Introduction
This post probably shouldn’t actually be called “London – Part Three” because it’s about our first venture beyond London. We traveled fifty miles from London and took a walking tour of two destinations in the borough of Oxford: the Cotswolds and Oxford University. [Note: this post is rated PG-13 for drug references and mild strong language.]
London Walks
We took the underground to Paddington Station and met up with a tour guide from London Walks, which is a walking tour company Erin had found on the Internet when planning our vacation. The idea of London Walks is this: you show up at a train station, give the tour guide a bunch of cash, and then (along with a bunch of other tourists) follow him around for a day. He takes care of all the transportation logistics (including discounted train tickets), shows you the best places, and gives witty lectures about them in a charming English accent.
This is much better than the alternative, which would be to pore over train schedules, take a train to the Oxford station, and then either do an endless death march toward the Cotswolds, wherever they are, and never get there, or rent a car and drive around lost, on the wrong side of the road, until you crash it into a tree. Even if we made it to the Cotswolds somehow, we wouldn’t know where to go or what to do, and our kids would start crying.
The downside of being in a tour group is that all humans are trained since birth to despise the idea of tour groups. In our minds, tourists are all fat and gauche, wearing “I’M WITH STUPID” or “Property of Alcatraz XXL” t-shirts and visiting wax museums and eating at restaurants that are usually “a place for ribs.” For tourists to gather together in a group only intensifies the stigma by bringing the cruise ship ethos to land.
Thus, if you actually join a tour group you have to either a) follow along ironically, silently condemning everybody around you and blaming some other person for your mandated participation in this disgraceful menagerie, or b) suck it up and admit that this really makes sense and better preserves your dignity than sitting by the side of the road crying about your ruined rental car, or fighting all day with your family about logistics. After five or ten seconds of deliberation, I decided to earnestly embrace the tour group concept, and I can now heartily recommend London Walks to anybody. (If you have teenage kids, who would die of shame if they willingly participated in such a thing, you might suggest that if anybody tries to tease them about it they can lie and say they dropped acid beforehand.)
The Cotswolds
What are the Cotswolds? Well, it’s a region of the UK near Oxford. (I’ll bet you never would have put that together.) “Cotswold” comes from the word “cot” meaning sheep and “wold” meaning rolling hill. This region used to be home to what was arguably the quintessential sustainable industry: sheep were raised here, their wool sheared, and the wool made into cloth using river-powered spinning wheels. For many years this industry made the region very important, and it thrived, and it had all kinds of train routes through it.
Then the industrial revolution came around, and coal-fired operations in urban centers lured the textile business away, and the sheep raising business followed it, and the industry dried up. About this time the railway was nationalized, and the routes into this region were all dismantled. I know this sounds like the kind of thing that only Americans would do, but remember, the English industrial revolution predated the existence of the U.S. That said, I’m sure that the bastards that ruined everything here were the same ones that subsequently left for the New World and founded our great nation.
Shed no tears for the Cotswolds, though, because as you can see, the area—being both gorgeous and close to London—is seeing something of a renaissance as rich Londoners buy up old cottages, fix them up, and come here on weekends for little getaways. This gentrification will is bound to spawn wonderful cinematic opportunities for Americans, along the lines of the weekend getaway scene in “Bridges Jones’s Diary,” that will positively sizzle on the silver screen. (Sibilance in this blog is brought to you by Dolby Laboratories, whose technologies can help out with the hissing sound should you read that last sentence aloud.)
To get to the Cotswolds, we took a coach. This is a whole lot better than saying “bus,” or (God forbid) “tour bus.” A chartered coach is a bit of a miracle, actually; you get on, sit around for awhile gazing blankly out the window, and then a miracle occurs and suddenly you’ve arrived at a place that you didn’t even know until now was your destination. As somebody who still takes wrong turns during the bike rides I’ve done for fifteen years, I really appreciated the simplicity. The downside is, I can’t provide a meaningless description of exactly where we went. Suffice to say, we walked around gorgeous places in the Cotswolds.
