July 9 – London to Oxford, England. Train to Oxford is easy from London, they run almost every hour but if you have luggage you need to be careful when selecting a train. Many trips have a change of train involved and you definitely don't want one of those. Some trains are more like commuter trains, absolutely no place for luggage. You can tell these trains because the web site won't give you a chance to reserve a seat. The train you want is a no change train that has 1st class and lets you pick a seat.
Having done that and already having my tickets in my wallet it was on the taxi for the 20 minute trip to Paddington Station. Paddington is being upgraded and that meant that the departure screens were not working. They had little portable monitors scattered around but they were so small that your train didn't show up until it was almost ready to leave. When you have a lot of luggage to board and sometimes not much time to do it you have to be in position and ready to act.
Train personnel all over Europe have been extraordinarily kind to us on this trip. They patiently answer questions and give advice on what you are facing in their station. I asked a staff member about the Oxford train at 10:22 and he told me it would be on Platform 1, Track 2. We had to go to the other end of the station to get to that track. I don't know if we would have made the train if we'd waited to head there when the track finally showed up on the screen.
Once again there was a lot of space on the train. First class is almost always half empty. I parked our large luggage at the end of the car and we put the hand luggage on the seats next to us. The ride was uneventful and we got off the train right on time. Oxford station is small but we are on track two and it's a pull through station meaning we had to go up and across a bridge and then down to get to the station. Normally this is not a big deal but our luggage it is a bit of a problem if they don't have an elevator. Fortunately they do have them here so it was up, over and out.
It's another grand day and the short taxi ride was quickly over and we arrived at our hotel. I splurged a bit on this one because we're only staying two nights and Oxford is really a walking city. It's located right in the center of the college district. It's an old building but it's been updated to be comfortable. One reason I wanted to stay here is that the hotel has been used in the BBC's Inspector Morse series and I'm a big fan. In fact, when you consider everything, plot, cinematography, writing style, actors, scenery, humor and all that goes into a TV show, it's the overall best police/mystery series ever on TV anywhere worldwide. The current spin off, Inspector Lewis is almost that good as well. Morse died in the final episode of his series. Lewis was his sergeant. There was a hiatus of several years and then they made a Lewis and it was a hit. I think there are about 8 of them now but the USA has only gotten the first 4 as far as I know.
Back to Oxford. We're staying in the MacDonald Randolph Hotel. If you want a sterile, plastic, cookie cutter hotel this is not your place. It has character and style but also some challenges. For example, our room was on the first floor, that's the second floor in US terms. When you get off the elevator you have to walk down the hall to the left and turn left into another hallway that shortly turns right. You then encounter four stairs before turning left and going down another short hallway to get to our room #145. It's not a long way but it seems to be as you make so many turns. I've been much farther from the elevators in most of the hotels we've been in on this trip.
The building is absolutely wonderful but then as long as the air conditioning works I mostly don't care about the other touches. The room was very nicely appointed; a high backed easy chair with round side table, a desk with chair, a large bottle of both still and sparkling mineral water, about the best coffee and tea layout I've ever seen in a hotel room and a nice bath but most importantly the A/C was doing great. Two little surprises were a box of six delicious chocolate truffles and a hand written note from the manager welcoming us to the hotel. The halls and stairs might have been a problem if we'd had to bring our own luggage to the room but the concierge and bellmen were swift and efficient and actually seemed like they would have been disappointed if I hadn't let them handle everything for me.
Right from the start the concierge called me Mr. Longenberger but in a way that didn't make it sound stuffy and formal, it just seemed natural. Odd, because I usually don't like to be so formally addressed. But in light of where we are it seemed appropriate.
We arrived in Oxford just after noon and decided to get some lunch and then go see the Ashmolean Museum. Another reason I stayed here is that the Ashmolean is right across the street. We walked up to Martyrs' Square turned right proceeded to Broad Street, aptly named as it is very wide in a city of generally narrow streets, and proceeded down Broad until we found a small café, The Buttery, that seemed to have nice things for lunch.
A very informal café in that you order inside and they give you a number, much like in the States, which you take to your table and they deliver the food. I couldn't resist the chance to get a Croque Monsieur, the fancy French name for a hot, toasted Panini style, ham and cheese sandwich with béchamel sauce on top. They can be terrible or delicious and I decided to see how the English would do with it. They did very well indeed. The sandwich was crisp and toasted hard enough so the sauce didn't make it gooey. The béchamel was applied to the sandwich and then it was put under the broiler to give the sauce some color. The cheese was melted but not runny and the ham was very good. Bravo British!! In France the ingredients are usually excellent but the assembly and heating done so haphazardly that the final result is not as good as the ingredients would warrant. Here it was perhaps the opposite. The ingredients were fine but not first rate. However the preparation was done so skillfully that the final result was wonderful. I can go on about good food, don't you think.
Two of Oxford's at least 39 colleges are side by side on Broad Street right off Martyrs' Square, Balliol and Trinity. The little seating area we used had a great view of both. As a huge fan of the Reformation and a big fan of Inspector Morse, all this was especially delightful to me. Start with the sublime and end with the ridiculous is a good motto so I shall.
I'll start with the sublime and that involves how Balliol College figures greatly in what is often called the Pre-Reformation Era and ultimately to the migration of my ancestors to the USA. In the 1400s John Wycliffe, the Master of Balliol College, wrote a manuscript criticizing the current corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church and calling for an end to them. His aim was not to split from Catholicism but to turn it back to a more Biblical way of operating. Three students from Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, carried a copy back to the University of Prague where they gave it to one of their instructors, Jan Hus. Hus was so struck by the similarity of Wycliffe's thoughts to his own that he read it in his classes and promoted the ideas at the university. Of course this did not set well with the local church leaders. Hus founded a movement eventually called the Hussites. I discussed this somewhat in my entries for June 27 & 29 when we were in Prague and Tabor, Czech Republic.
