Next Neil and Cath.  Great to see them.  Neil, after all these years, hasn’t changed a bit.  Touch greyer perhaps.  The Old Rectory was lovely as before, great view

What I hadn’t realised is that Neil’s family is built into the village – they built Wilson’s Mill.   The Wilson name’s everywhere.  He’s got family trees – a small family orchard in fact – on the wall up the stairs.  

Nice old Yorkshire village:

And here’s the man – you’re looking at the very fabric of Yorkshire

And so on to York to see off the kids – Sarah to catch the plane back to Australia, Katie to travel around Scotland for a week.  

This platform brings back a lot of memories – for 5 years my parents used to see me off from here on the train to school in Edinburgh.  Where I wasn’t very happy at all.  And here I was, 45 years later, saying goodbye to my own child.  Much less traumatic!

We went off to Bridlington where the family used to go to church.  Pretty boring I thought in those days.  Now I didn’t think that at all, really interesting church – the only one with gargoyles of Prince Charles and Camilla.  Yup, really.

You can only imagine the excitement I felt.

Bempton Cliffs is nearby – some of the highest cliffs in England at 100m, running for 10km and bubbling with boids.  The others wanted to see same, so I tagged along.  I used to go there with my Dad when I was a kid.  It was much easier to fall off and kill yourself in those days,but now there are fences all along the edge.  Progress of a sort. 

So I did some boidwatching. Here’s what I saw:

These are very rare – Fat Twins, got a big tick in my little book, that’s for sure.

This one’s also quite rare – a solitary female. Tick.

A pink-breasted male, hunting. Tock.  Time passed – the whole thing took about 2hrs……

A solitary male, noodling.

A male preening

Some can be quite inquisitive if disturbed.

Mostly however they exhibit strong flocking behaviour.

Here’s my little flock.

Flocks clustering at the feeding grounds

I was able to observe everything without leaving my cup of tea at the cafe.  Heaven knows why the others spent so long outside.

What I didn’t tell them was that before I came along my Dad used to abseil down these cliffs with his mates and steal the eggs.

Ahem….

We like Cathedrals, so we visited a few of the greats in England, giving Katie and Sarah a chance to see some of the most beautiful buildings of their heritage, and for us to revisit them.  

Here’s one:

This one was put together a while ago (3,000 years) by 3 sisters.  Before breakfast apparently.  Something to do with giving them somewhere to get away from their men. Hard to believe the latter, nowhere to hide I’d have thought, but I can see how it wouldn’t take too long with a simple structure like that.  Unlike some of the others – Wells, York Minster etc which took 200-300 years to finish. 

And another cathedral of a sort – Dartmoor prison.  I have liked to stop and poke around, but they weren’t having any of that – pity, since I’ve spent 7 years doctoring in prisons I wouldn’t have minded a peek.  Different sort of medicine, far removed from suburban practice….

It was important to me to show the kids my home country.  We went to Muston Hall, a beautiful gracious home where I grew up.  Not much changed in 50 years – the willow tree where my sister and I swung on the branches is still there on the left, as are the gardens and the fields.  I could have walked back into my childhood up that driveway.  So much of my life took place behind those windows……

And, still full of memories, but perhaps not quite so gracious, the beachfront at Filey – the cheap, noisy arcades, tourists, and the beach where I got away from it all on the rocks and fossil hunting on the cliffs.  

Treated the family to a horrible, fatty, meal of fish and chips, winkles, crab and green mushy peas.  Just as disgusting as it always was.

Then on to Scarborough – Victorian funland and just as gross as Filey, but bigger.  Here’s where I began my sailing career on Dad’s little yacht, Gloria.

One of the reasons for going as a family was to scatter Peggy and Don’s ashes on Meon Hill.  It was a special place to them during the war, he was a spitfire pilot, she was in the land army.  When they could get away they would go up there and get a bit of peace.

We had our wedding reception near there, and flew kites off the hill afterwards.  Now we were back there with our children – grown up women.  Nice to remember all those times, and Peggy and Don. 

Each of  us had ashes and walked along the hillside spreading them in the wind.

