Scraps of the Myth
The River Cherwell at Mesopotamia
After living in Oxford for two and a half years, it becomes easier to take the city for granted. You become oblivious to the tourist hordes sweeping up Cornmarket. Ancient college walls become a peripheral, sandstone-coloured blur in the rush through town to Boots to buy shaving gel and new razors, weaving your bike between the queue of buses on the High. The Oxford of legends and ghosts, the Oxford of et in Arcadia ego and the youth of Empire seems buried beneath the bustle of the day-to-day.
But just occasionally, Oxford hints at deeper traditions that grind on at tectonic pace. Like the rare, furtive swish of geisha’s kimono hurrying down a back alley in Kyoto, small scraps of mythological Oxford reveal themselves, for a briefest of moments. Blink and you’ll miss them.
Radcliffe Square
A harried don cycles up Catte Street in the early evening, sweating in full sub fusc and robes that billow behind, perhaps late for his pre-prandial sherry at All Souls;
It’s 9.05pm and you happen to be passing up St Aldate’s as Tom Tower intones its bell 101 times, as it has done every day since the time of Henry VIII;
An island among the tourists, a small group of pilgrims pray in a circle around the paved cross set into the Broad where the Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake by the Catholic Queen Mary in 1555 and 1556. (Thirty years later, half a mile away outside Magdalen College, under a protestant Queen, Richard Yaxley and George Nichols were hanged for being Catholic priests);
New College
While queuing for sushi at Edamame, a chattering crocodile of miniature undergrads in black duffle coats and mortar boards rustles up Holywell Street, led by a porter in bowler hat – it’s the New College choristers heading back to school after evensong;
After a few ales on the Cowley Road, you glide agreeably back towards town, pausing on Magdalen Bridge at midnight where you wonder if a young Oscar Wilde or T.E. Lawrence ever watched the moon pass behind a cloud above the slack, muddy Cherwell.
The priest’s door at St Thomas the Martyr
In most ways, modern Oxford is like any other provincial city in the south of England – suburbs, factories, narrow streets choked with traffic and the usual clustering of chain stores. But in small scraps of time – at midnight, or when the light is just right, or on the sidelines of your daily routine, you sense that a more ancient rhythm still plays onwards.
