was nonetheless interesting because, of course, it referred to Carroll’s Alice, Carroll having been a Christ Church professor and the inspirational Alice the daughter of the college dean, and we just read both of the Alice books for class. The store was what you might expect – lots of things you’re scared of knocking over, porcelain knickknacks and tiles. A sign claimed, however, that Alice Liddell (that’s the original Alice) had indeed frequented the shop as a girl, and bought her barley candy there. (This next to a stack of barley candy, priced at about $6 a box.) We browsed for a very long time.
Then we went looking for the Christ Church entrance again. We walked through a beautiful sort of outer courtyard but somehow missed the door in. Don’t laugh, I haven’t graduated from college yet. We came out on another street, near the Christ Church art gallery entrance, but the fellow there said the gallery hadn’t opened yet, and directed us to walk back around and actually go through Christ Church, by the conclusion of which visit the gallery would be open. We ended up, however, wandering off and getting lost in the stacks of a used bookstore. It was fun. I didn’t buy any books because Thackeray was lying heavy in my backpack.
Sooooo, we finally circled back around and got into the college – some don’t charge admission, but clearly people will pay to see this one – for a student rate. The cathedral was closed that day – tear – so we couldn’t see it (though they very nicely reduced our admission rates because of this), but we saw an incredible staircase that was actually used in the Harry Potter movies and took dramatic pictures of ourselves standing on it. Then we visited the dining hall, which dates from 1529, if I remember right – can you imagine? Eating every day in a place so old and storied? It actually reminded all of us of Commons, except with portraits of Henry VIII on the wall. High beautiful ceiling, long tables end-to-end, that sort of thing. There was something cooking, actually, and a menu on the table for that night, so I guess some sort of classes must still be running. Grad students don’t get vacations, right?
Anyway, then we found our way out to the quadrangle, which was enormous and beautiful – simple classical architecture, lots of green, fountains. I was kind of jealous, at which point Sarah decided I needed to be reminded that we go to school in a beautiful place too. Which is true. And if Oxford is the only place that makes you jealous, you’re doing pretty well.
We were excited for the art gallery, which we’d heard had some Reynolds and Gainsborough, and even some da Vinci. We’d thought our Christ Church tickets would get us in, but the old lady at the desk there said no.
Well, said Conor, the guidebook says the admission covers admission to the art gallery.
What guidebook is that? she asked.
Fodor’s.
Well, she said, it’s wrong, the gallery has always been separate. It’s to keep people out. We get schoolchildren who come in to look at the college, and they would just make noise in here. They’re not really interested.
But, she said, it was worth paying extra, because what was in there was “priceless”. So we shelled out fifty pence each – no great wound in the wallet – and went in.
There was a lot of medieval art. This made me happy. I like medieval art a lot. Mainly I like to stand in front of it and imagine the medieval artist standing there, painting it – I like to imagine what they were thinking, what they were worrying about, their superstitions and their beliefs. So I got kind of left behind, because I spent a lot of time in front of some 13th-century triptychs pretending to be medieval. I also noticed that, on the little cards that tell you about the paintings, the paint usually used in these works is “egg tempera”. Egg? Like made from eggs? The ingenuity! How did they do it? Wouldn’t it have been seen as a waste of eggs? Anyway, I spent even longer looking at the paintings trying to imagine the paint in egg form, and then I wanted to smell them to see if they smelled like eggs, which is hard to do subtly. I looked around and all the people in the gallery seemed to be engaged with other paintings so I leaned in really close to an enthroned virgin and child and took a whiff. Nothing. Bummer. Let alone eggs – didn’t smell like anything. Which you wouldn’t expect, after all those years.
The Reynolds, sadly, turned out to be one less-than-impressive portrait, and we couldn’t find any Gainsborough. There was one da Vinci sketch – I quite liked it, sort of a grotesque study of a face – and a few Raphael drawings that weren’t as interesting to me. Good times. And, I think I want to go to Oxford. If there’s anything that could encourage you to do grad school, it’s that place.
After that, we went to the Ashmolean Museum, billed as England’s oldest. The founding date proved to be 1845, which kind of annoyed me. Eighteen forty-five? England can do better than that. I know there were plenty of inquiring minds in the eighteenth century – I expect at least a 1700s establishment. Clearly there are museums in England that are lodged in much older buildings; I guess this is the oldest that has been in continuous operation as a museum? The collection was eclectic and interesting – some Greek and Roman sculptures, a huge array of ancient Egyptian artifacts from huge statuary and a complete shrine to tiny amulets, some pre-Raphaelite Rossetti paintings and drawings included the chalk sketch of a Proserpine now in the Tate, according to Sarah.