Later in the trip we went to East Yorkshire to a little village called Thwing, where my parents are buried.  On the Yorkshire Wolds, it has been largely untouched by the last 1100 years.  A beautiful sunny calm day, we tidied up the grave, added gravel and flowers and all sat together on a nearby bench.  Perhaps the last time I will visit their grave, perhaps not, but a time for me to think of them and our life as a family back  in my childhood.

First up we went off to Sallys home village, where she met some old old friends.  Memory lane for her.  But the village is now the home of the very rich English middle and upper class – close enough to get to London by train, full of old old Tudor houses, it has become one of the most sought after places in the country.  Pity, it was nicer before that….

Then off to Exmouth where her family gathered in large numbers – I don’t have any rels, so I was somewhat staggered by the quantity (there’s an equal number in Canada).  Nice bunch though, we spent a weekend talking and doing stuff.

En route we had a look at some old old settlements on Dartmoor.  Amazing thought that these were put up about 3,000 years ago and haven’t been shifted since.

The blog ground to a halt after that, and I’m adding a precis of what went on offstage as it were.

To write this blog, which I really like doing,  I need a decent internet connection to noodle around the web, and plenty of time.  Remarkably Britain has a lot of pretty crappy internet with rare sparkles of good.  Mostly I used my phone’s hotspot, but that was flakey too.  And time – I just didn’t have any, buzzing around from place to place as we were.  And Sally not being disposed to sit around while I do the blog thing.  So it ground to a halt.  Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

But I didn’t stop taking photos, so, now I’m home, here are the highlights.

New College borders the city wall, and part of the agreement to sell the land in 1379 was to keep the wall in good condition.  Every 3 years since then the city fathers walk the wall to ensure the job is being done properly.

I went to a  couple of meals in one of the colleges when I was studying here.  Remarkable for its ceremony even in this age.

Lovely quiet place for sitting and thinking, surrounded by plaques commemorating alumni who died in the past centuries.

The motto of New College is ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’, which means ‘evil be to him who evil thinks’ – or, more or less, don’t criticise others lest ye be criticised.

The motto is adopted by the Order of the Garter. Membership of the Order is limited to the Sovereign, the Prince of Wales, and no more than 24 living members, or Companions. This Order started in 1347 by Edward III.  It is said it was formed as an attempt to re-create the Knights of the Round Table as in the Arthur legends.

Apparently its origin is a bit mysterious but the best story is when King Edward III was dancing with Joan of Kent, his first cousin and daughter-in-law. Her garter slipped down to her ankle causing those around her to snigger at her humiliation. Edward placed the garter around his own leg saying, “Honi soit qui mal y pense. Tel qui s’en rit aujourd’hui, s’honorera de la porter.” (“A scoundrel, who thinks badly by it. Those who laugh at this today, tomorrow will be proud to wear it.”)

I think garters were a bit more important in those days.

Not so ‘new’ actually – it was built in 1379.  Not only does it have the best academic record in Oxford, it is the richest, and it has one of best choirs in the world. 

We had a look around, well worth it.  The gardens are immaculate and very peaceful, I’d love to have studied in that environment.  

The garden below is 725 years old.  Just behind it is a church which is 950 years old. Puts Australia in perspective – when I lived here I just took all this for granted, but now I’m visiting after 40 years it seems very special.

Wandered around the gardens, but didn’t go in (pity, but note the queue).  Amazing place to study, beautiful buildings.

Fantastic ivy on the front.

All Souls is a graduate college where Fellows are admitted after passing an exam. Any Oxford immediate post graduate is eligible to sit it once a year for 3 years. The exam, said to be the hardest in the world, consists of 3 days of examination, each being a 3 hour essay – two on the candidates subjects (all Classics) the third an essay on subjects such as “charity”, “error” and “mercy”. And, somewhat interestingly “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?” (That one might be worth 3 hours, not sure about the others.)

Two candidates succeed out of dozens who try every year. One of the failures was Hugh Trevor-Roper, who tried to teach me (briefly and unsuccessfully) to be interested in History.  One of the successes was Lawrence of Arabia.

