between the rock and the cold, cold sea

It turns out I'm not going up to London, because the thought of navigating pubtrans from here to there made me break out in cold sweats. So it goes: I'm not going to push my anxiety this time.

Today I was slow to get started. Ate lunch with J. and K. in The Arts Café, where I had moussaka that tasted far healthier than the last moussaka I had (there was more meat in it in Greece, and fewer vegetables). And then wombled over to Blackwell's, where I had an appointment to meet the most excellent Kari Sperring. (And where I briefly met the most excellent Juliet McKenna, who stopped by in the company of the aforementioned.)

I love medievalists. Classicists, too, but medievalists can be relied upon to know cool shit of which I've never even heard. It's truly delightful to talk with people who are knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and articulate - and when some enthusiasms overlap, that's brilliant. (I admire la_marquise_de_ and The Grass-King's Concubine is a book that meant rather a lot to me when I read it, so if I am enthusiastic in an unseemly way about spending several hours talking? This is why.)

It was, I think it's fair to say, a reasonably wide-ranging discussion. (And somehow my normal anxiety at meeting new people managed not to show up until... five minutes ago? That's fine. That's afterwards.) So, um. Kari Sperring? Delightful conversationalist. Absolutely lovely. Pleasure to meet.

Shortly thereafter, I failed my saving throw vs. temptation in Waterstones, and walked out with Chris Beckett's Dark Eden and something called Babylon Steel, which looks bizarre and potentially either terrible or amazing.

I did not purchase Richard Holmes' Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air. Weight limits. Weight limits. I keep repeating this. WEIGHT LIMITS.

...There may be some small problems at the airport.

Another night on the air mattress, another day wandering around Oxford and eating too much coffee-shop lunch.

I bought gyros from a terrible Greek takeaway and ate half of it on Magdalen Bridge before throwing the other half away. Not the worst gyros I've ever eaten - but decidedly not that good.

The sun shone. (Yay!) And it's a straight shot down High Street to St. Michael's at the North Gate and then turn right down the Cornmarket to where the Ashmolean may be found. Along the High Street I passed a delightful shop, Whittard's of Chelsea, which had both a nice man behind the counter, gorgeous flavoured hot chocolate powders and tasty instant teas. "WANT!" said I to myself. "Aeroplane weight limits," said myself to I.

So I just tasted the free hot samples. (Nom.) And regretfully ambled along. (I may have to buy another piece of luggage and check it in. Because WANT. Would this be so bad?) (Okay, I really probably can't afford that. BUT STILL.)

St. Michael's North Gate wasn't a place I knew of before setting out. But when I passed it, there were signs for the Saxon Tower (a nice bit of early medieval stonework, that), so I went inside. It's a nice little church, well-maintained, very friendly in that peculiar gently Christian-but-not-pushy Anglican way. I lucked out, in a sense, going up the Tower (two pound entry students, and the nice wee girl in the giftshop didn't even ask to see my card) - there was a guy from East London up doing something to the clock and the bells, so as I was going up past the bells they were being rung in turn. It's a sensation you feel in your bowel and your belly, the voices of great bronze bells.

The view isn't as striking as the one from the Sheldonian cupola, but there are some very interesting rooftops visible from up there. I'll have to go into Mary-the-Virgin church next.

The Ashmolean Museum is off Beaumont St., at the far end of the Cornmarket. Founded by Elias Ashmole, antiquarian and alchemist, in the late 17th century, its original premises were located on Broad St. It moved to its new premises in the last decade of the 19th century, and within the last decade it's been refurbished and its galleries expanded. And it seems to be one of the few things in Oxford that's free to enter.

It's fucking shiny. Now, mind you, collections of Greek and Roman antiquities fail to astound me these days, after Athens. But the Ashmolean was at one point directed by Sir Arthur Evans. Its prehistoric collections are sexy: it has material from Nimrud and Jericho, from Knossos and Cyprus (Hi, A.G. Leventis Gallery! The Leventis foundation gets everywhere, which is excellent for Cypriot material in collections abroad), and a goodly store of Egyptian antiquities to boot, including the mummy of Menesamun, a female musician.

