Lock
“Lock,” both a verb and a noun, is one of those amazing and evocative little four-letter English words of Anglo-Germanic origin with a multitude of possible meanings and usages. Its entry in the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary runs on for four pages. In tiny print.
Here’s a small section from the Wiktionary entry:
I begin this post with this because, on the morning of May 16, 2025, I awoke in our rented Oxford flat in north Jericho with a peculiar phrase in mind; a phrase, so I have gleaned from action movies and TV shows, employed from time to time by those following careers in the military and meant to convey their readiness—nay, gleeful eagerness!—to do battle: “Locked and loaded!” they cry, those grim-visaged and camo-costumed actor-warriors as they load and chamber their big shiny weapons with rehearsed expertise.
The Internet, with its vast store of infallible knowledge, informs me that “locked and loaded” was made popular by John Wayne and goes back at least to WWII. Whatever its provenance, on that Friday morning following the first two days of our Oxford adventure as described in Part One, the macho phrase leaped—leapt?—to mind in ridiculous and perverse contrast to how I actually assessed my own readiness to face another day made up of miles and miles, and probably more miles, of ancient cobblestones and sensory overwhelm.
Yes, I knew well it was all going to be simply gorgeous, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to make it sound as if I were undergoing some arduous punishment—Ah, it’s tough work, this hanging out in Oxford for a month, but someone’s got to do it!—but as a peculiarly thin-skinned individual when it comes to sensory overload, even when that “load” involves exposure to scenes of surpassing beauty and historical or artistic or literary interest, I had learned over the years that acquiring a great number, in swift succession, of even the most delightful experiences can prove exhausting. Especially when one’s seven decades-old bones ache from crown to cobblestone.
Truth be told, hauling myself out of bed that morning, my state of decrepitude could have best been described by a similar-sounding phrase of nearly opposite meaning: not “locked and loaded” but “locked and leaden”; as in rendered nearly immobile by jammed joints and calcified muscles.1
I hobbled into the kitchen to throw together something for breakfast. The Boys, hang ‘em, little the worse for wear by the looks and sounds of it, were already debating the merits of Christ Church Meadow vs. University Parks for a morning walk. As for me, as soon as they were out the door, I pondered my possibilities for a few minutes and came to the conclusion that if I wanted to reduce the overwhelm factor on this trip, I’d best focus on reducing the pain factor, which meant reducing the average daily mileage racked up over the next four weeks. In other words, it was time to make the immediate acquaintance of the Oxford city bus system.
Where does the Oliphaunt sit down…?
I believe I have mentioned before in these dispatches Churchill’s plangent witticism about the UK and the US being two countries separated by a common language. Once more personal experience proved the dictum’s aptness, at least in reference to this dim-witted Yank’s attempts to study, then navigate Britain’s transportation infrastructure—in my peculiar case not least because human communication is made up, not of words alone, but also of a complex of contextual considerations and a dictionary’s-worth of body language. I will not bore you, Gentle Reader, with a blow-by-blow of my time spent studying the Oxford bus company website, which to me resembled nothing so much as an exercise in deciphering cuneiform. Suffice it to say that after perusing it long enough to at least determine which bus I wanted to take (the Number 6 City Centre/Wolvercote bus) and the nearest stop (Woodstock and Plantation Road), it nonetheless required a good three or four wobbly in-the-wild excursions for me to master what turned out to be the most essential and mysterious of all British bus-riding communication skills: how to get the flippin’ beast to stop for me.