The Lovell manor house
Perhaps the highlight of our Cotswold walk was the manor house in the tiny village of Minster Lovell. Before I explain about the house, I feel a need to comment on the unfortunate reality of harmless English phrases sullied by American misuse. If you’re like me, the first thing you think of when you hear “manor house” is the low-end Safeway house brand of turkey you see around Thanksgiving. The Manor House turkey is usually alarmingly cheap, like twenty-five cents a pound, or even free sometimes if you spend more than $50 at the store (which is almost impossible not to do these days). This seems backwards: shouldn’t they be gouging us on this, since the Thanksgiving turkey is the centerpiece of the entire meal? And what awful animal husbandry practices did they undertake to get the price down this low?Meanwhile, some British proper nouns strike me as more subtly maligned by the common American practice of contriving Old World place names to appropriate their impressive aura; for example, the underground station here called “Earl’s Court” makes me think of a trailer park on the outskirts of some down-and-out American town, while the station name “St. John’s Wood” sounds to me like a gated community in some California suburb.
Anyway, the manor house we looked at here, though in ruins now, is very impressive, as you can see. It was built in the 15th century by the Lovell family, who in addition to (obviously) being very wealthy were in good with the crown. This wasn’t always such a good thing in those days, though; the Lovells got into really hot water when the throne was overthrown (I propose a new “word, “overthrone,” to encapsulate both concepts, though it’s admittedly a little late for this) and had their property confiscated. (I think it was when Oliver Cromwell lead a revolution against King Charles I, but it’s been a few days since our tour and I can’t remember for sure and am too lazy to do any research.)
The house was eventually passed on to another rich family, who I think lived in it for a few generations, then passed it on another rich family, who did a bunch of renovations but never actually lived there. Their plans went awry due to a tragedy at a wedding there. The bride got involved in a game of hide and seek and was never found. Months passed, and she never turned up, and kidnapping was suspected, and finally the widower gave up. Understandably, he no longer wished to live in the house, and moved out. The moving crew, hoisting a large lead-lined box used for storing food, noticed that it seemed oddly heavy. Sure enough, they found the corpse of the bride in there; apparently she’d decided to hide there, and the lid fell on her head and knocked her out, and she suffocated. (Lindsay hated this story.)The name of this village, Minster Lovell, gets its name from the little church very near to the ruins of the manor house. Here it is. This church is in fine shape, and services are still conducted here.
Other village attractionsHere’s a little three-bedroom cottage that was restored and sold recently, for the very reasonable price of £700,000 (about $1.14 million).
Everything in this village seems especially pretty and charming, even this bird:
It’s not a chicken. I can’t remember the name. It’s actually more closely related to a penguin. Okay, I made that up. If you know what this is called, post a comment or e-mail me (feedback@albertnet.us).
Here is the little family in front of a little cottage with a thatched roof. These roofs are made of straw, or (if you pay a little extra) reeds. Until recently, when a fire-retardant chemical coating was introduced, these roofs were a big fire risk so you couldn’t get homeowner’s insurance. Meanwhile, they are incredibly expensive to maintain; replacements are done one half of the roof at a time, because it takes six men two months just to do a half. I think the cost was like £15,000 (about $24,000) for the half-roof. So why would you have one? First, they look great, don’t they? Second, they really do work. Third, they last like forty to fifty years. Finally, due to zoning regulations you’re not allowed to get rid of a thatched roof if the house had one when you bought it.Burford
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We had lunch in the nearby village of Burford. This is a great word. Say it a few times. Try to sound British: “BUUUUH-fuuuuud.” (I have no idea if this is a proper British pronunciation; perhaps you should try it on an English friend and see how hard he laughs.) I dreaded the prospect of rolling up in our coach to a restaurant with a giant parking lot specifically designed for tour buses, but in fact Burford is very pretty and authentic and quaint, if (inevitably) a bit touristy. We parked in a cul-de-sac and people walked to the restaurant of their choice. (This would never work in America, where we’re too fat to walk and too disorganized to make it back to the bus at the appointed time.)
Having no idea where to go in Burford, we ate at the restaurant recommended by our tour guide, Huffkins. It was a cute place … so cute, in fact, that I was wary of it. Though established in 1890, it was so polished I wondered if it were a chain. Checking the back of the glossy menu, I was reassured to learn that there are only two Huffkins locations, quite close to one another. I read the menu’s fairly predictable combination of life story, philosophy, and mission statement (“we enjoy preparing freshly made food using our wonderful local Cotswold suppliers,” etc.), and then was shocked to come across this disclaimer:
I love the English. If such a statement were ever to make it onto a menu in America, which of course it never would, some employee would sue for seditious libel and/or emotional trauma, and the place would be driven into bankruptcy, and some new law would be written prohibiting any such slander in the future and the big hotel college in Las Vegas would use the case as a cautionary tale and eventually all restaurant managers would all be castrated as a matter of course.