And pots. I love pots. POTS POTS POTS. LET ME FONDLE YOU. (Alas, no fondling allowed. But SO MANY DIFFERENT KINDS OF POTS.)

The Islamic art is also impressive, if not quite as numerous on display: I have a great fondness for medieval Persian decorative arts. There is Mongol art, and Tang dynasty camel ceramics, Mughal paintings, Tibetan Buddhas, Buddhist deities. A dancing Ganesha, who looked delightfully happy.

I didn't get up to the rest of the collections. My feet gave out, so - after drooling over this book among others in the museum shop, I hied off to Waterstones for a sandwich and a cake in the café.

This tourism lark is tiring. (And expensive.) I should have a nap, and recruit my strength...

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Mostly about books. I dreamed I found a copy of Aaronovitch's Broken Homes in an Oxford bookshop. And then I dreamed that the cupola of the Sheldonian Theatre - which was open to tourists yesterday and which has the best views of rooftops - was filled with books.

Yes. Blackwell's has crept into my dreams.

Yesterday I wandered around aimlessly, because the sun was shining: down Dead Man's Walk, along Christ Church Meadow, around to Oxford Castle.

I've been spoiled by heritage sites on the continent, because I refuse to pay eight pounds to take a tour of a surviving medieval tower and part of an 18th century prison. Sorry, lads. Old prisons are cool - but I don't want to follow a chirpy guide in period costume around one. And I've seen more striking castles... English castles don't hold a candle to Venetian forts. But then, there're reasons I'm not a medievalist.

From there I wandered back up, past the handful of shopping streets lined with cheap cafés and highstreet shops, to Broad Street, and the former home of the Ashmolean (which now houses the museum of science) beside the Bodleian and the Sheldonian Theatre. The Sheldonian was open to visitors, so in I went: from its cupola one can see the statues and spires of the rooftops of the nearest bits of Oxford up close, and that's really shiny.

The theatre part of the theatre is a combination of baroque excrescences in gilt and gold leaf, moulding and wood and a GIANT FRESCO on the ceiling: the combination is overwhelming. The persons responsible for the decorative schema may possibly have heard of "restraint," but only as something to be excoriated, and avoided at all costs. A similar attitude to decoration is evident in the chapel of Trinity College, across the road, but there the paneling of dark wood, rising to baroque plaster moulding on the ceiling and behind the altar, combined with the stained glass windows, gives it a claustrophobic gravitas that the Sheldonian gilt orgy rather lacks.

The grounds of Trinity College are cheap to enter (a pound) and present an interesting patchwork of historic styles, from the Tudor to the 1950s. I walked past the dining hall, which seems very Victorian Gothic, and where the catering staff were trading complaints about the state of the floor.

Pretty. There's a limited amount of times I can repeat that word. Oxford's not like TCD, because TCD's elder buildings are hulking granite, not given to fairytale spires and a golden glow of Cotswold stone (I prefer granite, but that's just me). But the extra layer of prettiness, the green space, the fact that the university is the town centre rather than an oasis in the middle of it - those things aside, the college buildings remind me a lot of TCD. The same carefully preserved historical architecture wedded to newer bits, overlaid with the smell of sports kit and exam hall and stale food and existential angst. Oxford looks like a film set to me, because I've seen it in so many films or television programmes... but then you turn a corner and the whole present there-ness of it hits you in the face like a wet sock, and you realise that this collegiate dream of timeless buildings and playing fields is only one image of Oxford.

It's slightly weird, is what I'm saying. Makes me think thoughts about the anthropology of space and place.

I'm staying with mates, who are the Best People Ever, and who are feeding me marvelous things and showing me all the good places. Food is love.