The inmates are thought to be some of the finest minds in the country.

To prove it every hundred years, and generally on 14 January, there is a commemorative feast after which the Fellows parade around the College with flaming torches, singing the Mallard Song and led by a “Lord Mallard” who is carried in a chair, in search of a legendary mallard that supposedly flew out of the foundations of the college when it was being built in 1437. During the ‘hunt’ the Lord Mallard is preceded by a man bearing a pole to which a mallard is tied – originally a live bird, latterly either dead (1901) or carved from wood (2001). The last mallard ceremony was in 2001 and the next is due in 2101.

Oliver Cromwell in about 1600 said the fellows should sing  it ‘more loudly and in a bawdy manner’ at about 3am.  Which they did for a couple of hundred years, but have apparently toned it down a bit now.

After this bit of wassailing they go back to being brainy for another hundred years. 

Some fairly startling stop press: the present Master of the College (aka ‘Lord Mallard’) has written some new verses to the song. 

Here’s an interesting one – on the left hand side we have a very organised house with manicured lawns and a beautifully shaven hemispherical tree (how did they do that?).  On the other side a garden given mostly over to nature, including the other half of the tree which grows as god intended.  

I wonder if they speak to each other…

Here’s the side door for the priest and choristers to sneak out in the breaks.  Interesting porch roof of solid stone, and a very old door.  Carved into the lintel is some ancient graffiti.  I wonder what has happened in this little space over the years.  

(In my case, in another church, it was a choirgirl called Anne Hope, age 10).

Classic countryside round here.  Little paths winding o’er the lea, well maintained near the villages.  Church spires behind the hedgerows just like Constable painted.  These river meadows which flood regularly – owned by the Church since mediaeval times.  Deer roam around  causing havoc in some gardens – in the olden days they used to be the property of the lord and hunted for sport.  Foxes ditto.

Cotswold dry stone walls go back hundreds of years.  They are built without mortar, each side slopes inwards with a fill of small stones in the middle.  The bottom of the wall is about 500 wide, the top about 300, then there is a capping of some kind.

The stones themselves are laid sloping slightly downward to shed the water, so the wall stays dry inside.  Properly made they last for many years without much maintenance.

The thing amazed me was the sheer number and length of the walls (it’s the same in Yorkshire).  Some of the walls by the road were 8ft high and ran by the road for many kilometers, and that doesn’t count the ones around the paddocks.  When you think of the weight of stones which need to be carted on horse carts, picked by hand and cut to shape you realise that the labour force and effort was enormous.  We don’t think of that anymore because fencing is now easy – wire and strainers are (relatively) easily placed.

As an alternative to this there was only wooden fencing, which was time consuming and fragile (no split posts like in Australia because the wood was not so easy to handle).  Or hedges.  Hedges were either thick Hawthorne or laid Hawthorne – see the post on that.

We went to spend the day with Simon and Alison, friends and colleagues for 40 years – and my best man at my wedding.  They live in a lovely Cotswold stone house built in the garden of their big but cold and uncomfortable house.  Their new house is energy efficient, beautifully designed and light an airy.

The plaque on the wall is a copy of the one carved on the church choir stalls several hundred years ago: Kidlington made up of kid (goat) ling (fish) ton (weight) with a medical caduceus behind it.

Bike sharing is all the go these days.  It was tried in London with the result that bikes were strewn across the pavements, and dumped by the bike companies, and dumped in the Thames by the bike riders.  Cost 60M pounds apparently.

Not so Oxford which was the first UK city to trial the scheme.  They still get dumped in the river, but not in such enormous numbers (why would you?)

I wanted to try one, and signed up for the ap, but it said my phone didn’t have enough battery to complete the ride, so I couldn’t.  Ah well.

One of the foundation Oxford colleges (1897), with 9 students, this is now a huge settlement of females up the river in the education zone (lots of private schools, colleges and river park). It started taking in males some time ago. Now there are 600 students, with extensive and beautiful grounds.

Women were not deemed fit to receive degrees, nor be members of the university until 1920 (so what I wonder did they do in the 23 years before that?)