Oxford
During our drive back to the Oxford for our campus tour, our guide talked a bit about the University. This interested me a lot, because I’ve for years I’ve associated Oxford University with a general sense of having let my mom down. During my teen years she often mentioned that she’d like me to be an “Oxford road scholar.” I had always pictured this as a young intellectual guy hitchhiking on some area highway, his backpack full of books. I had a vague sense that he wasn’t allowed to attend classes, but could sort of hang out in the area and do the assignments, sort of like a correspondence course. This didn’t seem that attractive to me, and (being less than resourceful), I never even investigated the matter. Eventually I became aware that it was “Rhodes Scholar,” and that they were looking for the likes of Bill Clinton, not just some directionless kid with decent grades. Still, I felt like I never even tried.
Thus, I was heartened on this trip to learn that the notion of me attending Oxford was far more doomed than my mom or I had even imagined. The undergraduate program is mainly built around the school system in England. If you’re a high school student and want to go to Oxford, you apply before you even take any general college entrance exams. The university then checks in with your current school, whose staff predicts how well you’ll do on the exams. If their prediction is lofty enough, Oxford has you in for an interview. If that goes well, you’re in, unless you end up botching the entrance exam. It’s a weird system, and its validity has been debated for decades.
As we drove through the town, I saw something remarkable out the window of the coach: a vintage Ford Country Squire parked in front of a very fancy hotel.
Having no idea where to go in Burford, we ate at the restaurant recommended by our tour guide, Huffkins. It was a cute place … so cute, in fact, that I was wary of it. Though established in 1890, it was so polished I wondered if it were a chain. Checking the back of the glossy menu, I was reassured to learn that there are only two Huffkins locations, quite close to one another. I read the menu’s fairly predictable combination of life story, philosophy, and mission statement (“we enjoy preparing freshly made food using our wonderful local Cotswold suppliers,” etc.), and then was shocked to come across this disclaimer:
I love the English. If such a statement were ever to make it onto a menu in America, which of course it never would, some employee would sue for seditious libel and/or emotional trauma, and the place would be driven into bankruptcy, and some new law would be written prohibiting any such slander in the future and the big hotel college in Las Vegas would use the case as a cautionary tale and eventually all restaurant managers would all be castrated as a matter of course.
Oxford
During our drive back to the Oxford for our campus tour, our guide talked a bit about the University. This interested me a lot, because I’ve for years I’ve associated Oxford University with a general sense of having let my mom down. During my teen years she often mentioned that she’d like me to be an “Oxford road scholar.” I had always pictured this as a young intellectual guy hitchhiking on some area highway, his backpack full of books. I had a vague sense that he wasn’t allowed to attend classes, but could sort of hang out in the area and do the assignments, sort of like a correspondence course. This didn’t seem that attractive to me, and (being less than resourceful), I never even investigated the matter. Eventually I became aware that it was “Rhodes Scholar,” and that they were looking for the likes of Bill Clinton, not just some directionless kid with decent grades. Still, I felt like I never even tried.
Thus, I was heartened on this trip to learn that the notion of me attending Oxford was far more doomed than my mom or I had even imagined. The undergraduate program is mainly built around the school system in England. If you’re a high school student and want to go to Oxford, you apply before you even take any general college entrance exams. The university then checks in with your current school, whose staff predicts how well you’ll do on the exams. If their prediction is lofty enough, Oxford has you in for an interview. If that goes well, you’re in, unless you end up botching the entrance exam. It’s a weird system, and its validity has been debated for decades.
As we drove through the town, I saw something remarkable out the window of the coach: a vintage Ford Country Squire parked in front of a very fancy hotel.
I really want to know what this car was doing there. What is it even doing in this country, when the government will pay you £2,000 (over $3,000) to trash a ten-year-old Toyota? And how did the guy get such a sweet parking spot, right out front? Fortunately, I’m of the generation that is resigned to the fact that Google cannot answer all our questions, that I’m not just a few keystrokes away from the solution to this strange riddle. I will just ponder the matter in vain, probably indefinitely.Speaking of strange, and getting back to my original thread (you in the back there, wake up your neighbor), Oxford seems like an odd school in general. It was established in the 12th century as a way to educate devout Catholics. They learned Latin and Greek (to better understand ancient scripture) and then French, because the French duke William the Conqueror (also called, I kid you not, William the Bastard) became king and required all laws to be written in French. It was a very Catholic place until Henry VIII created the Church of England, at which point the University changed literally overnight into an Anglican institution.