At this point it was around quarter to five and I decided to head back to London. The others were planning to stay until 10 at night, and I didn’t really want to do that. So I bade them all farewell – saw a Stradivarius violin on my way out – and headed for the train station, arriving at 4:58 for the 5:01 back to the city. I had a fun ride back, read more Thackeray and listened to a little English girl go on in her little English accent to an adult woman about how her father used to read her the Just So stories and she didn’t understand them at all. I got off at Paddington a little less than an hour later – we were running fast – and set my course for the Hammersmith and City Tube line. On my way out, this guy asks to see my ticket, which doesn’t surprise me, because they don’t always check your tickets at line’s end but sometimes they do. I hand it over without a flicker of anxiety. They went down the aisle during the ride and looked at the tickets – another thing they don’t always do – and the conductor smiled very nicely and punched mine and moved on. But this guy looks at my ticket and as I’m walking forward anticipating no trouble he says, Wait wait wait. This is four-for-two.
Yes, I say.
Where are your other three people? he says.
What? I shrug. They’re not here – I had to come back earlier than them.
No, he says, you can’t do that, you need to be with the other three people.
What? I say, I’ve never heard that before. We’ve done this before and we never had this problem. Which is true.
He gestures for me to come with him and we walk all the way back to the other end of the platform. I am kind of mad. I’ve never heard that you have to come back together, I say. We left together. I had to come back before them because I’m meeting someone – I’m late, actually. This isn’t true, of course but I am working myself up into a self-righteous lather nonetheless. This guy must be mistaken.
But we arrive at the little supervisor booth at the platform’s end and lo and behold, after I explain the situation, the guy inside says, Yes, you need to travel all together, your ticket isn’t valid and your friends tickets aren’t valid anymore.
I never heard that, I repeat, we’ve done this before – and here’s where things get bizarre, because yes I am frustrated, and yes I am tired and this seems like a silly rule and I just want to get back to my room, but I’m not terribly upset. I don’t want to buy an extra ticket, I feel guilty about screwing my friends over, but okay, I have money, it’s not an emergency. But for some reason, as I’m talking to this guy, I start choking up, and suddenly I am freaking crying in the middle of the station. At the same time I am thinking, this is absurd, I’m not sad. Of course the man in the booth is sort of alarmed, and he comes out and I try to explain to him through my freakoid convulsions that I don’t know why I’m falling apart and I manage something about it’s having been a long day (even though really it hasn’t, not in that sense), and he says, here, I’ll get you some water and is in general very civil even though he’s probably thinking, Who is this crazy girl, and how did she get through customs? He tells me to calm down and then asks me if I’ve got my friends’ phone numbers and I say yes and drink the water and hold on to the plastic cup very tightly and he tells me to call them and let them know that their tickets are invalid, and suggests that they buy a 37-pound three-person travel package. At this point, I take out my wallet and make a gurgling sound in lieu of “How much do I owe you?”, but he gets the message and says he’s not going to charge me, and I apologize and thank him, in full-on Miserable Wretch mode. But call your friends, though, he says, because I’m not going to let them through. He unlocks the gate for me and lets me through into the station and I walk straight for my Tube line trying not to look at the people around me, who probably are all wearing expressions that say “Who is that crazy girl, and why did that guy let her loose on us?”
Anyway, I take the Tube back to King’s Cross and manage to get Conor on the phone. I say I’ll help pay for the extra tickets they’ll have to buy, and he’s very nice and just thanks me for letting them know. Of course, the really sucky part is that all this could’ve been avoided if we’d known ahead of time – I could have come back with the adult single ticket, and they with the two-for-fours. But I get to my room and I chill out and read some more about Becky Sharp.
Later that evening I ran into Lissa and Sarah, who said that in fact they hadn’t bought the extra tickets on their way home, and they hadn’t had any trouble – there was no one looking at tickets on the other end when they got into Paddington, not even little ticket-scanner gates in operation. Go figure. So none of us was forced to make any extra expenditure, it’s all good.
I will admit that I’m not proud of the incident. I have compartmentalized it, along with my memories of myself barking like a dog in the middle of an argument when I was in third grade and of some ill-advised declaration of sentiment made more recently. I’ve heard guys complain that the police always let girls off the hook for speeding because girls start crying, and I’m thinking there’s maybe some truth in that, which sucks because I don’t want to be THAT kind of girl.
I want to be the kind of girl who goes to Oxford. That was the greater part of the day, and it was a great day, let’s stay on message.
