A Month in Oxford in English Words
Part One: Outbound - Wearyall - Evensong (May 14 - 15, 2025)
As some readers of these Biblioll College Dispatches may remember, Daniel and I spent a month last spring in Oxford. It was our second such sojourn in as many years, and we hoped to post about our 2025 adventures as we our 2024.1
Alas, my uber-cheap laptop chose that month to demonstrate its worthlessness. After several days of wasting precious “Oxford” hours trying in vain to post one lousy Dispatch, I threw up my hands, sorely tempted, mid-gesture, to toss the hunk-a-junk right out our flat window and onto the street.
We’re in Oxford, I groused. To enrich our minds, enlarge our souls, and further diminish our already dwindling savings, not wrestle in purgatorial slow-mo with an oversized techno-slug that must have been spawned, I grew more certain by the minute, in the foulest dungeons of Barad-dûr.
Ergo, I concluded, the better part of valor was to Go Analog: to keep a detailed commonplace book, like the Victorian-at-heart that I am, and figure out what to do with it all, if anything, once we got home and I could invest in a contraption that, you know, did what it was paid to do.
Now, almost a year after our adventures, and with a nod to “Third Inkling” Owen Barfield’s History in English Words, although an apology might be more appropriate, I’m finally sharing some highlights from our 2025 Oxford days with a series of posts wrapped around a handful of simple but evocative old words of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic (as opposed to Latin/French) provenance.
1. ‘Outbound’
In keeping with my ever-strengthening belief that the worst thing about traveling is, well, traveling, our multi-leg outbound journey from Oregon to Oxford was bound by many tedious and numbingly uncomfortable hours scrunched into instruments of torture otherwise known in the Common Speech as “airplane seats.” (In our household they are known by other more colorful terms as well, but that’s best left to our readers’ imaginations.) Said “seats” are all bolted together cheek-by-jowl in a noisome, stuffy cabin filled to a load capacity no doubt calculated to the last gram. Like everyone else sardined in there, I strove to master my impatience and assuage the many discomforts of the dragging hours by numbing myself with assorted screens and headphones, calibrated to taste. (In my own case, I was deep into an audiobook of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, my favorite “vampire” tale and one of my favorite “travel” reads. Like chocolate in Harry Potter (as per Prof. Lupin), “It helps. It really helps.”
Also balming our session in Purgatory was the sturdy and unflappable presence of our youngest son, Liam, who, like some Millennial Virgil accompanied us (rather, as the superior navigator, guided us) through PDX and LHR, then the narrow streets of Oxford for the first week of our trip.
Truth be told, I’m pretty familiar now with Oxford and not half bad at reading a map—a skill, for the wayfarer, much akin to being able to read a book. But trust me, when it comes to navigating the ill-marked pathways and byzantine procedures of international airports, everyone needs a Liam.
Door-to-door, our journey took some thirty sleepless hours, during which time I repeatedly asked myself, my misgivings re much advanced tech to the contrary notwithstanding, whether I wouldn’t prefer to “leap beyond” (see the second definition of ‘out’bound’ above) our era’s primitive air-ships and instead (going where no man has gone before!) trust my scrambled and re-assembled atoms to a Star Trek teleporter, if the option were available for a few extra quid.
Ha! No contest. Beam me up, Scotty!
The last legs of our journey took us by Oxford Airline coach and an old-fashioned black taxi to our Oxford Airbnb digs, a comfy two bedroom flat, one of four such apartments carved out of a classic brick Victorian in north Jericho, the suburb/neighbourhood just west of the city centre.
Once tucked into our rental, Daniel and Liam (henceforward ‘the Boys’), bless ‘em, did most of the shopping required to set us up. Our location proved excellent. Only a block west of Woodstock Road, a main artery that becomes St. Giles to the south, then Magdalen and Cornmarket Streets in the pedestrians/bikes-only Carfax area in the heart of the city, then St. Aldates down to Christ Church and Folly Bridge. Indeed, the flat proved about as convenient a launching pad for our Oxonian wanderings as one could wish for, short of lodging in one of the colleges themselves.
That first evening, in honor of Biblioll College, we ate supper in Jude the Obscure, a lovely old pub on Walton Street only a couple of blocks from our flat. Liam and I indulged in our beloved fish and chips—this was England, after all!—while Daniel opted for a curry. (Because this was England, after all.)
We stumbled home in a stupor. We had hoped to stay up until ten p.m or so, the better to reset our internal clocks and get a leg up on jet lag. So we lounged in front of the telly for an hour or so; but when, a half hour into a show, we realized that not one of us could remember the last fifteen minutes, we crawled off to our beds, utterly spent.
I leaned my adjustable walking stick, which doubles as a cane, in the corner near the bed. As I climbed in, I imagined, already in a sort of half-dream, the thing taking root on the spot and flowering by the next morning, as in one of my most beloved films, Enchanted April. Or, better yet, the famous Arthurian-adjacent British legend of the Glastonbury Thorn on Wearyall Hill…