It has a Fellows’ Garden – hidden from view by tall hedgerows – and a Fellow’s Lawn, on which walking is forbidden. Actually we did walk on the hallowed grass of the lawn and the fellows garden – we went accross the park to the punt place the back way – via boat across a moat and via the LMH gardens (because the bus driver’s instructions weren’t all that accurate after all, forcing us to be a little creative with our route).

Happily nothing bad happened to us but we can reveal all here – the gardens do look good, excellent for thinking in,  here they are:

The whole place is pretty impressive – this is the bike shed – no messing around with simple structures here.

Lovely joints on the roof

Cloister walk – a lot of thoughts have been thought here I think.

Finally we reached the Cherwell boathouse, where the afternoons entertainment was to be held. It was one of my life’s goals to steer a beautiful damsel up a river on a sunny afternoon like in the Victorian novels. Somehow I’d never got around to it, due, I think, to a lack of rivers, punts and damsels. Today was to be the day.

 The Thames in the city had a fairly stiff current, and I didn’t like the look of it for a new punter. So we went upriver to the Cherwell on the advice of our friend (and erstwhile best man) Simon.

 The Cherwell Boathouse has been hiring punts since 1907 when it was built as Tim’s boathouse. Punts have been used for centuries as small commercial vessels, but in victorian times were introduced for pleasure. They were used all over the waterways of Britain until, with the introduction of power boats, whose wash made them unstable, are now used only in small quiet waterways.

What’s more, punting was considered especially suitable as a gentle entertainment for young ladies: the oldest of the women’s colleges, Lady Margaret Hall, still keeps its own punts on the river.  Accordingly we deemed it suitable entertainment for Sally.

Driving a punt is not all that simple – it is easy to make a mess of it, but takes a bit of practice to persuade it to go in a straight line, especially with the current and snags in the river. The long pole is just about long enough to reach the bottom in the middle of the river, and has a tendency to stick into the mud and catch on the trees at the edges. There is no rudder, so the pole is used to push the boat in a straight line, then you hang it off the back as a steering oar. So you can’t propel the boat and steer at the same time – plus of course you have to push it fast enough to get the pole working to actually control the direction.

These guys were entertaining. The bloke with the pole was being instructed by the lady who obviously knew what she was doing. This was just after they had biffed into a bush and backed off. With ribald comments from the audience (me) and chortles from the inmates, they managed to get free. All taken in good part – after all, nobody was in a hurry.

I got the hang of it after a while, but with the help of Sally paddling the single oar as a bow-thruster at times of crisis. Everyone was pretty good-natured, and it’s not a place for driving personalities, so the afternoon was pretty peaceful.

In a heroic pose I brave the hazards of the river – ducks and tree branches – to steer my lady on a voyage through the bucolic pastures of the Oxford countryside. Something which chaps like me have done for the past 100 years.

Meanwhile Sally sits, demure as ever, in the punt trailing her fingers in the water and dreaming romantic thoughts….

The bus driver’s route was via a large riverside Park. It was a delightful walk, with well laid-out paths, seats in the right places, lakes and all. We enjoyed our lunch on a bench surrounded by flowers and large trees.

Further along was a cricket match in progress – all in whites, in front of an imposing clubhouse. A world away from the busy Banbury road all I could hear was the click of ball and bat, occasional call of the players, and sporadic clapping of the spectators.

 My history with cricket was fairly painful. As a child at prep school I was forced to play games, but being uncoordinated, clumsy, uninterested in the rules and – the worst sin of all – didn’t care who won – my sporting career was short and sour.

 But now on a sunny afternoon in a park in Oxford I thought it was all rather nice.

It recalled the well-known poem I had to learn at about the same time by Robert Graves – Grantchester – which in part goes:

And in that garden, black and white,

Creep whispers through the grass all night;

And spectral dance, before the dawn,

A hundred Vicars down the lawn;

Curates, long dust, will come and go

On lissom, clerical, printless toe;

…

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?              

And Certainty? and Quiet kind?              