Now, you’d think these presumably pious young men would behave themselves, but the University had all kinds of problems with its students raising hell in the town and being generally drunk and disorderly. Thus, Oxford created all these smaller colleges (today there are around forty) so that their tutors could keep an eye on them. Originally these were just living arrangements, with the tutor onsite like a den mother, but then they started teaching classes there as well, and now a student’s individual college is where he spends most of his time, though the year-end exams are given by the University.
Okay, enough blathering on. Here are some photos. This first one shows the Sheldonian Theatre, where they have the ceremonies in which students matriculate (i.e., are formally admitted to the university—to me, this is one of those stalagmite/stalactite words and I had to look it up) and graduate. It’s also used as a theater and for lectures and certain conferences. Also in the picture is our tour guide, Richard, whose red hat is pretty much the only thing that prevented my family, several times, from losing contact with the group.
Okay, enough blathering on. Here are some photos. This first one shows the Sheldonian Theatre, where they have the ceremonies in which students matriculate (i.e., are formally admitted to the university—to me, this is one of those stalagmite/stalactite words and I had to look it up) and graduate. It’s also used as a theater and for lectures and certain conferences. Also in the picture is our tour guide, Richard, whose red hat is pretty much the only thing that prevented my family, several times, from losing contact with the group.
This next photo is the Radcliffe Camera, which is a building, not a camera. (The word “camera,” as I’m sure any Oxford student could tell you, is from a Latin word for “room” or “chamber.”) Oxford students call this the “Rad Cam” for short, as if this makes them cool or something—as if they’re not complete eggheads. At UC Santa Barbara, there was a park that we all called Dog Shit Park, because it was. Nobody even knew the real name. That, my Oxford friends, is cool. Now, get back to your studies and stop wasting your time on this highly non-educational blog.
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This next photo is of where Bill Clinton lived when he was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar. In fact, our tour guide informed us that this very building is where Clinton famously did not inhale. I can picture him in there, puffing on a fat spliff just to cleanse his palette, and then blowing out the smoke without it ever touching his lungs, so that he could study later, and be President one day.
There are gobs of gargoyles in Oxford, and I can see why: it’s the only place in England where we’ve been rained on so far. And in these gargoyles we once again see that irrepressible British humor asserting itself: as serious and stately as this university is, they couldn’t resist making gargoyles in the image of various Oxford dons. This one looks a lot like my first Latin instructor.
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Each college has its own chapel, and they’re very impressive. It’s hard to photograph stained glass windows; I did my best. Speaking of which, here’s another anecdote from our tour guide. During the English Civil War, Oxford supported the sitting king, Charles I, with the University serving as his home base. When this regime lost out, the new leader, Oliver Cromwell, punished Oxford for its loyalty to Charles by smashing out a whole bunch of its precious stained glass windows. Cromwell went on to become Chancellor of the University.
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Oxford is famous for its “dreaming spires.” I’m not exactly sure what this phrase means, but it doesn’t take an Oxford grad to know that spires are best viewed from above. Early in the tour our guide pointed out a great vantage point for photos, atop a tower in the Saint Mary the Virgin Church, which is this (look for the observation deck railing above the clock):
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When the official walking tour was over, we had forty minutes or so to wander on our own before being guided to the train station. While Erin and the kids checked out a bookstore, I headed over to the church to climb the tower. Here’s a closer view of the church.
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After paying a small fee, I headed up the tower. It’s funny: in two and a half years at UC Berkeley, I never did the climb up Sather Tower (aka the Campanile), but in one afternoon in Oxford I got around to doing this.
The view really is good. The observation deck winds around three of the faces of the tower so you can look out in three directions. I will let the reader decide for himself which are the dreaming spires in these photos. For that matter, you can work out for yourself what buildings are shown here, as I really have no idea.
The view really is good. The observation deck winds around three of the faces of the tower so you can look out in three directions. I will let the reader decide for himself which are the dreaming spires in these photos. For that matter, you can work out for yourself what buildings are shown here, as I really have no idea.
Whether or not I report on any more of our London outings, watch for my report on English food. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.
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