Oxford is... bizarre. I was here when I was thirteen, staying on a campbed in the same room as my grandmother in my uncle's house near the Iffley Road, and some of it I remember. The medieval buildings, and the Victorian-does-medieval fantasias of spires, the Tudor mass of New College and redbrick Keble, Magdalene ("Maudlin") with its pointy turrets, and the solid Georgians squatting their way through the middle. Much of the stonework has been cleaned in the last few years, and instead of the blackish grey of centuries of smoke, the natural warm yellowish tones of Cotswold stone glow under the clouds.

The centre of Oxford is half medieval/early modern city, half tourist trap, layered over with institutions of learning. (Tourist trap, because hello, well maintained. Most everywhere else I've been the historic bits are slightly more crumbly.) There is so much historical fabric, it's hard to take in. Particularly when you're walking through it with people who live here now, and tend not to slow down for your rubbernecking.

J. & K. took me down to K.'s college, Keble, which is all redbrick Victorian (and apparently St. John's has a Society for the Destruction of Keble College, because it was hated when it was first built), the red bricks highlighted by yellow bricks and the occasional blue in geometric patterns, a sort of flyaway spindly Gothic in technicolour. It's fantastic. The Dining Hall is vaulted in dark wood. It's so... academic. And shiny. You sort of just want to rollllll around in it.

It's cleaner than Trinity back home. Or looks cleaner, anyway. And Oxford has these weird abbreviations. Like "Univ" for University College. Whee!

So, anyway. The Pitt Rivers Museum is across the road from Keble. EYEBALL KICK. There's a natural history section as you go in - although the dinosaurs are closed off for refurbishment - and THEN. After the birds, and the shiny pillars of different sorts of hard stone, and the fossils, and the BITS OF ROCK YOU CAN TOUCH -

You enter this giant dark room filled with cabinets. (There's about three levels? I only wandered around the first.) And the cabinets are PACKED FULL of stuff. I mean, JAMMED. The museum staff hand out tiny flashlights so you can read the labels, and off you go into this museum which has preserved its Victorian approach to presentation, this bazaar filled with cabinets of curiosities: cabinets filled to bursting with STUFF from all over the world connected by some kind of theme. No white space. Everywhere you look you are assailed with RANDOM COOL STUFF.

The famous shrunken heads are really cool. And eensy: I had no idea they'd be that small.

So much stuff. Too much to take in. And in among all this historic stuff, and STUFF WHAT WE NICKED FROM THE SAVAGES (oh, Victorians), you get this odd modern thing that's stuck in a case with stuff to which it is thematically connected.

After an hour of this... well, the Eagle and Child is nearby. Over a burger and chips (pathetic helping of chips, although tasty burger and pint of cola is about £10, not bad), we had a discussion about C.S. Lewis's theology in the Narnia books, and J. quoted the line from Tolkien's letters about Lewis's "Ulsterior motive." Wheee! Fun was had by all.

And then off to Blackwell's. SO MANY BOOKS. I mean. The science fiction and fantasy section is pathetic, it's much worse than Hodges Figgis (I don't think I spotted a single US edition of anything, whereas HF will import things, particularly if you ask nicely), but the Classics and Ancient History sections. OH HEAVEN SO MANY BOOKS. And all of them, all of them, crying out my name. All the Oxford and Penguin Classics (most of them three for the price for two). All of the Loebs. CUP and OUP. Blackwell's Companions series. EVERYTHING YOU COULD EVER WANT.

Seriously, I want to go back in there with pen and paper and take notes on the titles of all the shiny books. And J. & K. are book-enablers. So I ended up walking out of there with two, after a drink and a brownie in the café. (Plus Cameron's The Red Knight, which I saw in a charity shop on the way into town.)

I also bought two postcards, because I'm behindhand in my reviews for Tor.com and think I should write a more apologetic note than my last email. And I owe them a thank-you note for the box of freebies. So.

Now my feet hurt and I'm lying on a comfy couch. And I ought to finish this review for SH and try to read for Tor.com.

Planning to be in London to meet a mate from college at the Natural History Museum Friday. So the rest of the week is just going to be wandering Oxford. (The NHM has a café. Whee, food! Whee, dinosaurs!)