Deep meadows yet, for to forget              

The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet              

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?                   

And is there honey still for tea?

I generally avoid buses. I find there are too many variables in time, place and bus and am worried that I’ll end up in some far-flung suburb next to a deserted factory with the bus disappearing in the distance and night coming on (yup, that’s exactly what happened). Safer to go by train, taxi or walk.

 Sally however has no such fears, so when we decided to go to Cherwell for a spot of punting she strode off toward a bus stop with me flapping in her wake. Jumping on a red double-decker bus she asked the driver if he was going there – he said he wasn’t – but another lady said he was, and another passenger said it could be done if we got off at the right stop (see what I mean).

 In the end a committee was formed as we drove to discuss our proposed trip, the two passengers, us with the bus driver interjecting from the front. Finally discussion was settled by the bus driver who halted off one stop too early saying we’d have a nice walk through the park to the boathouse. The other committee members agreed it might work, and anyway he’d stopped the bus, so we had to go – perhaps to the driver’s relief.

 As we drove up Banbury road the committee discussed the weather (it was Britain after all). We all decided that the present generation of Brits are basically weather wimps, and the recent freeze all over Europe was nothing compared to the winter of 1962.

All this mightily entertained of the rest of the passengers, who, being British, never look at each other on a bus let alone speak unless it’s in whispers about life-or-death matters.

 The Brits are a funny bunch.

We walked from Roger’s house into the city to go punting.  The river is a whole different world to the traffic choked streets, impressive buildings and busy footpaths.

Right in the city centre is this peaceful river Thames

Many barges used as homes, here’s and interesting roof garden

Swans on the river

No longer a traffic bridge, this Victorian beauty carries water pipes into the city

Dinky little riverside cottages – which are flood prone but very nice

This one impressed me – turrets, bay window and it’s own floating verandah

A pot of tea for two on the third floor of Waterstones booksellers in the centre of Oxford.

 Surrounded by students working on brainy stuff on their laptops, a tutorial going on in the corner.

So at Carfax, right in the middle of Oxford, there was this cafe. Looked like a cracker, French cakes and all, splattered with donly types looking academic and the waitress (pardon me, waitperson) was talking about all the essays she had to write.

 So all we wanted was a cup of tea and a cake. What we got was a pot of English Breakfast tea (I hate all those teas), and a jug of pale water – ‘see-through milk’. I took the water back and asked a waiter (sorry waitperson) if I could have something which was actual milk, and full cream no less.

 He looked at me as if he’d found me on the bottom of his shoe, saying ‘We don’t have that sir, what we have is light milk, fat free milk, almond milk, goat milk, soy milk, tofu milk, wilted lettuce milk, aioli milk, meditation milk, sugar free milk ….” and every other bloody liquid that isn’t milk at all but millenials think it is.

 Ptui.

 Avoid, Waterstones was a heavenly experience by contrast.

Years ago, when I was 16, I tried for Pembroke College in Oxford. My mum and Dad wanted me to be an ‘Oxford man’, especially my mum. My rich godfather sponsored me (as well as a building at the Radcliffe). All to no avail.

Apparently my written essays were good, but three august bodies interviewed me with a focus on chemistry. A mistake on their part since I didn’t know much in that department, and declined to let me in.

 I often wonder where life would have gone if I had been here. Very different I expect.

 So I wandered into the entrance with a view to having a look inside for old-times’ sake and was halted by the porter at the gate. Who told me it wasn’t open to the public, sorry sir.

 And so I didn’t get in today either.

I am a UK passport holder blending in with the locals.

Surely anyone paying attention would have sold these for $8.01 at the very least.

 I tried to find someone who cared. Nobody did.

Looking out of the plane window as we flew out of Hobart I thought about how nice it is to live in a place where it’s so beautiful and the air is so clean.

And after a long flight, we got to London and onto a bus to Oxford. First thing we noticed was the pall of brown smog hanging over the city.

 A friend of ours used to fly jets in the RAF. He said when he went up over Europe in the 50’s he could see dirty brown smog over all the cities.

 Makes you think about what you’re breathing.