For hundreds of years the Hussites were the majority in Moravia and Bohemia until the Bavarian Catholics teamed up with the Czech Catholics and took the country back by force. At that point it was renounce your new beliefs, leave the country or die in both Bavaria and Moravia. That's when my people, Lutherans, had to leave Bavaria and the Hussites had to leave Moravia and Bohemia. When they got to the Pennsylvania Colony of Wm. Penn they were called Moravians. They came to Pennsylvania led by Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. In fact, Zinzendorf and his band of believers founded Bethlehem Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve 1741 just 60 years after the Bavarians my clan, arrived. So at least indirectly, John Wycliffe of Balliol College, University of Oxford is responsible for my being in the USA. To say that I'm grateful would be to underestimate the gratitude I feel for all involved, Catholics included. It's hard for me to hold a grudge against someone who made it possible for generations of my ancestors to have a better life.
Now for the ridiculous. In the 27th episode of Inspector Morse (The Day of the Devil) Balliol's Bursar, Maugham Willowbank, is portrayed as an occultist and a revenge driven escaped convict starts bodies dropping around Oxford and the college in specific. Several scenes are filmed in the college. To the best of my knowledge, Balliol is the only college in Oxford to which I have a personal connection and it's doubled. My belief system was given form by a member of staff, my ultimate citizenship was set in motion by the same man and a very good episode of my favorite crime show was filmed there as well. Like I said, the sublime to the ridiculous.
In fact, The Buttery figures in two Morse episodes, The Last Enemy, where Morse and his date go into The Buttery and the final episode where Morse dies, The Remorseful Day where The Buttery is used as a bookshop. I guess everything gets into the act as the Tourist Information Center two doors down appears in The Service of All the Dead as a Lloyds' Bank. Actually since that episode was filmed in 1987 it might actually have been a bank.
All this twaddle produced by our first lunch in Oxford. You're in for some really rough going in this town.
After lunch we decided to get full value from a ticket to the HoHo Bus we'd do that tomorrow and this afternoon we'd look in on the Ashmolean Museum. There's no charge to enter the museum but donations are solicited. They figured a fair donation to be 3-4 British Pounds per person and that sounded about right to me.
This is a small but wonderful place. For example, the display they have for the Minoan culture of ancient Crete is the best I've ever seen. With a mixture of real artifacts, replicas (clearly marked as such) of priceless, one of a kind objects and explanatory charts and diagrams it gives you a very good understanding of that early civilization. I lived on Crete a year and a half. During that time I visited all the ancient sights and museums and if I were to try to summarize what I learned back in the late '60s I could not do any better than this.
As you know if you've read several of my journals I'm also a huge fan of Ancient Egypt and their exhibits on Egypt are excellent as well. They don't have a great quantity but what they have is high quality and well interpreted. They have a cosmetic palate that, while it is not as old as Narmer's Palate in the National Museum in Cairo, is old enough to qualify as one of the earliest 'documents' in the world (Narmer's is the oldest known). A palate in ancient Egypt was used to mix ceremonial cosmetics to apply to the bust or statue of a dead pharaoh as part of the religious rituals involved in their worship. They are almost arrowhead shaped and have a small circular flat area on one side that was used to grind the colored materials and mix it with a vehicle to apply it to the statue. They are ornately engraved with significant figures.
This example is called the 'Dog Palate' because the top was framed by two Cape hunting dogs. I saw was because one of them has been broken off. Two holes drilled in the break suggest that it was broken in antiquity and repaired. It dates from about 3300BC. (Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to use BCE but you know what? I don't care to be at all politically correct.) It has other real and mythical animals carved in low relief on both sides the most interesting of which were some cats with very long snake-like necks.
They also have some wonderful paintings in their collection. They have some Impressionists, the foremost being Camille Pissarro but the works are fairly minor with a few exceptions. Pissarro's The Tuileries Gardens, Rainy Weather from 1899 is probably their best and it is good. Where they excel is in the presentation of the Pre-Raphaelites. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed by young artists in 1848. Made up of painters, writers and sculptors, they intended to return English art to the freshness and close study of nature that they found in Italian painting before Raphael. They included the artists Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt and the sculptor Thomas Woolner. Their work was very controversial at the time but several prominent people took up their banner. The most notable was probably John Ruskin but there was also William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. One of their early patrons was Thomas Combe, the Superintendent of the Clarendon Press at Oxford. It's Combe's collection that the Ashmolean has on display.
Much of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites' work has a very melancholy, wistful feel. The titles tell the story, The Poor Actress's Christmas Dinner by Robert Braithwaite Martineau, Broken Vows by Philip Hermogenes Calderon or A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids by William Holman Hunt. In the Poor Actress, Martineau uses a lot of white and is not very detailed except for the actress's face and the small Christmas pudding she's about to eat. Her right hand is on the table as she rests her head on her left hand. She is gazing somewhat sadly yet with a wistful overtone, at a small pudding brightly decorated with a sprig of holly. The holly's red berries, a blue aura around part of her head and the gold of her earing are the only splotches of color that stand out. The rest of the painting is white or very muddled almost like a watercolor gone badly wrong. Her face and hair are very detailed and the holly and pudding less so. It captures the feeling he was after I'm pretty sure.
We spent quite a while in the museum but we were ready for dinner and some rest by late afternoon. Tomorrow it's on to the HoHo and a lap around Oxford.
Hope you go to the pub where C.S. Lewis hung out with Tolkien--The Baby and the Eagle I think (Eagle and the Baby?)
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